Three weeks after the most devastating flood in its history, parts of Lismore still look like a ghost town.
There is no power, the shops are boarded up, hundreds of homes are empty and the stench of decay is thick in the air.
According to Resilience NSW, more than 2,600 homes in the Local Government Area were significantly damaged and more than 2,000 are considered uninhabitable.
It was the town's second major flood in five years and scenes of desperate people being rescued from rooftops were beamed across the world.
Four people died.
No option but to stay
The catastrophic event has many pondering if, how and when the town can rebuild.
North Lismore couple Will Nissen and Nikki Fitzsimons, who lost almost everything they own, say they will clean up and start again.
"There's really no other option though," Ms Fitzsimons said.
"We know coming back to the house there's a chance everything is just going to get flooded again.
"Maybe we just live a really minimalistic, Zen life?"
Realistic real estate?
Those who do decide to sell up and move may struggle to find somewhere in their budget.
In the notoriously overheated North Coast property market, areas like North and South Lismore were known as being relatively affordable.
Lismore real estate agent Clint McCarthy said it was difficult to gauge what sort of impact such a devastating natural disaster would have on property prices.
"Realistically we've been speaking to a lot of finance brokers, valuers, and we are in a little bit of an unknown," he said.
"It's still going to have to be that entry-level market.
Flood insurance is a luxury few living and working on the floodplain can afford, with premiums running to tens of thousands of dollars a year.
The Federal Member for Page, Kevin Hogan, said there was now a precedent for the Commonwealth to underwrite insurance in high-risk areas.
"We passed legislation very recently for Far North Queensland, and it was done as a pilot," he said.
"It's there now — it's a vehicle we can use and we have to look at that as well.
Could the town be moved?
Lismore Mayor Steve Krieg said the idea of moving people from flood-affected areas to higher ground had also been floated in the wake of the natural disaster.
"Obviously we've talked about it, as a council you'd be negligent not to," he said.
"If there are houses that are condemned and no longer viable to be lived in, then yeah, we do have to make some hard decisions.
"Obviously there are higher grounds around Lismore, but many of them are not affordable to the people that live down here in the CBD or around North and South Lismore.
"We might be able to offer a buyback scheme a lot like they did in Grantham after the Lockyer Valley floods in 2011.
There have also been calls to raise the levee that was built in 2005 at a cost of $21 million.
It was overtopped for the first time in 2017, when the Wilsons River reached almost 11.6m.
This year's flood was almost 3m higher.
Vanessa Ekins, a former mayor and former chair of the Lismore Floodplain Management Committee, said it was impossible to protect the city from an event of that magnitude.
Deep impacts
The federal government has promised $10m to fund flood modelling for the Northern Rivers region.
Richard Trevan, from Our Future Northern Rivers, said the scale of the problem was far too big to be left in the hands of local government.
He said the city had always been the service hub of the region, housing facilities such as the Lismore Base Hospital and the Southern Cross University.
"The impact is going to be felt regionally," Mr Trevan said.
It is not a problem that is going to go away.
Ed Bennett, the State Emergency Service flood intelligence officer for the Lismore City unit, has identified a worrying trend.
"I calculated that the 2017 flood was the one-in-35 year flood," he said.
