Ex-tropical Cyclone Alfred: Flooding threat lingers as more homes go under, highways still closed

Brisbane resident Hayden Edwards thought he’d escaped the worst of ex-tropical cyclone Alfred until he woke up with rubbish and bins floating around his inundated property.

“It just came up so quick,” Mr Edwards said.

“Looked out the window, and all you can see is water.”

The Oxley renter knows some of his appliances have been lost but must wait for water to subside before he can find out the full extent of the damage and start the big clean up.

“We’re just happy that we’re safe and we’re at least we’ve still got power,” he said as a duck swam past.

“The ducks are having a good time, so at least they’re happy.”

A record 450,000 people in Queensland’s southeast have been affected by power outages since Thursday last week, which energy company Energex says is the state’s greatest outage cause by a natural disaster.

Some 353 public schools were set to reopen on Tuesday but hundreds more remain shut.

The area is slowly returning to a sense of normality, with supermarkets, airports and select Brisbane bus services operating again while the Warrego Highway connecting Brisbane to Toowoomba is closed until further notice.

More rainfall and thunderstorms storms associated with the ex-tropical cyclone were expected in flood-hit areas on Tuesday.

The Lockyer Valley west of Brisbane and Hervey Bay north of the Sunshine Coast were inundated on Monday, adding to the toll of damaged houses.

Major flood warnings were issued for the Albert and Logan Rivers at the Gold Coast, the Bremer River and Warrill Creek at Ipswich east of Brisbane as well as Lockyer and Laidley creeks.

Overnight, the Bremer River broke its banks and was sitting around 11.3m in the early hours of Tuesday, just below the major flood level of 11.7m.

It’s expected to remain above nine metres into Tuesday, the weather bureau said.

Warrill Creek also rose and broke major flood levels in the Ipswich suburbs of Amberley and Harrisville.

South of the border, residents have returned home as evacuation orders were lifted in some northern NSW towns.

Lismore local Tina and her son Tyson had to evacuate the home they had been squatting in after escaping domestic violence and returned as quickly as they could by boat.

“Lismore was in absolute fear, they definitely were traumatised,” she said.

She said that property and others on the street were part of a buyback scheme following the devastating 2022 floods and have since been occupied by people at the forefront of the nation’s housing crisis.

Premier Chris Minns warned evacuation centres for 700 people must shut once warnings are lifted as they’re not meant to be a long-term fix but Tina hopes the renewed attention in the emergency will lead to greater action.

“What’s happening out there is ridiculous, there are women over 55 all in their cars,” Tina said.

“I couldn’t imagine being in our caravan through (Alfred).”

Some 1800 people were isolated by floodwaters in NSW on Monday and more than 10,000 people were under emergency warnings.

Health authorities have urged residents not to wade into floodwaters as they may contain faeces, chemicals, industrial waste, snakes, sharp objects and a potentially deadly bacterial disease.

Soil-borne melioidosis has already claimed 16 lives in north Queensland in 2025 after record February rainfall triggered floods that forced hundreds to evacuate.