South-east Queensland residents have been urged to take shelter – some told to leave their homes immediately – as a precaution ahead of “extremely unstable” storms that could bring hail and heavy rainfall to areas still affected by severe flooding.
Large parts of the region remain underwater and residents have barely started to clean up after floods which killed nine people and damaged more than 17,000 homes and businesses.
Police are still searching for an elderly man who fell from a boat into the swollen Brisbane River near Breakfast Creek on Saturday afternoon.
On Thursday, state authorities sought to clear schools from Moreton Bay, north of Brisbane, to Bundaberg, asking parents to pick up their children early, before the storms arrived.
The Lockyer Valley town of Grantham, which flooded severely in 2011 and again this week, was evacuated on Thursday.
All schools in south-east Queensland will be closed on Friday – except for the children of essential workers – and people across the region are being urged not to leave home unless necessary as a precaution.
Authorities have also urged people to cease clean-up operations, as the forecast storms could pose renewed danger to communities where rivers remain flooded, and where residents are still counting the cost of damage caused by the “rain bomb” storm that lashed Brisbane and surrounds until Monday.
“These are unprecedented times,” the Queensland premier, Annastacia Palaszczuk, said on Thursday morning.
“We are warning people that this is a serious situation. It is extremely unstable weather conditions.
“I’ve lived in Brisbane essentially all my life and I haven’t seen storms and floods like this all being thrown at us at once.”
The Bureau of Meteorology has said the conditions are “very volatile” and that storms would be “dangerous and potentially life-threatening”.
Up to 150mm of rain could fall in some areas, heaped upon more than 1,000mm of rain during the past week in Brisbane and surrounds.
Meteorologist Laura Boekel said that flooding over the past week meant waterways did not have “capacity to take on any more water”.
“For today, the creeks are a real concern and a real focus because they are rising quickly,” Boekel said.
“They cannot take any more rainfall. They are what we call saturated.
“The severe storms are expected to continue into this evening, and we’re still expecting storm activity tomorrow and into the weekend.
“With severe thunderstorms comes severe hazard and phenomena and that doesn’t just include the heavy rain, it includes the potential for giant hail, as well as damaging winds.”
The deputy police commissioner, Shane Chelepy, warned people whose homes had been flooded: “There is a possibility your home will be inundated again.”
“Please do not move back into your homes if you have been inundated,” he said. “What we don’t want is for emergency services at midnight tonight needing to come back into those areas and evacuate you again.”
A “mud army” of volunteers helping residents to clear out flooded homes has been suspended until Saturday at the earliest, the Brisbane lord mayor, Adrian Schrinner, said.
The decision to evacuate Grantham came after storms hit Brisbane and surrounds on Thursday morning. The Grantham catchment had more than 80mm of rain and authorities said sounding the evacuation siren in the town was “a precautionary measure”.
The morning storm was short-lived, but dumped enough rain to prompt warnings that several river systems would flood.
The Logan River catchment, south of Brisbane, and the Bremer River at Ipswich were both rising.
Amid the fierce conditions, a seriously ill man was winched to safety from a cargo ship in the Brisbane harbour.
