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The Guardian - AU
The Guardian - AU
National
Susan Chenery

How the floods turned Murwillumbah into a shell-shocked island struggling for ‘basic survival’

Murwillumbah
A woman surrounded by flood damaged furniture piled up in the front yard
It took years for Murwillumbah to recover from the 2017 flood. This one was worse. Photograph: Jay Penfold/The Guardian

When I looked out my window in the early hours of Monday morning and saw my neighbour wading through water I was entering an alternative reality. The kind of parallel universe you might not come back from.

“There is a storm about to arrive,” said the man in the IGA, “unlike anything we have seen so far”. And we had been seeing storms most days since last September.

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