It’s been around a week and a half since Treasurer Andrew Fraser described our flood crisis as “of biblical proportions.” The news unfortunately keeps getting worse, with flash floods in Brisbane and Toowoomba adding to the ongoing troubles in St George, Dalby and Gympie, among other parts of the State.  I’m not sure there’s another level up from “biblical”, but the scale of this thing is much worse than we could have imagined last week.

No one can forecast the ultimate cost of this crisis until we’re all the way through it. According to Lord Mayor Campbell Newman, there’s now a risk of a major flood in Brisbane (Prepare for the worst, Brisbane residents told), given the massive volumes of water flowing into Wivenhoe Dam each day:

‘‘There are inflows into Wivenhoe Dam that are akin to or exceed what happened in 1974,’’ Cr Newman said. ‘‘There’s a lot of water coming down the system.’’

While previous cost estimates were of at least $5 billion, we must now be in the $10 billion plus ballpark.  Let’s hope our coal mines aren’t out of action for too long, because we’ll sure need the royalties to help pay the clean up bill.