Brisbane flood clean-up starts as damage emerges

Terra Daily via AFP: The swamped Australian city of Brisbane on Friday began the heartbreaking task of cleaning up after its worst floods in decades, as searchers made the grisly discovery of another body. As the waters drained from the country's third largest city, revealing the full horror of the devastation wrought when the Brisbane River burst its banks, search teams recovered the body of a woman in the nearby Lockyer Valley.

Brisbane residents nervously returned to see what remained of their homes and businesses, as the muddy brown soup that had covered buildings up to their roofs dropped to reveal its aftermath. "There is a lot of heartache and grief as people start to see for the first time what has happened to their homes and their streets," Queensland state Premier Anna Bligh said a day after the river peaked. "In some cases we have street after street after street where every home has been inundated to the roof level, affecting thousands of people."…

An image from the 1893 flood in Brisbane, shot by Poul C. Poulsen