 standard or unaccounted for families and young children and some of those who have lost their lives overnight are young children including a mother and two children in a vehicle. We have specialist teams who are all on standby in the region. The CERT team, the Queensland Police CERT team have been deployed overnight. We have specialist swift water rescue teams on standby. We also have additional fire and rescue teams. We are finding it very difficult to get these teams out and deployed because of the weather and the constantly changing water system. They are however, as I said, ready to deploy and into that region as soon as we see any of this weather lift. We are also seeing flood levels rise in river systems right across the southwest. Not only Dolby and Chinchilla evacuating people overnight, we now expect to see Warwick reach a peak equal to or greater than the peak last week by lunchtime today. Similarly, we will see those waters affecting Stanthorpe, Gundawindi, Texas, Yalaban, Inglewood and all of those towns in those regions. The town of Condomine is also flooding with waters rapidly rising and we will be watching that town very, very closely. All vehicles that were damaged to Wumba in the CBD yesterday have now been searched by police and I am relieved to say that we have not found anyone in those vehicles who is deceased or seriously anyone at all in those vehicles. I can confirm that we have had one helicopter be able to get into the air briefly this morning who has confirmed that there are and appear to be no further people on rooftops in settled areas like Helledon and in the Grantham area. However, we cannot rule out that there may be people stranded on the rooftops of outlying properties and as soon as we can get helicopters into the air we intend to search those areas for those people. Into the Wyvernhoe system we have now seen because of continued heavy rainfall overnight further revised predictions about the Ipswich and Brisbane areas. Ipswich is now likely to see a flood level in the river hit about at least 16 metres. The hydrology reports indicate however that if the rain continues and the bureau is advising it is set to continue then we are likely to see anywhere up to 18 metres in the Ipswich river system. By comparison the 1974 flood saw close to 20 metres in Ipswich. What all of this means for the Wyvernhoe catchment is that we will now have to remodel and plan for larger releases out of the Wyvernhoe dam to manage this inflow. That means that the Brisbane area will now have to reconsider the implications of the water likely to come down out of Wyvernhoe and revise up the weather that we are seeing swelling at the Brisbane river and the in-stream flows will also increase. The Brisbane local disaster management group will meet for the first time this morning at 10am. They will consider the further the implications of this new modelling and advise residents accordingly. I say to all residents in the Brisbane Ipswich and Lockyer valleys for those of you who can please listen to radio reports we will be updating people throughout the day it is a constantly changing situation. I stress that the releases being made from Wyvernhoe dam are not optional. There is no discretion here. This is how this dam operates. We need to make sure that we protect people down this river system by operating the dam safely and appropriately. Ladies and gentlemen as you will hear from further reports from the Deputy Commissioner of Police this has been a night of extraordinary events. We have seen acts of extraordinary bravery and courage from our emergency workers. We know they are out there on the front line desperately trying to begin their search and rescue efforts and we know that we have people stranded and people lost. We are doing our best to protect our emergency workers during this severe weather. We are equally doing our best to get everything that we can into that region to save and rescue people. There is no doubt that we are now in I think a very different sort of disaster and what it is doing is testing our emergency response and it will test us as communities and as people. This weather I think is um it might be breaking our hearts at the moment but it will not break our will. What we have out there on the front line are some of the best trained people in Australia and they are going to protect these communities and we are going to make sure that we keep everybody that we can as safe as humanly possible. I would like to ask the Deputy Commissioner to make some comments. Thank you Premier. Good morning everyone. Certainly our focus at the moment is as it always is in response personal safety. We have a major search and rescue operation underway right throughout the Lockheed Valley. As the Premier said Tuumba is fairly stable. We don't think that we will see any further deaths out of the Tuumba CBD but our search and rescue activities in the Murphy's Creek and Grantham area in particular certainly it is expected that we will find further persons deceased in those areas. The numbers we just don't know at this stage. What I would ask though is one thing. The rain and the weather pattern at the moment is variable. It is hampering our search and rescue operations. Access to the area through roads is very difficult for us. Our helicopter assets are having difficulty because of the rain pattern moving around that area but the one contributing factor which is getting in our road is onlookers now and I would stress to people that any diversion of our precious emergency services to deal with simple rubber-neckers and onlookers could cost a life. I would ask people to be sensible and if they have no reason to be there stay out and get out of those areas. Thank you. Just before calling Jim Davis and I should have also said that we are continuing to make evacuations across the Lockheed Valley area. We have for people being evacuated from Toguloa and Esk, 200 evacuations likely to occur this morning at Forest Hill although we expect they'll be evacuated into