Rockhampton Mayor Tony Williams said he was a “smiling mayor” after the revision, with a likely reduction in the 280 homes that were predicted to be affected at the higher levels.<\/p>\n
“[But] we still have impacts from that level of flooding to a number of our sporting facilities, also there’s a number of houses that have water in properties, in their yards and around their houses,” he said.<\/p>\n
He warned it was likely floodwaters would not significantly recede until early next week.<\/p>\n
![\"Brown](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/db659cd19c2320964902972a6df98d42.jpeg\")
<\/p>\n
Riverside walkways and barbecue areas in Rockhampton are underwater. (ABC Capricornia: Katrina Beavan)<\/p>\n
Bureau of Meteorology forecasting shows the river may remain above 7m until overnight Friday into Saturday.<\/p>\n
Sitting at 7.18m on Thursday afternoon, the river was not expected to go higher than 7.3m, keeping it firmly in minor flood territory.<\/p>\n
State Emergency Service central region manager Andrew Wyatt said there were 60 volunteers on stand-by ready for clean-up.<\/p>\n
“We’ve been watching this now for several days, waiting for the peak to arrive, we’re well positioned, well prepared,” he said.<\/p>\n
“The lower parts of the town and the surrounding areas, we’ve seen some inundation of properties, but not to the degree that it would have been [if it was] 8m or more.<\/p>\n
“With the revised flood height, we’re not looking at too heavy a clean-up.”<\/p>\n
![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/b83aa9d47fea1485ce3227dbed3bf58b.jpeg\")
<\/p>\n
Rockhampton mayor Tony Williams speaking to media on Thursday afternoon.\u00a0 (ABC News: Russel Talbot)<\/p>\n
Waiting to assess damage<\/p>\n
Some low-lying sporting fields had been inundated, including Rockhampton’s touch football fields.<\/p>\n
Rockhampton Touch Football president Gary Benbow said this was the organisation’s seventh flood, and it would put this year’s competitions “back a few months”.<\/p>\n
“We probably don’t really know how much damage it’s done until we get down there and reassess everything and just wait for the water to drop,” Mr Benbow said.<\/p>\n
He said it wasn’t clear if water had breached the clubhouse, but the group had already organised for some players to train at various school grounds and parks.<\/p>\n
“We’ve got over 20 representative Rockhampton junior teams looking for fields to train on for the Junior State Cup in July,” he said.<\/p>\n
“That’s a bit of a battle at the moment, trying to get locations for everybody.”<\/p>\n
![\"Aerial](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/4144c33d4a66dbc6ab4756d1c7737fd8.jpeg\")
<\/p>\n
The swollen Fitzroy River in the Rockhampton suburb of Port Curtis on Wednesday afternoon.\u00a0 (Supplied: Facebook, Archer Aerials.\u00a0)<\/p>\n
While the city waited for the water to recede, Mr Wyatt said the message to stay out of floodwaters was still key.<\/p>\n
“We’ve had reports of trees and mattresses and snakes and all sorts of debris coming down the river,” Mr Wyatt said.<\/p>\n
![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/1769070373_260_b48c90c4522de3ac70e1424cdc027128.jpeg\")
<\/p>\n
The city’s touch football fields, which sit on the north side of the river bank, were inundated this week.\u00a0 (Supplied: Neil Richardson)<\/p>\n
Residents have also been warned that the river is home to many crocodiles.<\/p>\n
The state government’s crocodile sightings dashboard showed three reports of crocodile sightings in the Rockhampton area since Monday.<\/p>\n
The dashboard, run by the Department of the Environment, Tourism, Science and Innovation, had labelled each sighting with an ‘under investigation’ status.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Rockhampton has escaped moderate flooding with the city’s Fitzroy River now predicted to stay at a minor flood…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":429557,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[64,63,61838,149687,52165,11630,75,218149,70979,17331,35216,18630,701,10589,128,33608,224099,1192],"class_list":["post-429556","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-bom","tag-bureau-of-meterology","tag-central-queensland","tag-crocodile","tag-environment","tag-ex-tropical-cyclone-koji","tag-fitzroy","tag-fitzroy-river","tag-flood","tag-flooding","tag-queensland","tag-rockhampton","tag-science","tag-ses","tag-state-emergency-services","tag-weather"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/429556","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=429556"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/429556\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/429557"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=429556"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=429556"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=429556"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}