Australia flood clean-up starts, tough task ahead

Ed Davies  -

Australia's third-largest city started cleaning up stinking mud and debris on Friday after some of the country's worst floods on record, but in a sign of the task ahead, it could take six months to pump flood waters out of Queensland's coal mines.

Many suburbs in the state's capital Brisbane, a city of two million people, remained submerged after floodwaters inundated the riverside city on Thursday.

The Queensland floods, which started in December, have killed 20 people, left 53 missing and affected an area the size of South Africa. A total of 86 towns have been impacted.

"We have seen a massive dislocation of people across the state," said Queensland state premier Anna Bligh, who has described Brisbane as looking like a "war zone" and describing what flood victims in some rural towns experienced as "terror."

"Right now we are still rescuing people, we are still evacuating people. So we are right in the middle of the emergency response," said Bligh.

Sodden mattresses, mud-stained clothes and water-logged electrical equipment were piled up in front of houses in the badly hit Toowong area of Brisbane.

"We've lost everything. I've got my work trunk, my motorbike, my partner's car and what I'm wearing," said Steven Harrison, a builder whose wooden house had been flooded with about 1 metres of water.

Residents used pumps to remove water, and hosed down mud-strewn floors to try and stop the mud baking hard in hot sunshine. Hundreds of volunteers arrived in flooded streets to help strangers clean-up their waterlogged houses.

The massive flood which hit Brisbane was contaminated with sewage which spilt from damaged treatment plants upstream on the Brisbane River.

"We need to brace ourselves, when this goes down and its going down quite quickly, its going to stink -- an unbearable stench," said Bligh. "We want this mud gone out of our city as quickly as possible now, it's a big public health issue."

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Photo Australian Department of Defence/Handout

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