Ipswich avoids severe flooding by inches as more rain forecast for Queensland and NSW in wake of Cyclone Alfred | Tropical Cyclone Alfred

Authorities are warning more rain is expected to hit battered parts of Queensland and northern New South Wales on Tuesday, as ex-Tropical Cyclone Alfred causes flooding in inland communities west of Brisbane.

The city of Ipswich narrowly avoided severe flooding overnight, after the Bremer River peaked mere centimetres below the “major” flood level.

Parts of the Ipswich CBD and some suburbs had been inundated, and residents had been nervously watching the river height in the early hours of Tuesday. It peaked at 11.49m, just below the 11.7m major flood level.

The town of Laidley was inundated on Monday and the flood siren at Grantham – a legacy of the 2011 flooding that swallowed the town – was sounded, warning residents to leave.

Major flood warnings were in place for the Bremer River and Warrill Creek, and the Logan River south of Brisbane.

Generally the severity of rainfall brought by ex-Tropical Cyclone Alfred was expected to ease on Tuesday, but flood warnings remained due to the lingering threat of isolated heavy rain.

In Brisbane, flash flooding occurred in city creeks early on Monday, after the city recorded 275.2mm in the 24 hours to 9am, the largest single-day rainfall since the city’s 1974 floods.

Flooding occurred in similar places to the 2022 flood, but the creeks subsided through Monday morning and the impacts were ultimately not as severe as 2022.

Brisbane resident Hayden Edwards thought he’d escaped the worst of ex-Tropical Cyclone Alfred until he woke up on Monday with rubbish and bins floating around his inundated property.

“It just came up so quick,” Edwards said. “Looked out the window, and all you can see is water.”

The Oxley renter knows some of his appliances have been lost but must wait for water to subside before he can find out the full extent of the damage and start the big cleanup.

“We’re just happy that we’re safe and we’re at least we’ve still got power,” he said as a duck swam past. “The ducks are having a good time, so at least they’re happy.”

A record 450,000 people in Queensland’s south-east have been affected by power outages since Thursday last week, which energy company Energex says is the state’s greatest outage cause by a natural disaster.

More than 350 public schools were set to reopen on Tuesday but hundreds more remain shut.

The area was slowly returning to a sense of normality, with supermarkets, airports and select Brisbane bus services operating again while the Warrego Highway connecting Brisbane to Toowoomba was closed until further notice.

South of the border, residents have returned home as evacuation orders were lifted in some northern NSW towns.

The NSW premier, Chris Minns, warned evacuation centres for 700 people must shut once warnings were lifted as they were not meant to be a long-term fix

Some 1,800 people were isolated by flood waters in NSW on Monday and more than 10,000 people were under emergency warnings.