More than 3,000 flood-affected Brisbane streets are waiting for kerbside collection a week after floods rushed through south-east Queensland.
Lord Mayor Adrian Schrinner said the city council has received an advance payment of $10 million from the Queensland Reconstruction Authority to help with the clean-up, which he said was likely to run into the tens of millions.
"There is in excess of 3,000 streets across Brisbane that need to be cleaned up from a kerbside collection point of view, and that number continues to grow," Mr Schrinner said.
The Lord Mayor said the time frame for flooded streets to be visited by council's kerbside collection teams "continued to evolve" as council teams had to revisit streets multiple times while residents continued clearing out damaged homes.
To speed up the process, the council has allocated temporary tip sites across the city where trucks can dump the waste, rather than travelling to one of the waste transfer centres with each load.
Larger trucks are then collecting the waste from the centralised dump spots and taking it in bulk to the waste centres. The council is also accepting help from private contractors.
Mr Schrinner said Defence Force numbers were also set to be doubled.
There are about 1,378 personnel in Queensland, with the ADF's focus on Monday in the suburbs of Ashgrove, The Gap, and Redcliffe.
Defending the Mud Army's conclusion
On Saturday, the council told its 15,000-strong volunteer Mud Army to stand down after a single day of clean-up, saying the ADF and council workers would take over.
Council opposition Leader Jared Cassidy said many flood-affected suburbs on the north side had not seen any kerbside collection more than a week after putting their damaged possessions out on the kerb.
"It's now getting quite upsetting for people, because in large parts of Deagon for the last week we've seen the streets just strewn with people's possessions," Mr Cassidy said.
"They're feeling a bit like they're being left behind, and I've been getting just as frustrated with the slow progress of the kerbside pick up."
Mr Cassidy said council workers had "slogged their guts out" over two days just cleaning up a single street, and more than 200 streets in his north side ward were affected.
Mr Schrinner said there was "a lot more work to be done", adding the council was methodically going through every request for help and confirming whether or not people still needed assistance.
"The volunteer Mud Army has a specific purpose, and that purpose was to go and knock on doors and help people in their homes," he said.
The Lord Mayor said there was also a liability risk for council and a safety risk for volunteers.
"There [were] situations where there was heavy machinery and trucks moving through streets cleaning up, there was debris moving around the place," he said.
"There's already been too many lives lost in this flooding disaster and I don't want to see any more lost through those safety risks."
'So much work' to be done
Jason and Lyn's Rocklea home was one of the few on their street that that did not flood.
They said not nearly enough volunteers from the 15,000 strong Mud Army had been deployed to Rocklea.
"The people who did volunteer for the Mud Army, good on them," Jason said.
When the Mud Army was stood down, Lyn and many others from the area questioned the decision and called for help on social media, prompting some volunteers to turn up unofficially.
"They definitely shouldn't have cancelled — they shouldn't have sent that message out to people telling them, 'You're not needed the following day,'" Lyn said.
"We still have so much work that needs to be done in this area."
Complex needs
On the south side, Labor councillor Steve Griffiths said his community was working together to match volunteers with needed support across hard-hit suburbs such as Rocklea and surrounds.
But for some multicultural communities, language barriers, COVID-19 isolation requirements, and poverty were causing further challenges, Mr Griffiths said.
"We had another house that are sleeping in wet conditions as well, but they're all … locked down with COVID and from a multicultural community."
