Last week I was consulting in Queensland with some of my clients. I was driving from the Gold Coast to Sunshine Coast about 192 Km’s. It was like driving in a Cyclone, I couldn’t see 20 metres in front me. It looked like driving in a blizzard, a complete Whiteout.
Fortunately I arrived at Nambour safely, though a little slower than I expected. My client wanted to position himself as Nambour Real Estate, his sites already rank in positions 3 to 6 on the front page of Google.
We planned to do some advance Keyword research, so he could get more listings. You see I had been working with him for 4 months, but had never actually met him. So I thought this would be a great opportunity to meet him and get a better feel for his business , while I was in Queensland.
We never actually did the research because the internet was down, due to the torrential rain. So we discussed some new strategies we planned to implement this year. We decided it was time for lunch, so went down stairs to the car park and jumped in his car and headed over to RSL. He told me, “we would normally walk there, as it was only 350 metres away,” but we would of needed a wetsuit and flippers today.
After a nice lunch, we headed back under the bridge along the creek, and went through Woolies’ car park and into his underground car park. The water was lapping the rims of the car. By the time we had lunch, the car park had 150mm of brown water. There’s nothing like wading through bubbling water, your shoes get soaked. And I still had to drive 3 hours back to the Gold Coast.
My drive home was uneventful, The road was littered with cars down the highway. They come to a nasty stop. Some had run up the back of the cars, some aqua-planned into the ditch on the side of the road, others just broke down.
The next day I hopped on a plane back to Sydney. That night I heard on the news the Bruce Hwy was closed from Caboolture to Gimpie. The next day the creek had risen and turned my clients car park into a sunken swimming pool, he was forced to work from, home as the road into Nambour was cutoff because of the flooding,
So I managed to escape the floods of Queensland by a matter of hours. Others were not so lucky.
Having seen the onset of this disaster I’m grateful that I made it safely back to Sydney.
When I arrived backed in Sydney I had no idea of the intent and scale of the forth coming disaster. Having experienced a glimpse of the weather’s fury, I thought I should track this frightful event.
So I set up a Google Alert, for the term “Queensland flood” and in Twitter I created a search for “Queensland flood” and “Queensland flood”
It was through Twitter that I was alerted the Devastating Youtube Video on the Toowoomba Flood 2011.01.10. This has been seen 3,274,296 times in 4 days.
[youtube kYUpkPTcqPY ]Here are some the tweets for “Queensland flood” and “Queensland flood”
Twitter giving people a place show their support for people caught in the Queensland Flood.
“Come on Queensland.” I never thought I’d say that as New South Welshman
So it time we dig deep, lets get them back on their feet http://www. qld.gov.au/ floods/donate.html