Residents began a long wait Thursday for floodwaters to subside and reveal the extent of devastation to Australia's third-largest city, while upstream soldiers picked their way through the debris of washed-away towns looking for more victims from one of the country's worst natural disasters. 
 
 An unidentified woman uses a hose to pump water out of an office in the city center of Brisbane, Australia, Thursday, Jan. 13, 2011. Floodwaters washing through Australia's third-largest city crested... (Associated Press) 
 
 Local residents walk through floodwater after getting ice and food to take to their flooded residence in the suburb of New Farm in Brisbane, Australia, Thursday, Jan. 13, 2011. Floodwaters washing through... (Associated Press) 
 
 The statue of Queensland's famous former Rugby League star Wally Lewis fitted out with water wings, scuba mask and snorkel is seen outside the Suncorp Stadium in Brisbane Australia, Wednesday Jan. 12,... (Associated Press) 
 
 The remains of a floating restaurant called Drift Cafe is swept down the Brisbane River Wednesday, Jan. 12, 2011, as floodwaters surge through Brisbane, Australia. At least 22 people have died and more... (Associated Press) 
 
 An entire suburb is submerged outside Ipswich, west of Brisbane, Australia, Wednesday, Jan. 12, 2011. Emergency sirens blared across Australia's third-largest city Wednesday as floodwaters that have torn... (Associated Press) 
 
 A rescue helicopter flies over a flooded area in South East Queensland, Wednesday, Jan. 12, 2011. Deadly floodwaters flowed onto the streets in Australia's northeastern state of Queensland since drenching... (Associated Press) 
 
 A farm house destroyed by floodwaters stands in South East Queensland, Wednesday, Jan. 12, 2011. Deadly floodwaters flowed onto the streets in Australia's northeastern state of Queensland since drenching... (Associated Press) 
 
 A street is flooded in the city center of Brisbane, Australia, Thursday, Jan. 13, 2011. Floodwaters washing through Australia's third-largest city crested Thursday just shy of record levels but high... (Associated Press) 
 
 An unidentified woman climbs onto a wall to see the damage in her property after flood water reached the area in New Farm, Brisbane, Australia, Thursday, Jan. 13, 2011. Floodwaters washing through Australia's... (Associated Press) 
 
 A rescue worker, left, talks to an unidentified home owner as he starts cleaning after flood waters reached his home in New Farm, Brisbane, Australia, Thursday, Jan. 13, 2011. Floodwaters washing through... (Associated Press) 
 
 A shoe floats out of the front door of a flooded residence in the suburb of New Farm in Brisbane, Australia, Thursday, Jan. 13, 2011. Floodwaters washing through Australia's third-largest city crested... (Associated Press) 
 
 A resident walks through floodwater to take food to stranded residents in the suburb of New Farm in Brisbane, Australia, Thursday, Jan. 13, 2011. Floodwaters washing through Australia's third-largest... (Associated Press) 
 
 The remains of a floating restaurant called Drift Cafe is swept down the Brisbane River Wednesday, Jan. 12, 2011, as floodwaters surge through Brisbane, Australia. At least 22 people have died and more... (Associated Press) 
 
 A car is wrecked in floodwaters outside the town of Grantham in South East Queensland, Wednesday, Jan. 12, 2011. Deadly floodwaters flowed onto the streets in Australia's northeastern state of Queensland... (Associated Press) 
 
 A police boat looks for survivors on the Brisbane River, Brisbane, Australia, Wednesday, Jan. 12, 2011. Deadly floodwaters that have cut a swath across northeastern Australia flowed onto the streets of... (Associated Press) 
 
 Debris float in front of a car park entrance in the center of Brisbane, Australia, Thursday, Jan. 13, 2011. Floodwaters washing through Australia's third-largest city crested Thursday just shy of record... (Associated Press) 
 
 A local resident talks on the phone inside his flooded home in Hawthorne in Brisbane, Australia, Thursday, Jan. 13, 2011. Floodwaters washing through Australia's third-largest city crested Thursday just... (Associated Press) 
 
 A car wrecks outside the town of Grantham in South East Queensland, Australia, Wednesday, Jan. 12, 2011. The small town was hit by flash flooding causing mass destruction. Deadly floodwaters that have... (Associated Press) 
 
 A vehicle is swept away in floodwaters in South East Queensland, Wednesday, Jan. 12, 2011. Deadly floodwaters flowed onto the streets in Australia's northeastern state of Queensland since drenching rains... (Associated Press) 
 
 A cyclist pedals past the Port Office Hotel in the city center of Brisbane, Australia, Thursday, Jan. 13, 2011. Floodwaters washing through Australia's third-largest city crested Thursday just shy of... (Associated Press) 
 
 The waters left behind tractor-trailers snapped in half, concrete slabs where houses used to be and a car hanging from a tree. 
 
