Streets have been turned into rivers after heavy rain smashed the South Burnett region overnight.
Emergency alerts were issued for Kingaroy, about 200 kilometres north-west of Brisbane, where homes and businesses were inundated in the heaviest December daily rainfall on record.
Footage shared with 9News showed streets in Kingaroy transformed into river rapids.
“Oh my God, look at that. I haven’t seen that since 2011,” one person can be heard marvelling at the flood of water.
“Have a look at this here, it’s a bin washed up,” another said.
The country town was hit with about 120 millimetres of rain from a thunderstorm over two hours.
“Easy knee-deep here, and the rush of the water – we’ve never seen this much water ever,” Kingaroy resident Tracey McConnell said.
Entire blocks of shops were swamped as the rain kept falling, including at Inflow Pilates where locals chipped in to try to minimise the damage.
“I’ve lived here for 20 years now and I’ve never seen anything like that,” Inflow Pilates owner Emma Harvey said.
The water came through so quickly that stock from some stores started floating down the street.
A woman was rescued from floodwaters on Kingaroy’s outskirts.
Dozens of roads were left closed across South Burnett for more than 24 hours.
Even just a few centimetres of floodwater through shops is enough to lead to big losses.
“It’s flooded pretty much everywhere except our two Christmas aisles and our art and craft department,” store manager Doug Newitt said.
“We’re going to lose two, maybe three days trading.”
There was also flooding at the town’s main pathology clinic.
The Bureau of Meteorology said the chance of the extreme flash flooding was about 1 per cent.
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“We did see intense rainfall thresholds breached, which basically means at a given location, it’s only about a 1 per cent chance of seeing those thresholds breached in a given year,” meteorologist Pieter Claassen said.
MP Deb Frecklington said while rain was usually welcome in Kingaroy, enough was enough.
“Whilst most people from the country never like to complain about the rain, we’ve had enough at the moment,” Frecklington said.
