Fluffy, to answer your question: the water that formed the flash flooding in Toowoomba in both East and West Creeks merged a little north of the CBD into a bottleneck at Gowrie Creek and then flowed northwest,not toward Grantham and the east.The flooding that devastated Withcott ,Helidon and Grantham fell on the eastern edge of the escarpment between the Range road and further along to the north eg Prince Henry Drive,Mt Kynock and all the way out past Carbalah and as far as Mt Perserverance and Ravensbourne.I knew that area well years ago and it is very sparsely populated,mostly bushland and the simple reality is that there probably was no one in the area to warn those towns and it went unnoticed. There used to be a road called Seventeen Mile road that ran from Ravensbourne National Park down to the back of Helidon,I remember driving down it in heavy rain in 1985 and it was a hell of a drive and no way to turn back once we had started and the flooding we experienced that evening scared the hell out of me. When I grew up in Toowoomba the area to the south between the two creeks called Middle Ridge was market gardens and bushland(all the way from Rowbotham St to West St),these days it is housing estates,lots of bitumen,concrete ,roofs and gutters and not much ground for water to soak away .That I believe contributed enormously to the flooding