an evacuation centre in a higher ground at Forest Hill. We have also seen overnight evacuations in Nanango. We also have the community of Sherbourg now completely cut off and food supplies being taken in. There are multiple breaks in the road between Ipswich and Toowoomba. People should not be driving on those roads and we continue to need those roads to be free from other vehicles than emergency vehicles. I'll ask Jim Davis and to give us a bit of an update on what the weather is doing and some background to the event that has led to this terrible tragedy. Thank you Premier. Good morning everyone. The Super Rainstorm we saw yesterday over Toowoomba and the Lockheed Valley was an extreme event and you'd say it was towards the top of the severe weather and flash flooding scale. It was very unique. What were the circumstances that set up this particular event? It all started I guess a few days ago with that up below which we were all tracking. The one that moved out to sea off Capricornia then moved back on shore again. So that was the synoptic, the largest scale feature which produced this exceptional storm but there were other considerations all on the local scale. The saturated catchments of course we had flooding now for many weeks, many months and Toowoomba itself actually had upwards I think of 100 millimeters on the previous day so the ground was very wet. The escarpment, the range just on the doorstep of Toowoomba that would have served to produce uplift for the rain and precipitation so once again it was a local factor which contributed. The relatively large area of this rainstorm the rainstorm itself wasn't that exceptional in terms of appearance on radar and satellite but it did cover a fairly large area. The rainfall reports we did get from Toowoomba said they received about 80 millimeters in half an hour or a little bit more than half an hour where we're fairly confident that if we had rainfall reports on a much tighter scale, smaller scale we would have seen 100 to 150 millimeters easy in that general area. And of course the other consideration was the funneling into Lockyer Creek, having Toowoomba situated where it is, Lockyer Creek immediately underneath the range, it all came together as I said on a very local scale. Now when it comes to forecasting the computer models that we use aren't run at a high enough resolution to pick up these sort of very small scale weather features. Every now and again I hope it doesn't happen very often, it won't happen very often, I can reassure people that we will get one of these very extreme events which fall within our resolution of our computer models but our forecasters are ever on the alert monitoring the weather as it happens and yesterday we were monitoring that particular rainstorm as it moved across South East Queensland but as I said earlier for all intents and purposes we were satisfied at the time that the severe weather warning which spoke about potential flash flooding in the Toowoomba region would cover that circumstance as we know now it didn't. When we did become aware that the rainfall was extreme in the Toowoomba area and the flooding was starting to occur we immediately jumped into flash flood warnings and we turned on the standard emergency warning signal and we made calls to numerous agencies, relevant agencies, relevant agencies, authorities responsible for policing the Lockheed Valley and surrounds the police for example and emergency management Queensland and alerted them to the fact that we did have a serious situation on our hands. I might stop there but I'm happy for any questions. Perhaps I shouldn't say it could not be forecast but I think it's important to say that it's very difficult to forecast. I'm not saying we miss all events of this nature but every now and again one will be that the combination of factors on the local scale will will will will produce an extreme event of this nature and it's not always we have the the science and the capacity to see this before it happens. What were the exceptional circumstances you're saying that you know it was heavy rain but you see heavy rain before was a bit larger than normal? Well not not really because I said before there were those other factors operating the saturate everything was saturated so so this rain minute fell just it it wasn't absorbed into the ground it stayed on top of the ground and eventually moved into Lockheed Creek the escarpment having that storm approach the escarpment I guess even on that particular angle meant meant the uplift was was very strong so the cloud and precipitation uplifted and when cloud and precipitation lift like that it drops huge amounts of rain so so it all came together in a very local area within a short period of time it could well be that the entire storm didn't really impact on the on the torn area but just for half an hour or so the the actual rainstorm took much longer than half an hour to actually pass over to one but whereas the the the rain event was more like 30 minutes or so. And you were saying so I didn't quite follow you said it measured 80 millimetres in 30 minutes but it was more likely to be 100 to 150? Yeah the because of the very small scale of what occurred we do have a fairly good network of rainfall reporting in that area but not dense enough to pick up everything that fell on the ground so we suspect with what we saw the 8 meter wall of water going down the Lockheed Creek there must have been falls maybe even of 200 millimetres in places perhaps on top of the range or just down from the range in Toowoomba. Now that if I could just say a fall of 80 millimetres and half an hour or so we're looking at about a one in 100 year event for that area. Now we get one in 100 year events fairly frequently across Queensland and for a particular town or city so not great but as I said we're almost certain there were much higher falls close by. Premier you said last night that you were fearful there could still be people spending the night on rooftops you'd said that those or the