Five weeks since the floods

It is five weeks since the floods in the Lockyer Valley that destroyed parts of Grantham and Murphys Creek.  The scars are still raw - particularly on the community but also on the landscape.  The road through Grantham just opened a few days ago; before that it had been closed to all other than local residents, emergency services and volunteers.  Driving through there the first time is like a kick in the stomach, even after seeing all the media coverage.

Of course I'm not going to photograph Grantham or Murphy's Creek, but here are some photos of one of the bridges over the Lockyer Creek where it passes through the outskirts of Gatton - quite a way downstream from Grantham.

Davies Bridge, the road bridge we cross on our way into Gatton, is visible under the middle arch of the railway bridge - the highway barriers give it away.  In the worst recent flooding (in 1974) the water came up to the blue mark that you might just make out on far side of the left-hand column in this photo.  In January I'm told that the water came up to the beams under the railway line.

The photo below shows the state of the bridge today, looking from the upstream side.  None of the large scour in the background was there before the flood, that whole huge scoop out of the bank was done by the rushing water which at this point was well above the sandy area in the middle top of the photo.

On the downstream side quite a bit of the foundation of the bridge seems to have gone, and the scour in the photo above was eating back into the bank under the road.

I'll try to get some photos of the other two bridges into Gatton, and of other parts of the Lockyer Creek in the next week or so.