 I can confirm that the death toll after the event in the Lockyer Valley has risen again today with the recovery of the body of a mature aged woman in a house in Grantham. This brings the total number of deaths out of the Lockyer Valley, out of last week's event to 16 and 17 in total with the loss of the life of a young man here in Brisbane. Just to give people an inkling of what the police are working through in Grantham and I can certainly understand the impatience of many people who do want to get back into their homes. This house had already been searched on two occasions and the body was located on the final search. These houses are full of a lot of, some of the houses are full of a lot of debris and police and army personnel are being absolutely systematic and rigorous. We need to be very confident that bodies that are in the town of Grantham are recovered and people I hope will understand the pressure that the police are working under in these sorts of circumstances and be patient where they are working as hard as they can to be in a position to allow people back into the town of Grantham as quickly as possible. We're also working very hard to ensure that when people do all come back into the town of Grantham that they will have somewhere to gather and meet because we appreciate that this has been a very traumatic experience. Right now the only part of Grantham where people are able to come together and our meeting is the school. Unfortunately it needs to be used as a school and be ready for school in a week's time. So we are right now constructing a temporary marquee with temporary flooring etc in the town of Grantham. It will also have a separate temporary building that will be available for counselling as well as obvious amenities and we anticipate that that facility may well be there as a temporary meeting place and hub for this community for many many weeks and months to come and it'll be there for as long as it's needed. I'm also pleased that the company Lynn Fox through Lindsay Fox has very kindly donated 25 secure shipping containers that will be arriving in Grantham today. People have nowhere where they can take those goods that they can salvage and protect them and lock them up and they've they were worried about this when I met with them the other day and I'm very pleased that we've come to an arrangement with Lynn Fox. This is part of their donation and contribution to this effort. Those 25 initial secure shipping containers will arrive in Grantham today so again that's all about having Grantham ready for when people are able to come back in. In terms of other issues here in Brisbane and in Ipswich we continue to see 22,000 homes without supply. Can I just say on behalf of all of our Energex workers they have they've asked me to implore people on two things one they really need to get some very big trucks into streets to reconnect so they're asking people who are onlookers and sightseers to please stay out of these streets so that you are not impeding the progress of the electricity resupply. We've also seen lots of volunteers with lots of goodwill unfortunately piling rubbish up in and around and on top of the electricity the green electricity boxes out there that you have on suburban streets in at least one instance we've seen a bobcat take the whole lot out so can I just really encourage people don't put your rubbish in and around those electricity boxes. Sounds like a very basic thing but with a lot of enthusiasm out there we could inadvertently be making things harder. In terms of the CBDs of Ipswich and Brisbane Ipswich is well on the way it's substantially operational tomorrow the Brisbane CBD has all but five buildings now with power reconnected and up and operational we are doing there's some quite a bit of work going on however to pump the water out of the basements and around the substations that are in those other five buildings so sometime mid to late this week we would expect Energex expects that sometime around Wednesday or Thursday that all homes that can be reconnected to electricity will be but we expect there will still be several thousand that cannot be because of the level of inundation that they have seen. Water supply is basically we're very comfortable now that Brisbane and Ipswich water supply is clean and and we have what we need we still have some resupply access sorry resupply issues across Queensland but by and by and large the access into cities and towns across the state is opening up now and so places like Rockhampton are now being fully supplied by road. Durham Bandy however continues to be an issue that we are looking at resupply town of Durham Bandy is cut off there will be a Chinook helicopter taking some 17 pallets of supplies into Durham Bandy on Monday. In the area of transport public transport we're getting it back and operational as quickly as possible and we are hoping to have the busways fully operational as in the early part of this week. The Port of Brisbane we've seen the Port of Brisbane authorities and maritime safety workers working round the clock in very difficult conditions clearing the channel so that the Port of Brisbane can resume priority operations from today and the first ship that will come in will be an oil tanker we need to make sure that we keep fuel supplies safe but it also means with the Port now opening that goods into Brisbane and just as importantly goods out of Brisbane can now start operations again. We're seeing roads progressively open across the city and we do just repeat the messages of earlier this week please it's still not and it's not easy driving around some of those roads and we don't expect to see all traffic signals fully operational as I said