They had a few days warning and saved a lot of stuff. A lot of places went under several metres though, and are now filled with mud. The deaths and destruction was a bit further west where some really heavy rain fell and rivers rose 5-10 metres in an hour. These were the flash floods where people looked out and saw the river rising, made a few phone calls or started packing and the next thing they knew is that they were trapped. Most of these were in places that were not known for flooding, see one brief account here Toowoomba floods a joke no more [^] All this water then went on to contribute to the floods in Brisbane. The dam peaked at 188% and is already back to 120% in case of further rain. Also, quite a few of the tributaries come in below the dam so are not controlled (I think about 1/3 of the catchment feeds downstream).
Peter "Until the invention of the computer, the machine gun was the device that enabled humans to make the most mistakes in the smallest amount of time."