 The slow-motion inundation of Brisbane overnight _ played out live on television before a nation transfixed _ was a critical moment in flooding that has built for weeks as rain fell incessantly across Australia's tropical northeast. 
 
 The emergency is not over, but Brisbane's escape from what forecasters had predicted would be a flood worse than one that laid waste to much of the city 37 years ago triggered relief nationwide. 
 
 The death toll stood at 25, including a 24-year-old man who drowned Thursday when he was sucked into a storm drain as he tried to check on his father's home in a swamped Brisbane neighborhood. Officials said they expect to find more bodies farther upstream as they finally got access to hamlets struck by flash flooding on Monday. 
 
 The deadly floodwaters began to recede Thursday after cresting about three feet (one meter) below the depth of 1974 floods that swept through Brisbane and set a benchmark for disaster. Still, 30,000 homes and business were swamped _ many all the way up to their terra-cotta roof tiles. Skyscrapers stood empty as downtown closed for a for a second day, and thousands remained huddled in evacuation centers or with friends and family on higher ground. 
 
 "Queensland is reeling this morning from the worst natural disaster in our history and possibly in the history of our nation," a visibly shaken state Premier Anna Bligh told reporters. "We've seen three-quarters of our state having experienced the devastation of raging floodwaters and we now face a reconstruction task of postwar proportions." 
 
 The flooding across Queensland has submerged dozens of towns _ some three times _ and left an area the size of Germany and France combined under water. Highways and rail lines have been washed away in the disaster, which is shaping up to be Australia's costliest. Damage estimates were already at $5 billion before the floodwaters swamped Brisbane. 
 
 At least 61 people are still missing, most of them from around Toowoomba, a city west of Brisbane that saw massive flash floods on Monday. Fourteen died in that flood alone, including two whose bodies were found on Thursday. Deputy Police Commissioner Ian Stewart warned that number was likely to rise as search and rescue teams are able to move into more devastated areas. 
 
 "We've got to brace ourselves for more bad news," Stewart said. 
 
 With decent access to the region between Brisbane and Toowoomba for the first time, more than 200 police and soldiers fanned out across the stricken Lockyer Valley in buses, helicopters and amphibious military vehicles on Thursday. 
 
 At Postmans Ridge, about 55 miles (90 kilometers) west of Brisbane, about two dozen soldiers wearing jungle camouflage uniforms and police in dark coveralls picked their way methodically through large trees flattened along a creek banks and a floodplain strewn with debris. Tractor-trailers lay broken in two, boats were crushed and the body of a horse was wedged between a downed tree and the sodden ground. 
 
 Nearby, Barry and Catherine Bull boiled potatoes and cooked rump steak given to them by a neighbor over a gas-fired camp stove set up outside their house, built of brick and one of few left standing around them. All that remains of the neighbor's wood-framed house is the concrete slab. A car was suspended in the sagging branches of a tree. 
 
 They fear the elderly woman across the street is one of the people for whom the soldiers are searching. 
 
 "One of the neighbors went to get her, got her out of the house, but she went back for the dog," Catherine Bull said. "That was the last anyone saw of her. If you'd seen the torrent and the way the water was moving, I think you know the rest." 
 
 Officials told evacuated Brisbane residents it could be days before it was safe to return to inundated neighborhoods, though no bans were in place preventing people from surveying the damage. Some homes would never be habitable again. 
 
 Mayor Campbell Newman said 11,900 homes and 2,500 businesses had been completely inundated, with another 14,700 houses and 2,500 businesses at least partially covered in water. 
 
 Roads were flooded, railway lines were cut and sewage spilled into the floodwaters. People moved about in kayaks, rowboats and even on surfboards. 
 
 Police officers were patrolling Brisbane's flooded streets around the clock. Three men were charged with looting after police said they tried to steal dinghies from the swollen river. 
 
 Despite the devastation, many in Brisbane were thankful the river running through the city had spared them the worst of its fury. 
 
 Lisa Sully, who lives in the nearby suburb of Sherwood, did have some water in her home _ but she still felt lucky on Thursday. 
 
 "I can handle this," she said. "Mentally, I was prepared for worse." 
 
 The death toll has shocked Australians, no strangers to deadly natural disasters such as the wildfires that killed 173 in a single day two years ago. 
 
 Though the full extent of the damage won't be known until the water is gone, even before Brisbane was threatened, Bligh estimated a cleanup and rebuilding to total about $5 billion. 
 
 Add to that, the damage to economy: Queensland's coal industry has virtually shut down, costing millions in deferred exports and sending global prices higher. Vegetables, fruit and sugarcane crops in the rich agricultural region have been wiped out, and prices are due to skyrocket as a result. ||||| Clive Palmer, the billionaire owner of mining company Mineralogy, initially ordered the helicopter to go to the aid of three staff members who were stuck on the roof of his horse stud farm in Kilcoy, 70 miles northwest of Brisbane. 
 
