Hundreds of Charleville residents in flood-ravaged south west Queensland have been evacuated from their homes with the town's levee still at risk of collapse.
Police and emergency workers went door to door in the early hours of Saturday morning, instructing residents to move to a temporary centre at the town's racecourse.
Mayor Mark O'Brien says it was a precautionary evacuation and there is renewed hope that the levee will hold after a second emergency bank was thrown up overnight.
"We were confident we had everything under control, but a leak began in the temporary levee and the engineers lost confidence that they could guarantee it," Mr O'Brien told the ABC.
"We made the decision as early as we could to get people out of the way just in case it breached."
Mr O'Brien said if the levee broke with the Warrego River banked up behind it, the town would be engulfed by a wall of water.
"Council staff have basically built another levee behind that through the night...it looks very substantial and looks like it will provide safety for us.
"The river has risen through the night to about 100 or 200mm below the top of the levee banks ... and we're not absolutely confident we've reached the peak yet."
Mr O'Brien says so far there has been no damage to homes and no water has flowed into the town.
"So far the levee bank has held the whole lot of it out so the place is high and dry - we've just got an enormous body of water going down the river, but if this thing passes quickly people can just go straight back to the way they were before."
Premier Anna Bligh will visit Charleville on Saturday.
Meanwhile, there are grave fears for a woman who was swept away during a rapid water rescue in Roma on Friday.
A child was rescued from a stranded car but the woman disappeared.
A search for her resumed at first light on Saturday.
In Mitchell, where 75 per cent of the town was under water, 300 of the community's 750 residents were flown out of an evacuation centre on Friday after it became isolated.
However, some are being allowed to return briefly to their homes on Saturday to collect clothing.
Roma's 13,000 residents were told to move to higher ground as the Bungil Creek crept beyond the March 2010 flood level of 8.1 metres on Friday, but the water started to drop on Saturday morning.
However, flood levels are expected to ease only slowly over the weekend.
The Insurance Council of Australia has declared a catastrophe for flood-affected parts of southwest Queensland.
A spokesman said an insurance industry taskforce would work with local authorities to help process claims.
