‘We’re sick of it, but used to it’: Lockyer Valley residents assess flood damage

Jaiden Smith wasn’t going to let the floodwaters swamping his house stop him from seeing his family. 

True, his folks lived just next door — but he wasn’t keen to keep wading back and forth waist-deep through the oily, silty inland sea that suddenly divided them, courtesy of ex-Cyclone Alfred.

So Jaiden hopped in his car-battery-powered tinny — with his partner, cats and pet rats — and navigated through the garden gate to their door.

“Brilliant. Works well,” he says.

He says the water around their properties at Crowley Vale, a farming expanse in the Lockyer Valley west of Ipswich, rose quickly on Monday.

“It was unexpected. We had maybe four hours, pretty much, to prepare for it,” he says.

“We had all power, everything, we were chilling. But next thing you know, they cut the power on us.”

But the Smith family managed to keep the ground floor of the main family home as good as watertight, having learnt from experience.

“Wivenhoe did us the worst in 2011,” Jaiden’s mother, Kylie, says, referring to the infamous dam releases during that year’s disastrous floods.

Jaiden’s sister Paige says they’re “actually very lucky they didn’t let out Wivenhoe again — we wouldn’t be here if they did”.

Jaiden says after 2011, the family “went around and sealed the whole house, sandbags on the front door, just all the stuff that we needed to do to keep the water out, we did, and it worked in our favour”.

The road running by their house leads to Forest Hill, a town of 900 people which was entirely marooned by floodwaters until Tuesday morning.

Kylie says their only knock on the door from authorities was police warning them not to try crossing the submerged part of the road.

“We don’t get any help,” she says.

“They’re more just, ‘Aw yeah, they’re country people, they’ll be alright,” Jaiden says.

Over at Laidley, Bushmasters have carried in 60 members of the Australian army’s motorised infantry battalion.

They’ve been deployed again to help the town get into recovery mode.

WIth a population of 4,000, Laidley is one of the bigger centres in the Lockyer Valley, whose rich farmlands have earned it the moniker of Australia’s “food bowl”.

In the town centre, shopkeepers swept out the muddy traces of floodwaters which seemed to inundate just about every place of business.

Stacks of ruined stock and furniture piled up on the muddy roadside.

For Wayne Clark, owner of the Wayne’s World discount store chain, it was third time unlucky.

“2011, 2022 and then obviously 2025,” he says.

“It got all the way through, about half a metre … a bit of devastation as you can see now.

“We prepared for two days, picking stuff up off the ground, trying to get stock up high, barricading our doors, obviously staff getting safe and getting home.”

Business owners including Clark are glowing in their praise for local volunteers who rolled up their sleeves for the clean-up after floodwaters receded on Tuesday, some of them bringing in fresh food.

Clark says he’s “had it worse — mate, no losing lives, the staff are safe, everyone’s safe and their houses are dry, so that’s the main thing as well”.

Of the 10 Wayne’s World stores across south-east Queensland and northern New South Wales, Clark says three normally flood when there’s a big wet on.

This time around it was just Laidley.

Wayne says he and just about every other shop owner in Laidley lost insurance coverage after 2022.

But Clark does scratch his head at some of the industry’s reasoning — like how a flooded store in Laidley isn’t covered but a flooded store in Gympie, north of the Sunshine Coast is.

“So how’s this? When it flooded in 2022, it went over the roof [in Gympie], the biggest flood I’ve had, I lost 400 grand’s worth of stock,” he says.

“I had cover, so I got the payout, no worries, they renewed the policy.

“But they didn’t renew this one [in Laidley], and this was like a 50-grand cover.

“I rack my brain why we haven’t got cover on this site.”

With the Queensland government committed to putting $15 million into flood mitigation works around Laidley, Clark and others are hoping insurers will be forced to revisit the issue if their risk profile is lower.

“Well see what happens mate, it takes a long time to change things,” he says.

Down on the lower part of the town centre, the force of floodwaters swept several tonnes of brick pavers right off a footpath.

Julie Williams, owner of the Laidley 2nd Hand Shop nearby, was among those who gathered the pavers up and put them in stacks.

“And guess what we found in them?” she laughs.

“A yabby.”

Along with the kindness of strangers who brought fresh food for Laidley’s mud army, the unexpected discovery was a bright spot in the aftermath of a recurring natural disaster.

“We’re sick of it — but we’re used to it.”