Sunday, January 13, 2013

Two years on...



This is the one day of the year I can say I knew exactly where I was and what I was doing two years ago.

Today marks two years since the floods consumed South East Queensland, flooding 22,000 homes in Brisbane alone and left many people dead and businesses and lives destroyed.

The night before we had watched the coverage of flood which was expected to peak at about 4am. I hardly slept a wink that night and woke to the horrible, but expected news. Our suburb had gone under and so too, I expected, our little home.

The next 48 hours seemed to float along in slow motion, surrealism.



We went down to Bulimba and watched the waters rising along the Brisbane River. Drift Restaurant, released from its moorings in Toowong was upstream and floated past us in a tangled mess after hitting the bridge in the city.


Anna Bligh gave her historic "We are Queenslanders" speech and while I'm not a Labor supporter, it did give me a sense of community and pride and I actually teared up.




We managed to get back to our suburb later that night and while we could get into our street, access to our house was still cut off from the floodwaters.

The neighbours further up the street who had stayed during the floods told us our house had flooded almost to the ceiling, so we had an idea of the task ahead of us. This is me looking back towards our house, which has the blue fence.



While the last two years have been quite trying, things are definitely looking up. We are just weeks away from being back in our home . We didn't do anything to commemorate the day, in fact I wasn't even in town, but I did have a few moments of quite reflection. Not just for that day, but for the lives that were lost, for the people who are still rebuilding and the sum of all our experiences over the past two years. Onward and upwards though, life goes on. Forever though, I will always remember the 13th January and where we were on that day in 2011.

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