Vintage photo of the 1974 Brisbane Flood

[benfica_77]

Is that @JohnS on the right and Rob at the back? These gents had the right idea...save the beer! 

[rckymtn22]

The guy on the far left looks like Ken!

[BoliDan]

Four X 🤢

[JohnS]

Who's the guy in the front, then?

[El Presidente]

Legends...all of them 

[Ken Gargett]

i was just a little kid back then. loved the floods. our house cut off. bridge wiped out. and school was closed for a week. very exciting. 

one thing a lot of people don't know about the 74 floods, there was an oil tanker moored in the brizzy river at the time. forget the name (something morris?? - Robert miller i think - and i found a picture below. largest vessel ever built in Australia at the time, 230 plus metres) but a huge thing. the floods snapped its ropes etc at one end and swung it around in the floodwaters. the brizzy river is a very wide thing but this ship went within ten feet of the loose end jamming on the other side of the river (i know all this as the company was one of the old man's clients), which would have formed a dam across the river during a flood. the estimates were that the flood throughout the brizzy suburbs would have been at least ten to twenty feet higher. possibly more. it would have been carnage.

the old man had a bit to deal with at the time. as well as personal dramas - they had to get a boat in over cow paddocks (the current Kenmore shopping centre) so he could get out and get to work, but he was president of the brizzy golf club. some poor sod's house came loose in the floods and floating onto the 10th green (or one of them). the bloke immediately claimed that this must mean that this was now his land. bit of a fight over that but he was never going to win. 

the other thing i remember was that in one of the waterways on the course, they saw a coffin floating, having been swept in by the floodwaters. apparently there were no volunteers to deal with that. eventually they got someone who went in to get it. turned out to be just the coffin lid. nothing under it. and i gather that they never found the main part of the coffin.