Brisbane, Australia a 'War Zone' as Major Flood Smashes City

Residents use a boat to navigate across their flooded suburb as flood waters inundate Brisbane.

Photo Credit: AFP

Australia's third-largest city Brisbane awoke to a "war zone" Thursday with whole suburbs under water and infrastructure smashed as the worst flood in decades caused wide destruction.

Frightened evacuees surveyed the damage after floods that have swept eastern Australia peaked about a metre (three feet) below feared levels around dawn, sparing thousands of properties in the besieged river city.

State premier Anna Bligh said relief was tinged with despair at the damage to homes and major city landmarks, as well as the scale of the "post-war" rebuilding effort ahead.

"It's a very mixed story here today, there is some relief and I'm grateful Mother Nature hasn't been as terrible as she could have been, but people are waking up to unbearable agony across our city today," Bligh told Sky News.

"We've seen scenes of unbelievable devastation and destruction: entire suburbs where only rooftops can be glimpsed, whole big workplaces... are completely under water."

"Whole industrial parks (and) railway stations under water, bridges, roads all closed... What I'm seeing looks more like a war zone in some places," she added.

The swollen river was already beginning to slowly recede, but the stricken and nervous city was reeling from damage wrought by the waters that have already deluged many areas of Brisbane.

A massive 300-metre (300-yard) stretch of a popular concrete walkway that was perched above the river and was popular with walkers and cyclists, was ripped from its moorings and hurtled down the river.

A well-known floating restaurant was among dozens of vessels and pontoons also sent speeding down the waterway, while the downtown Suncorp Stadium resembled a giant swimming pool and the XXXX brewery closed its doors.

Brisbane's cosmopolitan city centre remained a "ghost town" after office buildings ordered workers to stay away and power was cut to more than 100,000 properties in the region.

Brisbane River, which runs through the centre of the state capital of two million people, peaked at 4.46 metres (14 feet eight inches) at around 5:15 am (1915 GMT Wednesday), below levels that devastated the city in 1974.

Residents breathed a sigh of relief as they woke up to the news that they had dodged the worst case scenario.

"It was worse in '74, a lot worse," said John McLeod, security director of the Stamford Plaza hotel, which lies near the Brisbane River in the city centre and which was forced to close due to flooding ."I slept only one hour last night. We have 3.5 metres of water in the basement. The hotel will stay closed at least for another 10 days," he told AFP.

But forecasters said the river would stay above major floods levels for at least a day and remain high over the weekend. And Bligh cautioned that a return of torrential rains that have battered the state could bring fresh danger.

"People are seeing (flooded) houses on their TV screen: multiply that by hundreds, and that's thousands and thousands of people. In a modern capital city these are the sort of scenes you don't expect to see," she said.

Some of Brisbane's inundation was related to flash floods that hammered towns high in the Great Dividing Range to the city's west on Monday, leaving at least 12 dead as rescuers comb wrecked communities for more bodies.

Police were investigating whether the death of a man in his 50s in the town of Ipswich, west of Brisbane, was flood-related.

A total of 23 people have died in floodwaters that have turned an area twice the size of Texas into a disaster zone, following months of heavy rains blamed on the La Nina weather phenomenon.