Six thousand homes in the Ballina area may have been impacted by flood waters, the State Emergency Service says, as prolonged power and phone outages hamper communications.
Flood waters surged in the northern New South Wales coastal town on Tuesday morning, with water bubbling out of the gutters as the 1.8 metre king tide met the swollen Richmond River.
The SES had received up to 500 calls for help in the area by midday, but the flood response agency said those calls represented a fraction of those who had received help, because prolonged power and phone outages had left many without access to communication services.
The surge at Ballina comes after authorities in Lismore, 40km inland and 12 hours upstream, reported a third death – a male found on Wednesday morning in the CBD. The body of a woman in her 80s was discovered in a South Lismore home on Tuesday afternoon and another woman in her 80s was found dead that morning.
The deaths bring the toll from the NSW flood disaster to four, after another man died on the Central Coast on Friday. In Queensland, nine people have died in the floods.
Residents have begun to return to their homes in Lismore to sort through belongings that are covered in mud. Piles of ruined furniture line the curb as people determine what can be salvaged, and what is lost. Parts of the city remain under water, trapped behind the flood levee. The SES said it would not begin pumping out the trapped water on Wednesday.
The Ballina CBD lost power at 8am on Wednesday. Rural Fire Service spokesman Stephen Kada said emergency services were working with utility companies to reconnect the community.
“The protracted flood peak in the area will continue for a number of hours. We are monitoring it, and when those water levels start receding we will get into more areas,” Kada said. “Right now we are still very much in the response stage.”
Ballina mayor Sharon Cadwallader said communication outages were hampering rescue efforts.
“How can people call for help if they can’t get through?” she said. “We need desperate help, we need helicopters, we need everything thrown at Ballina at the moment.”
Cadwallader said West Ballina was particularly affected by flood water, which had subsided slightly as the tide went out. The next high tide is a 9.30pm.
“The water is starting to go back a bit, but it will certainly turn around and come back the other way,” she said.
“We just don’t know what the water is going to do either, when it does come back. There is still a lot more coming down from the Bungawalbin Basin and the Wilsons River into the Richmond River, it is still coming full force towards us.”
Hundreds rescued by boats in Ballina
There is no flood gauge in Ballina so an accurate picture of the extent of the floods and the damage caused will not be known until the area can be surveyed.
SES spokesperson Adam Jones told Guardian Australia that the number of calls for assistance represented just a fraction of the work done by rescue boats in the area. On most callouts, SES boats were rescuing multiple people from different households so the full extent of the rescues had not been logged. Across the northern rivers region, the SES logged 300 rescues and received 2,202 calls for assistance in the 27 hours to 7am, 202 of which were in Ballina. Another 300-odd calls were received throughout the day.
Thirty evacuation orders and four evacuation warnings remain in place across the northern rivers region.
“Hundreds of thousands of people have been impacted by this event,” the NSW emergency services minister, Stephanie Cooke, told the ABC on Wednesday morning. “It is not over by any stretch of the imagination.”
Cooke said the situation remained “very dangerous”.
The Richmond River peaked at 7.15 metres at Woodburn, four hours upstream from Ballina – almost 2 metres higher than its February 1954 peak of 5.42 metres. All that water is now rushing to Ballina, in what authorities warned could be a one-in-500-year flood.
Flood waters rose in the town at 9pm on Tuesday, in time with the high tide, reaching half a metre higher than they had earlier in the day. The hospital was evacuated at 10pm, with patients moved to a makeshift ward at Xavier Catholic College. A temporary emergency department was also set up.
Many residents are stranded and without communications.
The community Facebook page on Wednesday was awash with requests for people with boats to rescue those stranded.
Jones said the best way for people to help, if their home was out of the flood waters, was to offer a place for friends, family and neighbours to stay.
Upstream at Coraki, a small town at the meeting point of the Wilsons and Richmond rivers, there were reports of significant stock losses. One person reported missing 19 horses from one property. Flood levels at Coraki peaked at 3am and an evacuation order remains in place.
Thousands of vehicles remain stranded on the MI, the main highway between Sydney and Brisbane, which has been cut north and south of Ballina.
Evacuation orders remain in place for Ballina Island, the Ballina town centre and South Ballina, as well as low-lying areas of Lennox Head.
Already 145,000 claims for federal disaster payment
Cooke said it was too early to say how many homes had been lost.
“We are actually training up additional assessors – RFS volunteers and staff … in that aspect because we want to get on to that recovery phase as quickly as we possibly can,” she said. “And they will move in as soon as it is safe to do so.”
The government services minister, Linda Reynolds, said the federal government had received 145,000 claims for the one-off $1,000 disaster recovery payment.
That’s 14 times the number of applications in the 2021 floods, when 10,245 claims were made.
“We’ve already paid 35,000 people money which is over $35m, so we can make the payments very quickly,” Reynolds told ABC radio on Wednesday.
“Given the unprecedented nature of this disaster we’ve already got teams out at evacuation centres in Brisbane, and as it’s safe to do so, that’ll roll out to the 11 evacuation centres [in NSW] today.”
Reynolds said many of those applying do not have all their identification documents but the priority was to get money out. It’s a system Services Australia had been able to perfect, she said, because Australia has been hit by so many disasters.
“People can still apply and get the money straight away, and we’ll worry about the paperwork later.”
