A Cairns councillor has described the terrifying moments he helped a young Victorian woman swim to safety after she drove into a flooded causeway.
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On Saturday, councillor Brett Moller's wife, Beth, had an "inkling of something not right" and walked outside about 7.45pm to see lights in the creek behind their house.
A Victorian woman was travelling to Cairns on the Bruce Highway before she became lost, ending up on a country road among the cane fields.
She hit the water at the flooded Behana Creek causeway and aquaplaned, with her car floating into the current.
The woman, aged in her mid-20s, moved from the front seat to the back seat as the car filled with water and then climbed out a window and onto the roof, and began to cling to a branch, using her mobile phone for light.
The car jammed against a large overhanging tree branch and started to sink.
Cr Moller said the family was watching a Saturday night movie when his wife decided to walk outside, saw the unfolding incident and called for his help.
"We heard a girl screaming," he said.
"[She] was just hanging on and very desperate and panicking."
Cr Moller said he checked no one else was in the car, then sent Beth back to his ute to get a coil of rope and his daughters Eden, 15, and Keelin, 13, to get torches.
"I didn't know how much longer she could hang on," he told Brisbane Times.
"With flood waters rising and the young girl panicking and screaming for me to help, not wanting to wait any longer, I dived into the water to swim out to where she was holding on to the branch.
"My daughters arrived and I told them to keep the torch on us at all times and calmed the girl, telling her to breathe deeply and slowly."
Cr Moller, who wrote about the ordeal on social media, then told the woman and his daughters that they would let go and swim diagonally to the bank, telling the woman to hold onto his arm and not let go.
"We let go into the current, bobbed up and down under the water and found some saplings downstream which we grabbed hold of before my girls running along the bank shone the light for us to work our way until the girl found her feet and my girls helped her out of the floodwaters," he said.
Cr Moller's wife arrived with rope, towels and dry clothes, and comforted the woman, who was upset and emotional until police, firefighters and paramedics arrived.
The woman was taken to Cairns Hospital.
"Before she was taken to hospital we all had a very emotional hug together, thankful we were all safe," Cr Moller said.
"Apart from some severe shock and some cuts and abrasions, she was OK.
"It could have been another tragedy but thankfully it was a good outcome."
The woman flew back to Melbourne with her partner the next morning.
Ex-Tropical Cyclone Penny has dumped more than 110 millimetres of rain on far north Queensland, with the weather bureau warning it could re-intensify into a cyclone in the Coral Sea.
Cr Moller said he was proud of his wife and daughters for working together to help rescue the young woman, and warned people to be vigilant during wet weather in far north Queensland.
