Qualla: 2010-2011 Queensland Floods

2010-2011 Queensland Floods: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit PMBO, CC BY 3.0. On the afternoon of 10 January 2011, the storm that had been sitting over Toowoomba for hours stopped behaving like rain and started behaving like a sea. More than 160 millimetres fell in 36 hours, and the gully creeks that run beneath the city's streets could not hold it. Water rose through the central business district in minutes, lifting cars and carrying people away. Four died there in a matter of hours. Survivors would call what they witnessed an inland tsunami, and the worst of it had not yet reached the valley below.

Image: PMBO | CC BY 3.0

2010-2011 Queensland Floods: A Drowning Summer

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Vicki Nunn, Public domain. The disaster did not arrive all at once. It built through the wettest spring and the wettest December that Queensland had ever recorded, the legacy of a powerful La Nina that turned the tropics into a tap that would not close. By late December 2010, rivers across the state were s...

Image: Vicki Nunn | Public domain

2010-2011 Queensland Floods: The Lockyer Valley

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Cyclonebiskit, Public domain. The same storm cell that struck Toowoomba poured off the range and into the Lockyer Valley, a patchwork of farming communities on the rich black soil below the escarpment. There the water concentrated into a wall. It came through Murphys Creek and Withcott and then Grantham, a sm...

Image: Cyclonebiskit | Public domain

2010-2011 Queensland Floods: Brisbane Goes Under

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jim, CC BY 2.0. Downstream, a city of two million braced. The Brisbane River, fed by saturated catchments and by water released from a Wivenhoe Dam that had filled past 190 percent of its supply capacity, climbed toward the suburbs. On 13 January the river peaked, and around 20,000 homes across ...

Image: Jim | CC BY 2.0

2010-2011 Queensland Floods: We Are Queenslanders

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Martin Howard, CC BY 2.0. At the height of the crisis, Premier Anna Bligh stood before the cameras, her voice cracking, and said: "We are Queenslanders. We're the people that they breed tough, north of the border. We're the ones that they knock down and we get up again." It became the refrain of the recov...

Image: Martin Howard | CC BY 2.0