Political rivalries have been put aside as Tropical Cyclone Alfred approaches and a wave of volunteers, including federal MPs, pitch in at Brisbane’s sandbag depots.
Greens volunteer Harrison Rees has been working shoulder to shoulder with a Liberal for the last three days at the former Toowong Bowls Club site.
Despite the imminent federal election, there’s a powerful bipartisanship spirit, including a “no shop talk policy”.
Around 20 Greens volunteers, including Brisbane MP Stephen Bates, worked alongside three union members and the single Liberal volunteer to fill thousands of sandbags for pickup early on Thursday afternoon, and the impact their work had was felt immediately.
On Tuesday, before volunteers showed up to help out, the wait for sandbags was about two hours. On Thursday it was reportedly 20 minutes or less. Trucks arrived every few minutes to drop more sand, and it was gone seemingly just as quickly.
Griffith MP Max Chandler-Mather said his entire campaign infrastructure had switched from winning votes to saving homes as the cyclone loomed.
“We’ve completely suspended the campaign and redirected every resource we have to helping,” he said.
It’s the second subsequent time he’s been forced to pause electioneering: hundreds of Griffith campaigners helped clean up after the 2022 Brisbane floods.
This time, it’s a well-oiled machine, hundreds strong.
The sandbag depots only reopened on Thursday morning. Forecasts on Wednesday suggested Tropical Cyclone Alfred would have probably made it too dangerous to do any further preparation by now. Chandler-Mather said he had put the call out that morning and dozens signed up immediately, on site within minutes.
“Our strength, I suppose, in the Greens, is the capacity to organise a lot of people,” he said.
They are even doing drop-offs, coordinated from a centre army-style headquarters.
“We’ve got a triage system in my office at the moment,” Chandler-Mather said.
“Our chief of staff is there, basically triaging any request that comes in, sending out our fleet of utes, picking up extra sandbags for mobility impaired people.
“And then when we hear that a particular line has blown out in wait time, we’ll send more volunteers to that one to help clear it, and then we’ll move those excess volunteers somewhere else.”
Chandler-Mather said that the small band of volunteers would switch to clean-up once the cyclone had passed.
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More than 400,000 sandbags had been distributed in Brisbane by Thursday morning.
Thousands of people have been through the gates of seven fill-your-own sandbag stations in Acacia Ridge, Toowong, Camp Hill, Boondall, West End, Darra and Murarrie since they reopened at 10.30am on Thursday.
Many of them did not stop distribution until late in the night on Tuesday and Wednesday.
Lachlan Morris, from Ryan MP Elizabeth Watson-Brown’s office, said many people had picked up enough sandbags for themselves and then returned to help others.
“There are people that have been here every day,” he said.
The 2011 “mud army” is a Brisbane cultural touchstone. Thousands of ordinary people spontaneously appeared to clear debris from that year’s flood.
Nobody’s picked a name this year.
Cfmeu delegate – and sandbag volunteer – Oliver Graham suggested “sand army”.
“Every time there’s a natural disaster in Queensland, we tend to pull together. There’s … an instinctual reaction on the part of most people to, sort of, collaborate, help each other, and work together to solve problems,” he said.
Graham lives in Rocklea, one of Brisbane’s most flood-prone suburbs.
He predicted he would be working for a few more days yet.
Gale force winds are expected to start hitting Brisbane within 24 hours, with the Bureau of Meteorology on Thursday forecasting Tropical Cyclone Alfred would make landfall late Friday or early Saturday. It will be south east Queensland’s first cyclone on land in half a century.
