Ex–Cyclone Koji Floods Queensland Towns, Rekindling Debate Over Warning Systems

Clermont, a mining and farming town on Queensland’s Central Highlands, has seen its share of floods. But when residents woke this week to find roads cut, paddocks turned to lakes and rescue boats moving past familiar landmarks, many said they had never witnessed anything like the deluge that followed ex–Tropical Cyclone Koji.

Record rain, rapid flooding

By Monday morning, Clermont had recorded more than 200 millimeters of rain in 24 hours—its wettest day in about 110 years. Creeks burst their banks, at least 100 homes were affected and key access routes, including Sandy Creek Bridge, were submerged, briefly leaving Clermont an island in a vast sheet of brown water.

“At the moment it hasn’t quite hit that catastrophic level but we are being really cautious,” Isaac Regional Council Mayor Kelly Vea Vea said, as authorities opened Clermont State School as an evacuation center. “This amount of rainfall is a lot for Clermont.”

Koji had already disappeared from cyclone bulletins by then. Officially, the system ceased to be a tropical cyclone on Sunday afternoon after crossing the north Queensland coast between Ayr and Bowen as a Category 1 storm and weakening inland. But as a slow-moving tropical low, its most damaging phase was still ahead.

The event has now left a wide belt of central and northern Queensland dealing with major river and flash flooding, livestock losses and damaged infrastructure, even as a political fight builds over whether authorities warned communities in time.

From coastal landfall to inland deluge

Koji developed in the Coral Sea in early January and was declared a tropical cyclone by the Bureau of Meteorology on Jan. 9. Offshore, it briefly reached Category 2 strength before edging toward the populated stretch of coast from Townsville to the Whitsundays.

On Sunday, Jan. 11, it came ashore between Ayr and Bowen with sustained winds typical of a Category 1 system. Strong gusts and heavy squalls lashed coastal towns including Proserpine, Airlie Beach and Mackay. Around 20 vessels were damaged or torn from their moorings at marinas around Airlie Beach and the Whitsunday Islands.

“It was sad to see the boats losing anchor and one that was totally destroyed,” tourist Noel Harrison said after watching the storm from Airlie Beach.

Within hours of making landfall, Koji weakened below cyclone strength and was reclassified as a tropical low—ex–Tropical Cyclone Koji. The Australian Reinsurance Pool Corporation formally ended its declared cyclone event that afternoon, a technical step important for insurers and the federal government’s cyclone reinsurance scheme.

Meteorologists, however, warned that the system’s main threat was shifting from wind to rain.

Flash flooding and major river warnings

Forecasters at the Bureau of Meteorology issued severe weather alerts for “locally intense rainfall which may lead to dangerous and life-threatening flash flooding” along the coastal strip between Townsville and Proserpine and inland over the Central Highlands and Coalfields. Over the week to Jan. 12, the bureau said, Koji and its remnants helped dump between 25 and 300 millimeters of rain across large parts of eastern and tropical Queensland, with higher local totals.

Those local peaks tell the story on the ground. In the ranges west of Mackay, gauges at Finch Hatton Creek picked up nearly 300 millimeters in just six hours. Cattle Creek, in north Queensland, recorded about 370 millimeters in 24 hours. In Moranbah, more than 150 millimeters fell overnight; Emerald recorded around 80 to 100 millimeters.

The speed of the rise caught some communities off guard. In Finch Hatton, a small town west of Mackay, a service station that has stood for roughly 60 years without flooding was suddenly inundated, with water pushing through doors and shelving.

“We’ve never, ever seen anything like this before, where the water has come up so quickly and so high,” manager Lisa Zarb said, estimating the loss of stock at hundreds of thousands of dollars.

As creeks and rivers surged, the Bureau of Meteorology issued major flood warnings for the Pioneer River near Mirani, the Connors and Isaac river system, and the Georgina and Flinders rivers further west. Flood watches and warnings extended across a long list of catchments from the Herbert and Burdekin in the north to the Diamantina and Thomson in the interior.

Rescues, outages and damaged infrastructure

Emergency services carried out multiple swift-water rescues. Crews in the Mackay region pulled families from partially submerged homes and cars in places such as Pinnacle and Gargett. In Clermont, at least three people were rescued overnight at the height of the flooding. Mackay water police rescued a 65-year-old man from a stranded boat and later recovered a calf that had been swept an estimated 70 kilometers down the swollen Pioneer River.