 The remote property was inundated by flash floods and the emergency services had not yet responded to calls for help. 
 
 The group had been unable to escape when a wall of water hit the property and were in danger of being swept away, he said. 
 
 "An extra metre and it would have got them. They were very lucky - they should have got a quicker response," he told the Courier Mail newspaper. "The important lesson is we need fast reaction times and not slow ones." 
 
 Mr Palmer said the group had called the emergency services, but 12 hours later when they had still not arrived, he decided to act. 
 
 "I made the call at four in the morning to get our guys in because we were worried they'd drown," he said. 
 
 On the way back from picking up the employees, the helicopter passed over another 16 people, including several children, stranded on the roof of a local school. 
 
 "They'd been waiting for a day for an evacuation too, so our chopper went back and shuttled them all off," Mr Palmer said. 
 
 By the end of the crisis, the helicopter had saved 60 people, employees said. 
 
 Murray Sullivan, who was plucked from the roof of the horse stud, said he owed his life to Mr Palmer. 
 
 "I will never, ever forget what Clive did for me," he told racing website harnesslink.com. 
 
 "I will definitely be returning to work for him but for now I can't face what is there. The water has subsided but the thought of cleaning up the carcasses of horses I loved so much would be too much for me to take right now." 
 
 Mr Palmer said he had lost around $1.8 million of farm equipment and about 20 horses had drowned in the flash flood. ||||| Web wide crawl with initial seedlist and crawler configuration from March 2011. This uses the new HQ software for distributed crawling by Kenji Nagahashi. 
 
 What’s in the data set: 
 
 
 
 Crawl start date: 09 March, 2011 
 
 Crawl end date: 23 December, 2011 
 
 Number of captures: 2,713,676,341 
 
 Number of unique URLs: 2,273,840,159 
 
 Number of hosts: 29,032,069 
 
 The seed list for this crawl was a list of Alexa’s top 1 million web sites, retrieved close to the crawl start date. We used Heritrix (3.1.1-SNAPSHOT) crawler software and respected robots.txt directives. The scope of the crawl was not limited except for a few manually excluded sites. 
 
 However this was a somewhat experimental crawl for us, as we were using newly minted software to feed URLs to the crawlers, and we know there were some operational issues with it. For example, in many cases we may not have crawled all of the embedded and linked objects in a page since the URLs for these resources were added into queues that quickly grew bigger than the intended size of the crawl (and therefore we never got to them). We also included repeated crawls of some Argentinian government sites, so looking at results by country will be somewhat skewed. 
 
 We have made many changes to how we do these wide crawls since this particular example, but we wanted to make the data available “warts and all” for people to experiment with. We have also done some further analysis of the content. 
 
 If you would like access to this set of crawl data, please contact us at info at archive dot org and let us know who you are and what you’re hoping to do with it. We may not be able to say “yes” to all requests, since we’re just figuring out whether this is a good idea, but everyone will be considered. ||||| McErlean, 
 
 Tyson said he was heartbroken but proud of his son. "I can only imagine what was going on inside to give up his life to save his brother, even though he was petrified of water. He is our little hero."Rice is being hailed as a hero today after he gave up his life for his younger brother Blake, 10, when his family's car got caught in the floodwaters that have so far killed at least 15 people and left 70 others missing.Warrena passerby who tried desperately to save the family when their white Mercedes began to flood Monday, said he was in awe of Jordan's courage but devastated that he could not rescue the boy or his mother. In an emotional interview, McErlean said he and two others who stopped to help the family were using rope to pull 43-year-old Donna Rice and her two sons to safety when Jordan told them to save his brother and mother first.McErlean said the youngster helped rescuers lift Blake out of the flood waters, then begged them to take his mother next as the rushing waters became stronger."Jordan grabbed [Blake] and helped him onto the car. ... Jordan was getting up but he wouldn't go. He couldn't swim. But he helped his mom onto this guy's back ... the current was so strong," McErlean told Australia's 2UE954 Radio , his voice breaking.
– With floodwaters starting to recede, the toll in Australia is at 25 and expected to climb given the dozens of people still missing, reports the AP. As the state's premier put it: "Queensland is reeling this morning from the worst natural disaster in our history and possibly in the history of our nation. We face a reconstruction task of postwar proportions." As the nation assesses the damage, tales of daring rescues and heroism are emerging: In Toowoomba, 13-year-old Jordan Rice is being hailed as a hero for asking rescuers to get his brother to safety first. By the time they returned to the family's submerged car, it was too late to save Jordan and his mother, reports AOL News, which rounds up local coverage. Click for more on Jordan. When a helicopter owned by mining magnate Clive Palmer set out to rescue three employees near Brisbane, it noticed scores of other people trapped on roofs. It went back, again and again, and ended up saving 60 people, reports the Telegraph. A reddit.com photo popular on BuzzFeed shows a man carrying a small kangaroo to safety. Click for image.