Four Australian universities are scraping out mud and picking up debris this week after heavy flooding in the northeastern state of Queensland shut down some of the universities’ campuses. The Queensland government declared three-quarters of the state a disaster zone.
In the area of Brisbane, the state’s capital, campuses of Griffith University, CQ University, the University of Queensland, and the Queensland University of Technology are scheduled to reopen this week. “It’s amazing how this city has gotten through the mess,” said Paul Greenfield, the University of Queensland’s vice chancellor. “This university and the city are determined to get on with life as soon as possible.”
Mr. Greenfield said the university, which had been in a summer session, was organizing help for students who had lost their housing or their belongings in the flood.
The Brisbane River left its banks last week and swept over campus roads, into parking garages, over recreational fields and, in a few instances, into academic buildings. Electrical power was shut down to many university buildings, as it was to many parts of Brisbane, for safety’s sake. The loss of power often disrupted telecommunications and Internet access.
University officials said flood damage was generally restricted to athletics facilities, such as tracks and tennis courts, and outlying parking garages, with core academic buildings less affected.
At the South Bank campus of Griffith University, the staff worked all night to move equipment, musical instruments, and library collections to higher ground, and used sandbags to try to prevent damage to buildings. Some water penetrated the lower level of the Queensland Conservatorium, the university’s music school.
At the University of Queensland’s Gatton campus, which focuses on agricultural and veterinary studies, about 50 people were marooned for four or five days, Mr. Greenfield said. Elsewhere at the university, greenhouses were flooded, and many research projects were destroyed. Two child-care centers, some administrative-office operations, and the lower levels of some parking garages were damaged. Early estimates of the University of Queensland’s flood damage ranged from $20-million to 30-million.
At the university’s St. Lucia campus, 600 tons of silt were hauled away from parking garages and a low-lying road. Brigades of volunteers with brooms, shovels, and rakes were dispatched in the clean-up effort.
Core teaching and learning operations, Mr. Greenfield said, would be largely unaffected.
The Queensland University of Technology reached out to students on Facebook and Twitter. On Facebook, anxious students inquired about getting scholarship money, enrolling in classes, and taking exams.
On all the Queensland campuses, officials were eager to let international students, who make up a high proportion of the student population—about a quarter of the University of Queensland’s students, for example—know that the campuses were returning to normal quickly.
“If you are about to get on a plane in Asia, North America, or Europe, it might worry you a little bit,” said Mr. Greenfield. “It might worry your family.” The university is picking up international students at the airport and making sure they have proper housing, he said.
Some external evidence supported the university officials’ reassuring statements: TransLink, the public-transportation authority in southeast Queensland, said that as of Monday, 96 percent of public transportation was in service. And as if to script an after-the-disaster cliché, there is the weather: The sun has been shining.
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