A friend lives near the Lockyer area & I kept in touch with her by email & texts that night. She & her husband hoped they would be okay, they had been out & checked the nearby rivers & the dam on their property. They did have their car all packed & their animals ready just in case. My friend said the worst for them was after dark when they couldn't see what was happening. They were v relieved to be able to unpack the car the next day. They hadn't even lost their power! If only the rest of the area had been able to unpack too. So many kids, women & men were lost, so many homes & livelihoods destroyed.
In Brisbane, my two GU workplaces, QCA & the Con, are beside the Brisbane River & my other workplace, QSA, is three blocks away towards Westend. QCA library is on the 2nd floor, no problem, but the power was cut of course. It reopened on Thursday, yay. The Con is on the ground floor & the day of the expected high tide we spent a frantic two hours clearing out the lower shelves of the library. The priority was the printed musical scores, some of which is well over 100 years old. The entire Conservatorium had to be moved up a floor, so to speak, & I am glad grand pianos are on castors. I saw them being wheeled around, into the lifts & up to safety & later counted twenty in one massive room. All the upright pianos went up on castors too. Musical & orchestral instruments of all descriptions, computers, printers, photocopiers, the crew who came in to move the Con were marvellous & they seemed to have endless energy, unlike us. Anyway, the Con was flooded through the basement areas & through the orchestra pit, but not the ground floor. The library was due for a rearrangement of the various collections later this year & now, because we have moved so much already, the rest has been removed also & the ranges/shelves all moved into their new configurations. So now we are sorting & rearranging the entire library!
My QSA workplace, I have seen on one of the flood pictures that it was totally surrounded by brown water. I think the basement, carparks & lift shafts were flooded. The library is on the 7th floor, thank God, I didn't have to worry about that. The building reopens next week, so there will have been some v dedicated cleaners at work there to do it so quickly. I think this was the most flood affected of my workplaces.
Me & mine were v fortunate at our homes also. Nearby suburbs were flooded but our houses were safe. I did get worried about the creek behind my house. It was creeping up through the park, enough that I packed a bag just in case. The weird thing was I packed a couple of outfits of clothes, toiletries, even some books, couldn't be without a book, & totally forgot my passport, papers & photos. By that night though the rain stopped & the creek gradually crept back to lower levels. Phew! Unpack again & kick myself for forgetting.
So that was my experience of the floods. A whole heap of worry about friends & family. A whole heap of empathy & sympathy for those so badly affected, both now & for the future. I know there will be a lot of traumatised people with ongoing mental issues.
I've seen & heard it from the people I know living through the Christchurch earthquake & the seemingly endless aftershocks. The trauma continues because the aftershocks continue. There was a 5.1Rmag yesterday along with another cluster of shocks. I'll be there in a few weeks & I know I'll be eyeing any sturdy looking tables around. I don't really trust doorways as much as I should! I'll let you know what it's like to shake, rattle & roll in ChCh.
