Flooded Australia city 'like war zone'

Floods left parts of Australia's third-biggest city on Thursday looking like a war zone in need of years of reconstruction, the state premier said, while fresh threats loomed with a cyclone forecast offshore. The floods across the state of Queensland have killed at least 19 people, 12 of whom died in the Toowoomba area inland, and 61 were missing, the state government said.
Toowoomba and the Lockyer Valley region, west of state capital Brisbane, were devastated by tsunami-like flash flooding on Monday. Large parts of Brisbane have become muddy lakes, with an entire waterfront cafe among the debris washing down the Brisbane River, a torrent that has flooded 12,000 homes in the city of 2 million and left 118,000 buildings without power. Aerial views of Brisbane showed a sea of brown water with rooftops poking through the surface.
"What I'm seeing looks more like a war zone in some places," Queensland Premier Anna Bligh told reporters after surveying the disaster from the air. "All I could see was their rooftops ... underneath every single one of those rooftops is a horror story." Floodwaters in 35 suburbs, which on Thursday peaked below disastrous levels predicted a day earlier, forced residents to take to boats to move about the streets, where traffic signs peeped above the water. The floodwaters destroyed or damaged many parts of the city's infrastructure. One group of residents was lucky not to disappear into gushing waters when the street they were walking along collapsed.