greater residential areas has got the or clear are we sure that those people are safe? We can say that we don't have any visual sightings from helicopter of people on rooftops in Heledon or Grantham we are unable to say that there may not be some people on rooftops in more isolated rural properties remember that this is a rural part of Queensland there are many people who do not live in town similarly we don't know necessarily where those people if there were any people who have subsequently got back into the buildings they were sitting on top of as some of the water has gone down and we won't know that until we can get either water boats or a helicopter in there. And some of those pictures that we've seen have just been so heartbreaking you said earlier that a lot of those missing are young families? We have some 72 people unaccounted for and obviously they span from the very young right through to the very old but we do have some whole families who at this stage are unaccounted for. We I think have already seen absolute tragedy with the eight deaths that are known it does include two children who are quite young but we know that at least one sorry the first four were two children who are quite young and the second four a mother and two children so half of the eight so far are children. This took everybody so unaware that there was no opportunity in most cases for people to get to safety so we do anticipate that these numbers are very preliminary until we get our emergency people into those areas we really can't give you anything more certain other than to say in all honesty we hold very grave concerns for a number of these people who are not accounted for and we are anxiously anxiously worrying that we will see this toll rise. Are you talking in terms of the emergency evacuation signal? That was enacted as soon as we could but there is a time lag from when that goes when the process starts to when it actually physically goes out certainly there was no evacuation in Tuumber there was no warning in Tuumber because of the the nature of the event and as I've explained previously when we're dealing with floods like we've seen throughout the state over the last couple of weeks most of that we can predict we have time to get in to deal with it. This was purely an emergency response situation with no warning at all basically to emergency services we simply had to react the best way we could and all emergency services are swaying to action as they would normally do in any such event. Certainly the volume of water caught I think most people by surprise and I am not yet sure because we haven't been able to go back and tally this up. Water emergency warnings went out to the lower, lower Lockyer area. No certainly Grantham is one of the focus but the other one is that Murphy's Creek and Withcott area that's the other area we're having difficulty getting into and as most of that area is not isolated but but rural property on acreage is that sort of thing and it's going to take us a long time today to get to every one of those areas. I mean the sheer scale of this operation is quite daunting when you look at the number of places areas and creeks that have been affected. Certainly there was an elderly lady in a house at Heledon who was found deceased as a result of the flood a gentleman and a middle-aged man and a younger male in the Murphy's Creek area have been confirmed deceased and as you said then there were the two mothers and their children they were both in vehicles one was in Tuumber in the initial phase and the second vehicle was down at Grantham. Can I say these tragic deaths overnight are a very timely reminder to everybody that this fast moving water kills. I saw images on every news station last night in other parts of Queensland of people jumping off bridges into this sort of water and people attempting to drive through quite heavy water over bridges and over roads. Our emergency services are up to this task but we do not need to challenge them further with people doing stupid things. I just send out the most heartfelt appeal please do not cross roads that is flooded and do not jump into these waters. We need no more timely reminder than the shocking tragedies last night that this water is deadly and it's not to be played with. Certainly and we know that in the last couple of weeks there have been times because of the debris coming down the Brisbane River even that the CityCats service has to be suspended and that's done by the Brisbane City Council. So anywhere where there are floodwaters people do not know what's under that surface it could be anything we as the Premier said we're pleading to people do not become a statistic there is no need to go into this floodwater as we've said all the way along we can replace fridges, freezers, houses we just cannot replace people. The simple answer is no as I think I said before I can reassure people that it's very unlikely we'll see an event of this magnitude again particularly in the short term like this season. However there is a fairly decent rain ban at the moment between the Sunshine Coast and the Granite Belt and we are monitoring that very closely we're getting reports in that rain ban of up to 80 millimeters an hour and we do have the standard emergency warning signal turned on. We do expect though that this particular rain ban will be the last in the series once we see this weekend in the next few hours we should then enter a period where we just generally see the rain easing over southeast Queensland and tomorrow should be a much better day than today. That's correct sorry not weather wise just just a shower or two or a few showers for the rest of the week. Well we issue warnings always as quickly as we can and as I think I explained this this one was different this super rainstorm and it was something which any forecaster in the world may not have issued a warning for so it was exceptional but at the same time I should add that like all events of this nature we will be reviewing the situation in partnership