Saturday 26 January 1974
I was there. It was higher than in 2010. I was working at the Main Roads Laboratory at 35 Butterfield Street, Herston (opposite the hospital) on the Friday 25th. I parked my car up the hill, might have been on Garrick Terrace and walked down to the laboratory.

There were hundreds of bags of soil samples stored under the lab building and two or three of us spent hours carrying them into the lab and stacking them on the benches.

About noon, the staff began to suggest that some of the more delicate laboratory equipment - spectrophotometers, the computer terminal and other things that could be easily unplugged and carried should be placed in some of the cars and taken up to the head office on the top of Spring Hill. Likewise paper files should be removed. This was considered to be a bad idea by management.

The laboratory vehicles were parked out the back, at a lower level than the street. As the water rose, the asphalt on the car park began to bulge as air displaced from the soil below it bubbled the surface. It was like walking on a mattress. They could not deny that the car park was going to flood so the cars were driven away.

When the front yard of the lab began to flood some of the staff got toey. But management refused to allow staff to leave until regular quitting time, which was 4.51pm. By that time there was 4 or 5 feet of water at the bottom of the front steps and staff got out by walking along the top of a concrete wall and out onto the street, where the water was only three feet deep.

I left a pair of shoes on top of one of the lab benches along with an umbrella, it was pointless carrying it as I was already wet through.

On the Monday the water had gone down. I arrived at the lab to find that the water had reached about 18 inches above the level of the lab benches and all the hundreds of soil samples were soaked. The spectrophotometers and computer terminal were of course ruined and all the paper files and books were pulp.

The shoes I had left were still in the same place and dry inside. They had floated up and down, they must have been waterproof.

About 9am we were all rounded up and taken over to the hospital where we all got tetanus shots.

Some years later I went for another one and the doctor asked me when I'd had my last one. I said "28 January 1974" and he said that he knew where I had been.

If you cross the Indooroopilly Bridge, on the Indooroopilly side, just upstream on Radnor Street there was a block of flats, three stories plus basement garage. That belonged to Jim B. a Yorkshireman who was a friend of my fathers. Only the top floor escaped flooding. The flats had parquet floors and we spent Sunday 27 January hosing the flats out, then shovelling the parquet tiles up and tossing them out the windows. Kitchen cabinets were full of mud. At noon, somebody went and got a pizza. I had a slice, it was the first pizza I had ever eaten.

The house next door to Jim's had been featured in the Woman's Weekly a few months before, it was new and had been built by one of the Parer family, relatives of Damien Parer who had been awarded an Oscar for his Kokoda Front Line! New Guinea documentary from WWII. It had been completely submerged and the back yard swimming pool was full of mud.

The house my parents had been offered a couple of years before was just around the corner from where I lived. My mother had refused to even look at it as she said it was in a gully and close to the Bne. River. "Oh, there's never been any water here" said the estate agent. On Friday night, 25 January it was completely submerged and the street lamp opposite it could be seen reflecting off water just a couple of feet below the light bulb.

Never build, buy or even rent on a flood plain. Seize the high ground.
(Redemption blamed it on the Bossa Nova since, Tue 19 Jun 2012, 13:42, 1 reply)

Whilst I am not a tin foil hat level climate change denier ...
I am a proud skeptic. 1974 was a year of extreme weather events. Floods in Brisbane, Cyclone Tracy flattened Darwin and over in Blighty it was the worst heatwave on record. I'm a big believer in the 11-12 year solar cycle wreaking havoc with the weather.

Of course it could be my fault, I was born in 1974 bring a bagful of woe with me. My mum still complains that she had to sit halfway up the stairs with her feet in a bucket of water whilst heavily pregnant with me.
(Que?, Wed 20 Jun 2012, 0:34, closed)