Back when hubby and I were first married, we lived in Barcaldine. For Easter in 1990, we invited my sister to come up and stay with us for the holidays, as mum was struggling a bit, and it would be a good break for both of them. The summer had been the wettest on record, and the ground was waterlogged. After a few weeks of constant rain, a huge low rolled into the gulf of carpentaria, and then just continued to come down through inland Queensland. And so we had the 1990’s floods, a 1 in a 100yr event. The Sanderson Dam held thank goodness, and Barcy has some localised stormwater but no river flooding in town, but Longreach and Iilfracome, Jericho, Alpha …. and many many towns were totally swamped. The Mary river was over 1km wide at the bridge, and the highway was destroyed, with great gouges 100’s of metres wide taken out of it, bridges gone. And so …. my sister spent nearly 4 weeks at our place, including going to the local school.
And as a present for xmas, we bought a plane ticket for my niece (my sister’s daughter) to come down, and spend a week of the school holidays with her cousins. She arrived last Saturday. This year, after the wettest spring and summer, Queensland has been hit with a huge flood crisis. My sister and her family lives in Toowoomba, and of course the destruction there has been astonishing. Along with the damage to the town, has been the damage to the range road, and now with the Brisbane River and Bremer River flooding … the damage to the Ipswich/Brisbane roads …. there is no way of getting from Toowoomba down to the airport. So Miss11 is stuck here for the moment. At this point we are only talking about a week or so, but the reality is, it may very well be a couple of weeks …… in which case she will have to come to school down here.
Its so amazing ….. that history would repeat like this. First with my sister, and then her daughter.