Despite the scale of the flooding and road closures, Queensland authorities reported no confirmed deaths directly linked to Koji’s rains by Monday and Tuesday.

“That is the most important thing in a disaster,” Premier David Crisafulli told reporters, while warning that further flooding was possible as the low moved west.

Electricity infrastructure bore the brunt of strong winds and falling trees as the system crossed the coast. Ergon Energy said around 23,000 customers in northern and central Queensland lost power at the peak of the event, with the Mackay and Whitsunday regions hit hardest. Several thousand customers were still without electricity days later. Some small communities, including Gargett and Pinnacle, also experienced temporary disruptions to drinking water supplies.

Rural losses and remote community risks

The inland flooding has amplified an existing emergency in Queensland’s northwest, where weeks of monsoonal rain before Koji’s arrival had already inundated Gulf Country and Channel Country catchments. Authorities estimate more than 50,000 head of cattle were killed in those earlier floods, a tally expected to rise as graziers gain access to remote paddocks.

“The economic impact for western Queensland, because of how important agriculture is to underpin those communities, will be large,” Crisafulli said.

Koji’s inland rains fell on already saturated ground in some of those same river systems, prompting fears of renewed or prolonged flooding on the Georgina, Flinders, Diamantina and Thomson rivers.

Beyond the well-known cattle districts, Indigenous and remote communities across Cape York and the Gulf of Carpentaria were also placed under flood watch. Residents of places such as Doomadgee, Mornington Island, Normanton, Kowanyama and Aurukun were warned they could face extended isolation as roads closed and airstrips became the only points of access.

Warning systems under scrutiny

The disaster has opened a sharper debate over Australia’s weather warning systems and infrastructure.

Crisafulli has accused the Bureau of Meteorology of “failures” that he said left regions such as Clermont “sitting ducks,” arguing that a lack of modern rain gauges and radar coverage meant warnings did not reflect how quickly local waters were rising.

Some residents and local media have echoed concerns that formal flood alerts and online dashboards lagged behind conditions on the ground, with messages arriving after water had already entered homes.

Meteorologists counter that they issued broad severe weather and flood warnings well before the heaviest rain and say the kind of intense, localized downpours seen with Koji’s rain bands are inherently difficult to pinpoint in advance, especially in regions with sparse observation networks.

While the bureau has not responded directly to the premier’s “sitting ducks” remark, officials have previously noted that convective storms can produce vast differences in rainfall over short distances, even within the same catchment.

The argument speaks to a broader question of how much protection forecasting alone can provide in an era of more frequent and intense extremes. Hydrologists and emergency planners have long said that even with improved radar and gauge networks, rapid-onset flash flooding will remain a difficult hazard to manage, and that land use, building standards and evacuation planning are equally important.

Insurance questions as recovery begins

Koji has also become an early test case for the federal Cyclone Reinsurance Pool, administered by the Australian Reinsurance Pool Corporation under the Terrorism and Cyclone Insurance Act. The pool is designed to lower premiums for households, small businesses and strata properties in high-risk areas by allowing insurers to offload cyclone-related losses to the Commonwealth.

With claims still being lodged and assessed, it is not yet clear how much of Koji’s damage—particularly from flooding after the system was downgraded—will fall under the pool, or how quickly affected residents and businesses will see payouts.

As the waters slowly recede, attention is turning to recovery and the longer-term questions raised by another major flood in places that have seen several in recent years.

In Clermont, residents are stripping mud from walls and piling ruined furniture on the curb. In Finch Hatton, locals who are accustomed to helping others in disasters are now taking stock of their own losses. Along the Georgina and Flinders, graziers are confronting not just drowned stock but washed-out fences, scoured roads and the prospect of rebuilding on land that has flooded repeatedly.

For now, authorities are emphasizing the basics: do not drive through floodwaters, heed local warnings, check on neighbors. Behind that immediate message, however, Koji has highlighted the stresses on weather and flood monitoring systems, the vulnerability of remote and Indigenous communities, and the strain on rural economies repeatedly hit by climate-related extremes.

“We’ve never, ever seen anything like this before,” Zarb said of the water that finally reached her 60-year-old servo. As records fall and flood maps are redrawn, many in Queensland’s interior are quietly asking whether scenes like hers are becoming less an exception and more a glimpse of what lies ahead.