A man who lost most of his family in the deadly 2011 Grantham floods insists he was hidden away from media afterward because his earlier pleas to evacuate the small Queensland town were ignored.

Rural firefighter Danny McGuire told the Grantham Floods Commission of Inquiry on Friday he spent the two days leading up to the most devastating flood on January 10 rescuing people and towing cars that had become stuck in floodwaters.

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It prompted him to ask Group Officer Stuart Damrow whether mandatory evacuations should be enforced.

“He came back over the radio: `No, it’s only a voluntary evacuation. Stand down, we’re only rurals, we don’t know what we’re on about’,” he said.

A day later he had lost his wife and two of his three children to the floods.

Mr McGuire said he was then taken to stay in a Toowoomba hotel room, without a phone, for six weeks and unable to tell his extended family what had happened to him.

“To this day I still don’t know who paid the hotel bill – I was the only one in the whole Grantham area that actually got put up in a motel and hidden away,” he said.

When Commissioner Walter Sofronoff QC suggested he might have been put in the hotel for his own mental wellbeing, Mr McGuire replied: “They were trying to stop me from talking to media because on the Saturday and Sunday night (before Monday’s flood), I actually asked for Grantham to be evacuated”.

Just before the flooding was at its worst, Mr McGuire, his wife Llync Clarke-Gibson and children Garry, Jocelyn and Zac tried to escape in his fire truck but it became stuck in the quickly-rising water.

After the truck was hit by a large wave and the cabin started to fill with water, Mr McGuire and Zac were able to get out to safety.

He found out the next day that Llync, 32, Garry, 12, and Jocelyn, six, were all found dead, still in the vehicle.

Mr McGuire said he suffered post-traumatic stress disorder in the aftermath and his surviving son Zac was also still recovering.

Another resident, Martin Warburton, spoke of being haunted by not being able to help people being swept away in the raging torrent as sat on his service station’s roof.

Mr Warburton choked back tears when recalling how he reached out to help someone he thought was struggling in the torrent, only to find out they were already dead.

“And that’s when I realised that if you’re in the water, you’re already gone,” he said.