This page keeps the historic address /2022-logan-floods-to-exceed-2017-floods/ from the earlier Park Ridge News site. It is an archival briefing, not a live warning and not a reprint of 2022 eyewitness copy.
If a river is rising today, leave this article. Open the Bureau of Meteorology, QLD Traffic, Logan City Council’s disaster channels, and call 000 if life is at risk. The official road message remains: if it is flooded, forget it.
What the 2022 headline was asking
The old slug asked a comparison question that residents still type: were the 2022 Logan floods bigger than 2017? The Bureau of Meteorology’s Logan and Albert River notes answer it without colour. Flooding along the Logan River in February–March 2022 was the most significant since January 1974, and peaks along the lower Logan were above those observed during ex-Tropical Cyclone Debbie in March 2017. The Albert River also flooded in 2022, but those peaks sat below 2017.
That split — Logan above 2017, Albert below — is the sentence metro briefs often skip. It is why a Greenbank or Park Ridge resident cannot treat “Logan floods” as a single water level.
The numbered record
BOM publishes a table of notable events at forecast locations. At Waterford the Logan River peaked at about 11.15 metres in February/March 2022. The major-flood classification there is 9 metres. In March 2017 the same station peaked at 10.50 metres. In January 1974 the tabulated height is 12.95 metres (with a footnote in the BOM series). In January 1887 Waterford sits at 13.70 metres and Maclean Bridge at 22.30 metres — still the top row.
Maclean Bridge in 2022 peaked at 20.67 metres, almost identical to 2017’s 20.66 metres, both below 1974’s 21.22 metres and well below 1887. Numbers like that are why this newsroom will not say “the worst in living memory” unless an agency has already said it, and even then we will quote the agency.
Special Climate Statement 76, covering extreme rainfall in south-eastern Queensland and eastern New South Wales, records multi-day totals that broke records and produced major riverine flooding in the Brisbane, Logan and Albert catchments among others. The Queensland Reconstruction Authority lists “South East Queensland Rainfall and Flooding, 22 February – 5 April 2022” as an activation that includes Logan City Council.
What council counted
The BOM catchment brochure records Logan City Council’s damage assessment for the event: 197 properties damaged, including 35 residential properties and one commercial property experiencing severe damage. Scenic Rim Regional Council recorded 15 damaged properties, including two residential properties severely damaged. Transport routes were significantly affected. Schools closed. Those counts are a civic record, not a photo essay.
This briefing will not reconstruct street-by-street water marks from old social posts. Individual properties flood for reasons a news site cannot see from a CMS archive: slab height, creek backups, blocked culverts, the difference between riverine and overland flow. Residents who need a current flood overlay should use Logan City Council’s published mapping and the Queensland flood information that sits behind it.
How Park Ridge News files a flood
The weather and emergencies hub is the live method. This page is the 2022 bookmark. Together they should tell a search engine — and a neighbour — the same thing:
- Warnings and heights come from BOM.
- Roads come from QLD Traffic and, for council roads, from Logan City Council’s reported channels (the old site quoted 3412 3412 for council roads and 13 19 40 for state roads; treat those numbers as historic until you confirm them on the current agency page).
- Recovery funding and activations come from the Queensland Reconstruction Authority.
- Household planning sits on Get Ready Queensland.
- Quotes from unnamed residents are not a substitute for any of the above.
The earlier article included community photographs and interviews. We are not relicensing those images or restaging those interviews. If you are looking for how neighbours actually organise once the peak has passed, read how Logan West communities organise in floods. If you want the nineteenth-century benchmark that still sits above 2022 at Waterford, read 1887 — the great flood.
Related local geography
Park Ridge’s ridge can be dry while Chambers Flat, Logan Reserve, Waterford and Eagleby are not. People who live in Park Ridge, Greenbank or the Logan West corridor still cross those floodplains for work and school. That is why a Park Ridge paper keeps a river file.
SEQWater and drinking-water notices sometimes accompany major floods. Any conservation request belongs to the utility’s current statement, not to a 2022 paragraph frozen in place.
This URL will stay. The body will be updated if BOM revises the historic table or if QRA publishes a clearer local recovery summary. It will not be updated with invented drama.