possibly even into Tuesday and Wednesday. We are currently operating 34 recovery centres across the southeast and we've seen some of them very very busy. In Ipswich yesterday they were processing 100 payments per hour in Ipswich there is a lot of people in very desperate and dire need. To those people who know someone who might need this sort of assistance these are one-stop shops where you can get immediate cash as well as information about your insurance and your entitlements and how you can get help as well as things like your electricity supply. These locations some 34 of them they'll be available on government websites and I'd really encourage people to talk to your friends about them if they don't know about them. We'll have new teams of recovery workers for those centres arriving from South Australia and ACT tomorrow and New Zealand later this week and we have offers from other states to continue to replace people as they get worn out on the front lines. So those centres we expect to be operational for several weeks. In terms of the effort that's going on across Queensland to get our schools ready for day one we've now been able to confirm 92 schools have experienced inundation of at least one building and another 29 have seen inundation onto their playing fields. So there are a number of schools that will experience some disruption on day one but we are on track to have every school that can be opened open on day one of school and we are working in some smaller communities and even here in Brisbane in Rockley for example identifying local schools nearby that can take extra children for that first couple of those first week or so. So we expect to have either school open as normal or alternative arrangements made so that every child in Queensland can start school on day one. We think this is a really important part of restoring a sense of normality to those communities and also a sense for children who have been through some quite traumatic events an opportunity for them to be back with their friends at school and again starting back into a normal routine of life. We continue to be very grateful for the assistance we're seeing from the Australian Defence Force. There are now 1447 Defence Force personnel deployed across Queensland largely in the southeast but we continue to have a presence by the ADF in St George and in Rockhampton. We are very pleased that a minesweeper will arrive tomorrow to start checking in Morton Bay so that we can locate large debris and make decisions about what if any should be salvaged for the sake of cleaning out the bay. We have now got Air Force assets out doing major photographic aerial surveys of the flood plain so that we can see how this flood behaved and keep that record before the flood marks disappear so whether it's people out on the ground getting dirty the ADF are providing either those sorts of personnel or using their assets in a very strategic way that will hopefully help us in the future. The scale of this disaster I think is certainly starting to be understood by many people but what happened in the last week certainly significantly has increased the task of rebuilding. Just the early estimates indicate that since this time last week the number of houses that have been inundated has doubled, the number of properties impacted in some way has trebled, the number of evacuations across Queensland have doubled and the area affected by all of these events in the last couple of weeks is now almost 500,000 square kilometres and the people who live in the 51 local government areas that have a disaster declaration number 2.1 million so we're seeing a very large scale event obviously some people have impacted in a desperate and dire way but many others having their lives dislocated by roads cut off by not being able to get to services by not being able to keep medical appointments etc so this will have a ripple effect across our community for a very long time. On that note I therefore very pleased that the Federal Government and the Prime Minister has matched a contribution from the State Government of another $10 million each into the Relief Appeal. That additional $20 million between the Queensland Government and the Commonwealth Government will bring the Relief Appeal to around the $85 million mark today. We still have some number of big fundraisers, the Cricket Australia Day, a big sound relief concert to come but I do appeal to Australians today and to Queenslanders who have not been affected. Many of you are coming home from holidays and haven't had a chance to think about donating. Now is the time for us to kickstart the appeal again and ask you to dig deeper. The people who are affected by this event are affected by not only savage water wrecking their homes they have gone through something very traumatic and their ability to get over it and our ability as a community to totally get back on our feet will need significant financial help. Governments are putting in massive amounts of money to the rebuilding effort but as a community we can all play a role. So I encourage people time to dig deeper and Queenslanders say a very big thank you to everybody who's made a contribution to date. I invite the Deputy Commissioner to make some additional comments. Thank you Premier and good morning ladies and gentlemen. The Queensland Police Service is certainly working very hard in relation to traffic management plans and traffic strategies to keep Queensland moving particularly in the south-east of the state. Over the next few days as the Premier quite rightly said there will still be road closures and road details because of damaged infrastructure and the police will be out there working to try and keep