As Tone Deaf previously reported, the violent super-storms that hit Queensland’s south-east late last month not only left residents with a clean-up bill estimated to exceed $100 million, but also affected several music industry outlets.
In addition to wreaking havoc on the Brisbane HQ of ticketing retail giant Oztix, one of the city’s most beloved music venues, Crowbar, suffered intense flooding that caused damage to parts of their stage and lighting controls, among other features.
“[It] left us looking like The Valley Pool with a foot of water to get out of the venue,” Crowbar’s venue director, Trad Nathan, told The Music. “We got slight water damage on some of the stage, we lost a TV and the lighting controls, but the PA was fine.”
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The venue is now working on fully recovering from the freak storms, which also hit The Zoo, resulting in four broken windows, and the Brisbane Hi-Fi, which was forced to cancel a performance by New Zealand duo Broods.
“At about 7pm Thursday a whole army of Crowbar staff and supporters turned up from awesome bands like Malakyte, and we managed to get the whole place cleaned and dry over the duration of that night,” said Nathan. “We’re still working on cleaning up our two other levels, the new bar we’re hoping to get open early 2015 and the offices upstairs.”
Venue operators shared CCTV footage of water rushing through both of their entrances last month, describing the incident as “devastating” and the flooding as “severe”, and explaining that they have been forced to close their doors for the night.
Despite the damage, Crowbar’s downstairs band room is now fully functioning and only one performance had to be rescheduled.
While the bar has not opted to launch a Kickstarter or appeal for donations, any funds raised via their merchandise store will go towards cleaning up and repairing damage sustained during the flood. You can head on over to the Crowbar merch store here.
