Day 15: Ipswich, Brisbane

From December 2010 to February 2011 a series of floods hit particular parts of Queensland including the capital city of Brisbane. Much of Queensland was declared a disaster zone due to the flooding with 35 lives lost and approximately 200,000 people affected by the floods state wide. While this was a devastating natural disaster, Brisbane, along with the other hard-hit regions, is well on it's way to recovery.

The army of volunteers made national (and international) news, demonstrating to the world just how much Australians (and Queenslanders in particular) care for their neighbours, with many of Brisbane's streets, suburbs and businesses back to pre-flood condition in no time!

-Brisbane Australia, City Council

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Queensland floods

 With no clue where we were headed at first and wasting about 4 hours travelling and deciding on where exactly to head to, we finally decided head for the city of Ipswich.

Public transport was free-of-charge for the week as a relief effort by the city council. Took about 1.5-2 hours before we arrived in Ipswich, which was like a ghost town.. We asked around, and found our way to Ipswich showgrounds' community recovery centre to help out with the first aid team.

We ended up helping out behind the bar counter, manning food, water and baby supplies. It was hard seeing how people had to live there with their homes inundated as well..  And as much as we wanted to use our "able bodies" to help out on the actual field, we were glad we were given jobs at the recovery centre.

  

This sort of made me realize how "real" natural disasters are. Seeing things happen on TV seem unreal compared to seeing it actually happen or listening to someone's stories (like how they lost everything in their homes...)

Won't be too pleased if that's your car

I guess Singapore is really a "boring" safe zone, but I'm pretty glad I live there..