traffic moving. I would like to in particularly mention though that unfortunately the vultures have started to come out and we have a number of scams operating across the south-east in particular. Some of these are the normal ones where these scam tradies turn up demand money of people to do to help with cleaning buildings a bit of painting here and there clearing of yards and they want the money up front they go away they're never seen again please don't fall for victim to that type of scam. The other scam that's operating is both by telephone and electronic means to contact householders who've been affected and to advise them that they know how best to help them access the money that is that is coming from federal and state authorities and then demand records of banking arrangements for those particular people do not fall into the trap of giving over any details of that sort these are just scams certainly in the Locky Valley today we are continuing the very very gruesome task as the Premier quite rightly said of the search to give people an understanding of the of the challenges that are still facing the searches there is one debris pile that is about three meters high by at least another three meters wide and a hundred meters long we know that that pile contains deceased animals the farm animals and the like that whole area has got to be pulled apart and searched meticulously and that is just one of the areas that we're dealing with in that huge area certainly the other focus is to assist with areas like Condomine and Durham Bandy and to monitor the flood peaks as they as they continue in those areas and to repatriate people as soon as possible thank you no we haven't but obviously it's five days away and we will be in relation to the King tide next Friday that will be carefully monitored and the hydrologists will be posting their forecasts and readings online so if there is any issues that people need to know about rest assured as we've done this week we will come out and tell you about it can I say that it's inevitable in a big event like this that you'll often get rumours and there've been several wild allegations that I've been having to put to bed all week there may well be some scare mongering about the King tide can I just say we have King tides all the time they're a very normal part of the tidal system and we are very confident that we'll be able to manage this King tide as long as of course we don't get massive amounts of rainfall in the next week so we talk about the King tide to be open but people should not be worried unnecessarily we are very confident that the King tide will be managed if there is a problem we will come and talk to you with plenty of notice no they will they will be up and running we've just got to get the water out of those basements you know I think the current forecast is that they'll all be operational sometime this week but it won't be Monday morning so you know this time of year we do anticipate that the combination of people who are still on leave people whose own homes have been affected will see both major private companies and government departments not as fully staffed as they might otherwise be at this time of year and we've just got to accept that we want to be as reasonable as we can with people whose lives are being that who are still cleaning up this sort of mess so I do think everyone's going to have to be a little patient our centre of the city is not going to look or operate as you know at full at full throttle for some days but all efforts that can be made are being made to do that and have you been given any sort of feedback to bring now what we're what we there are a couple of people who out of one of the flood affected towns particularly around Theodore we are waiting on tests to see what might what they might be suffering from there's no absolute confirmed evidence that it's anything to do with flood waters but just so that we can be absolutely rigorous we're testing them to ensure that that's not the case but you cannot I can't give the message more strongly and more often or too often that while you're out there cleaning up these floodwaters and I've been out there talking to people this morning I think everybody knows it stinks out there and the reason it stinks is that this water is full of awful things there've been dead animals rotting food the broken chemical containers this water is toxic and if you have a cut or a scratch and this water gets into it then you're at a serious risk of infection so it's absolutely fantastic to see all the help out there on the streets of Brisbane and I really thank everyone for rolling up their sleeves but please let's not see a serious disaster made worse by people getting sick when they don't need to we need everyone on deck so please stay safe and look after yourself not only am I inspired by all of the volunteers that are out there on our streets I think the rest of Australia is inspired by what's happening here in Queensland I indicated earlier this week when we were in much more dire circumstances that there was something special about the people who were born north of the border and I think everyone's seeing it on display out there on our streets not only in Brisbane but I saw it yesterday in the streets in Rockhampton I saw it last weekend in the towns of Condomine and Theodore and we're going to have to see it again when Condomine gets back after their evacuation so there's still a lot of cleanup happening right across regional and rural Queensland there's still a lot to be done and everybody who can pitch in is pitching in and I think we can all there's something magic happening across the city today certainly I would invite anyone who