Time to read : 4 Minutes
I Stood Witness To Three Lismore Floods And I Am Not Going Anywhere
This year has been dominated by floods.
It seems that every other week there is another community that is decimated by another wall of water.
Their devastation has been complete, taking with them people's homes, jobs and in the worst cases, their lives.
The cost has been enormous too.
💰 The Insurance Council of Australia says there have been 197,000 claims so far, with a price tag of $3.35bn.
🌧️ By the end of March, Southern Queensland and Northern NSW had coped more than a whole year's worth of rain.
😭 Almost 1,000 Lismore residents are still without homes today.
Elise Derwin is an award-winning photographer based in Lismore and this is her powerful story.
During the early hours of Monday 28th February, an unprecedented weather event was taking place over the east coast of Australia.
As the deluge pelted down on Lismore in northern NSW, pleas for rescues started streaming in on social media.
Friends were trapped on their roofs in rising flood waters. Families with young children, pregnant women, the elderly, those with their beloved animals and pets, all risking their lives by climbing onto their roofs in the dark, freezing cold rain to sit and wait for help.
The official advice received by many was to climb into the roof cavity to seek refuge.
As the water level continued to rapidly rise, a terrifying reality began to emerge. In complete darkness, trapped occupants were forced to cut escape holes out of their roof with whatever tools or blunt objects they could find.
No one came to help
Emergency calls to the SES and 000 were going unanswered.
For those who did manage to make contact, the response was stark. Simply, no rescues would be conducted until daylight resumed.
This left only brave local residents with their tinnies and jet skis to start the dangerous task themselves in the dark.
By first light the scale of devastation became clear – the river had swallowed the entire Lismore basin. Homes and businesses that were previously not considered to be in the flood zone had water to their ceilings.
The town was gone
This flood was two metres higher than any flood on record.
In previous floods, what was ankle deep water was now water over your head and that was in a second storey. How did the BOM (Bureau of Meteorology) get it so wrong?
Nobody could prepare. Businesses in the town centre followed their flood plans and moved their stock to their mezzanine levels only to lose it all.
Boats streamed down Ballina Road which was now a river.
Rescue after rescue of people in shock. People who had just lost everything. Beloved pets left behind. Others refusing to leave them behind and hauling 40kgs dogs onto their roof.
The uncertainty of how many lives were lost.
I have never felt so helpless
At nearly eight months pregnant all I could do was document the devastation unfolding so the rest of the country could witness what my hometown was going through.
As I stood on the main road leading into Lismore photographing boat after boat drop off residents, I kept thinking, where is the Army? Where are the blankets, shelter, water, and transport to take people to the evacuation centre?
Elderly men and women from an aged care residence, still in their nightgowns were being lifted out of rescue boats by abattoir workers that were volunteering because they couldn’t get to work that day.
There was nowhere for the fragile bodies to rest except for the cold, hard bitumen in the rain and hope someone would be there to pick them up soon.
The journalist I was with was frantically running around to nearby houses gathering blankets for them.
I was shocked, where was the disaster plan? How can we live in a flood town and be so underprepared?
The aftermath was worse
In the week that followed as the waters receded and the clean up began, thousands of homes in Lismore were deemed uninhabitable or condemned.
Almost an entire town in ruins, displaced with nowhere to go.
Very few people had flood insurance here. The town of Lismore was gone. No chemists, no shops, no mechanics, no cafes, no petrol, no doctors, no McDonalds, no parks, no churches, no food, no water. Nowhere for people to live.
And still no Army or emergency response from the Government.
Friends who had just bought their first home on the flood fringe had water to the ceiling. They had just finished renovating. They also lost their business in the CBD. So had no home, no income.
Everything was covered in thick, stinking mud
Flood mud is contaminated with raw sewage, chemicals from surrounding farms, oil, asbestos fragments and the smell is overwhelming.
Residents were left with no choice but to throw their entire belongings onto the footpath and allow their homes to be gutted so they could dry and prevent the rapid growth of mould and remove the sewage that had seeped into the bones of their houses.
One elderly resident in Coraki was forced to wait weeks after the flood until her insurance company made an assessment before her family could remove the moulding gyprock.
But the locals couldn't afford to wait, they had already lost everything and the structure of their homes was sometimes all they had left.
What I want the world to know is...
We need insurance companies to act faster.
We need prefabricated emergency housing that can be ready to roll out as soon as it is needed and not leave people still displaced eight months later.
Rent assistance is great but we really need houses to rent.
Government assistance is only helpful when you have a phone, computer and ID – not when you finally do manage to make a claim, which is declined because someone has already made a fraudulent claim using your address.
The Government announced a 10 million dollar flood mitigation plan that could take 10 years and still may not solve the problem.
First Nations need to be brought into the discussions about how to be more prepared and restore the river system.
The buy-back scheme is not a real fix
The government has invested 800 million dollars into a buy back scheme.
While this is great, the people of Lismore and other flood affected towns in the Northern Rivers want to know what this means for them.
Will they be able to relocate their homes?
While they wait, they live in homes with no walls and in a state of limbo to avoid spending what little money they have on a home that may be bulldozed.
We need homes to be built with materials that are flood proof.
We need affordable housing so if a home is bought back by the Government, people can afford to buy another home.
There is a reason why people live on a flood plain.
Prices have skyrocketed in the region making it unattainable to own your own home unless it’s on a flood plain.
Today as I write this
Lismore is still a shell of a town, eight months and two more floods later.
The heart still beats but she’s a tired old town.
You can walk around the main block downtown and about one in five shops have come back while the rest stand stripped and dormant waiting for the next flood or for long enough for people to want to move back in. Australia, please don't forget about us.
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