with our colleagues our state government colleagues and the like and looking at ways that perhaps we might improve the warning system in the future but every now and again very rarely we might see something like this happen it's unfortunate hopefully in the future the computer models will be run a tighter resolution and these sort of very local features will be picked up thank you. We've had a number of incidents overnight that we're now looking at declaring rather than local government areas a significant region of Queensland as a disaster zone so we'll advise you a little further this morning we're just looking for an appropriate northern line and everything south of that will just be declared because we expect to see as I said over the next few days not only to Womba but Warwick, Stanthorpe, Condomine and other areas back into the disaster range I should say that we do expect to see both in terms of things getting worse and you might have been thinking about what we said yesterday Cathy what we're expecting is that Ipswich over the next 24 hours is likely to start to see the the waters peaking and in the Brisbane area Wednesday Thursday will be the time when we see the waters hit their high mark for this week so over the next two to three days Ipswich and Brisbane will be our high watch areas here in the southeast but equally we've got a number of places in the southwest where we anticipate evacuations and continued problems in some small and quite large communities I'm double-checking that for you but I suspect yes no the Ipswich City Council is doing that work at the moment clearly there are many more parts of Ipswich that have been settled since 1974 or since we've seen rivers at that height the current hydrology indicates that we we will expect to see 16 meters the rise from 16 to 18 will depend very much on the rainfall and as you've just heard from Jim there's you know that's not entirely clear because the catchment that's feeding this is not just here in Brisbane it's way up into the Lockyer Valley so what's happened to the flash flooding in the Lockyer River is now turning into a significant river flood as it gathers strength and coming down that system we've got challenges getting into a number of these communities getting our emergency personnel in and getting supplies in and yes they will be issues but we have got this is our number one priority this morning and we have an entire strategic team in the major incident room with Queensland Police working on these issues we also anticipate that we may see supply issues into parts of central and northern Queensland given that we have now seen cuts to the inland highway that was taking supplies as an alternative to the Bruce Highway so we've got quite a lot of work ahead of us ensuring basic supplies logistically into a number of those communities the Brisbane local disaster management group meeting at 10 a.m. this morning the purpose of that meeting is to look at the new data and advise people accordingly so in the interests of accuracy I think it's important that we wait until the the Lord Mayor and the local disaster management group here in Brisbane meets for the first time this morning I do think that it's important to understand that without Wyvernhoe we would have this a very significant flood in Brisbane right now that dam is keeping that 1200 mega litres a million litres a day off and out of our streets but the circumstances with this continued rainfall are putting pressure on all parts of that system so there's no need to panic in Brisbane but there is a need to get good accurate information and listen to the bulletins this is a changing situation but one that is being managed we will have a total review of all of the disaster response over the last for this entire event given what's happened in the Toowoomba and Lockyer Valley that review will have a particular focus on that event but I have to say the extreme nature of this event the rapid escalation of it in a very short period of time did require every effort to be made and I recognise that in some cases news helicopters were also being used that is I think an appropriate response and I thank those news news helicopters who made them available this wasn't all hands on deck no questions asked get in and do whatever you can event and that's what we saw there are people alive today because of that attitude that prevailed yesterday evening and I thank everybody who was part of it and assisted in any way in any of those rescues as I said and you saw it last night it happened so quickly it was every every hand to the wheel and I'm very pleased that we managed to get so many people 43 rooftop rescues many of them at night time done overnight it's it's very heartening to see that sort of response and as I said many many acts of courage and bravery behind every one of those rescues I'm here today working with the disaster management coordinating group it had been my intention to try and get into these areas that's not possible this is still an operational zone and it's not appropriate and not possible at this stage to get in we expect to see potentially well we know that there are between four and five areas where the road is cut from Ipswich to to Wumba it's not clear that they'll be cleared for some time similarly air flight into the region is not possible but even if it was frankly we are still in a desperate search and rescue phase this is not at the time for me to be visiting and talking to locals I'll do that as soon as it's appropriate okay the answer to that the answer to that one is the the hydrologists are now working with Brisbane City Council and Seq Water and we do expect the next warning out very shortly so they're recalculating because the rainfall is changing all the time and the release is from Wyvernay so there's all those factors operating potentially we'll let you know it is a rapidly changing situation the extent of the rainfall last night has changed all of the models and we'll be updating people as soon as we can thank you