thinkabit,
I'm trying to think what the World would be like now if the people who built the Suez Canal, the Canal of Corinth, El Camino etc etc would have been afflicted with the mentality you're plagued with !

Thinkabit,
Come to think of it, what we're facing right now is down to people with your thinking ! No effort yet demanding everything to be laid on for your convenience is what stopped progress over the past 50 years.

Indi pie in the sky mate. Yes a waste of water, & I'm sure the people of Brisbane would love to see it gone somewhere else, but the biggest pumps on earth could only harvest a small amount of it.

The riverina is 700 feet & more above sea level, & hundreds of kilometers away. The cost of pushing water that high & far is so great that it would have to grow gold to repay the energy costs.

Dalby wheat fields are 300 to 500 meters above sea level & 250 meters away. Again hideously expensive to pump water to.

Apart from that, the water is only available for a few days each decade.

This time they have handled the dam quite well, but inflows below the dam would still have produced a very similar flood if the dam had been able to stop all from above it. I had 550mm in 5 days, 260 of it in the last 24 hours of the deluge. Many places had more. Nothing was going to stop Brisbane being flooded with that much rain.

Even the low lying areas around local creeks were flooded. Those creeks flow into the bay, and have nothing to do with the Brisbane River. Once the rain stopped the water levels went down quickly in the local area. High tides didn't help those on the rivers flood plain.

Issy, the town of Towoomba is high on the top of the range and it floods, how high can you go.

Indy, remember our Seniors National Service motto, "Have shovel will travel".

There are no solutions to nature.

Indi pie in the sky mate.
Hasbeen,
Well, that's your view. Mine is more like pie in the face of developers, planners & bureaucrats & last but not least, indifferent voters.
You of all people are aware that since the '70's literally no projects for future infrastructure have eventuated because of Green lack of vision. This literally amounts to ecological & economic sabotage. Literally all water absorption has been obliterated & hardly any drainage has been given any thought. What a lot of people in authority, aided by voters haven't taken into consideration or simply can't see is, that we need to work with the environment not against it.
Stop building in low lying, flood-prone area for a start. Where flooding is deep rather than wide, widen the flow paths. This could be done by either diversion i.e. Bradfield type schemes or canal developments which would offer great real estate as a bonus. Anything to prevent water rising to such disastrous levels. Also, flood mitigation should also be before it gets to the dams & overfills them. There's so much that can be done to prevent the impact of these floods, from building on higher ground to building up the ground. Just imagine if the Dutch had the mentality of Australians, they'd be constantly underwater.