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.
It wasn’t a malignant storm, full of malicious wind of the kind that tore a chunk off my roof in December. It was quite polite really, but insistent, there was just so much water coming down. And still it kept coming and coming. For all its lack of ferocity this storm would cause the biggest flood in local recorded history.
By mid-morning my street was a river, and the town of Murwillumbah was underwater. Sitting in the wide flat Tweed Valley in northern New South Wales, surrounded by mountain ranges, it is a spectacularly pretty place. Through the town runs the usually benign, sometimes glassily still Tweed River. But on Sunday night the river was rising and surging.
Mark Hamilton-Browne opened his front door at midnight only to find “the whole street was about three foot deep and it was flowing over the bonnet and windscreen of my car. Two hours earlier there was nothing there.” He managed to attract the attention of an SES boat. Getting to the boat, he says, “I was up to my stomach, almost up to my chest”. Wet and shocked, he was taken to the evacuation centre at the Tafe. “There were probably 300 people there and 30 or more dogs. And some dogs barked all night. People were wired on adrenaline, anxiety, fear and stress and everyone was talking really loud. It was just a cacophony of upset people. I didn’t sleep at all.” In the days to follow more than 600 people would be brought to the evacuation centre at nearly Kingscliff. “Hearing the stories is just tragic,” says the federal member for Richmond, Justine Elliot.
Through the night came the distress calls: 30 dogs, three cats and two goats at the pound in rising water (rescued by boat), 44 patients with no running water in aged care, disabled person with a dog and a cat in Charles Street, helicopter needed for four adults and four children, families trapped all along Tweed Valley Way, a pregnant woman trapped in a ceiling. On and on it went. Locals in boats and on jetskis helping them to safety.
During the night Hamilton-Browne’s house was completely destroyed. Water smashed through the front windows and took the door off. The force of the water moved the furniture and tipped over the fridge. Books turned to mush. He has lost everything. In the days that followed, “the reality of it sunk in, the shock turned into despair and grief. I am pretty distraught.”
It is the same story in street after street, house after house, as people return to ruined homes that were above the flood line and had never flooded before.
For kilometres along Tweed Valley Way there is utter devastation. Heading into the nearby town of Condong it is apocalyptic in the mud. A disaster on a massive scale.
Murwillumbah is still scarred from the 2017 flood that was supposed to be an unprecedented once-in-a-century event. It would, people believed, never happen again in their lifetime.
In that flood the heavy rain that followed Cyclone Debbie had turned the river into a tsunami. “We heard a roar, a weird noise that sounded like traffic. It just got louder and louder and a wall of water hit our house” said Trace Henderson at the time. She ended up with “trees in our lounge room, other people’s belongings, cushions, a microwave. A couch in the garden, pallets of wood.” At least 300 people were left displaced, homeless. It took years to recover.
This week’s storm was worse. “It was much faster and much higher,” says local councillor Meredith Dennis, “and it is not draining away as fast as it normally would. There is just all this stinking mud. The damage to the infrastructure this time is so much worse – whole bridges have completely gone. There are lots of landslides and road damage that won’t be fixed for months and months.”
From Monday on, Murwillumbah has been an island. All roads in and out are flooded and closed. No supply trucks can come in. When Optus and the NBN tower go down we enter a kind of twilight zone, isolated, in another world that seems to be moving in slow motion, unable to communicate. Anxiety peaks for those with homes and families out in the hills that they can’t reach, a need to access disaster grants in order to eat. Like so many, Angela James, a disability carer looking after her patients in town, doesn’t know what has happened to her husband, son or elderly parents in the village of Pumpenbil, just that they will be flooded in. Says mayor Chris Cherry: “We still don’t know the extent of the damage in villages and isolated places that you just can’t get to.” Those who have lost everything for a second time are, she says, “just broken”.
All five petrol stations have gone under. I am rationing the small amount I have and just walking everywhere in the rain. The things that concerned me last week seem ridiculously redundant now. Now it is basic survival.
As shell-shocked people wander around town carrying backpacks with all they have left, their homes gone, living out of suitcases in their cars, with nowhere to go, shops and restaurant owners grimly sweep out their destroyed premises, throwing everything into the street. Sewage has backed up in the gelato shop, there is a stench of rotten fish from the Japanese restaurant, mould and mud are taking hold. In the arts centre, which has been under waist-high water for days, paintings by Arna Baartz are sitting in a skip, the irreplaceable work of other artists lumped into the middle of the room.
A tree and landslide has swept through the palliative care op-shop. Now everything is out in the street being given away to those who have lost everything. Elaine who works there broke her wrist during evacuation but can’t get to Tweed hospital to get it set. The painkillers are not working.
When the NBN went, so did card payments, now it is cash only. All the ATMs went under except one where there are long queues. The only food shop left operating is a small IGA, which is rapidly running out of supplies. It is starting to feel like a subtropical Soviet Russia – queuing for an hour and a half for a loaf of bread only to find there is none left. By Wednesday, the shelves are nearly bare.
“If I can’t have bread or milk,” says a woman in the Imperial pub, “I might as well have wine.”
In Australia we take so many things for granted. When it resumes raining there is the realisation that if the waters don’t recede and the roads don’t open, and supply trucks come through, we could run out of food. The water treatment plant is still not up and running, it’s boiled and bottled water now.
There is exhaustion borne of lack of sleep, of not knowing where to start when they go back to houses without water or electricity. Sifting through all the precious things that they worked so hard to get to see what can be salvaged. Trying to find the energy to start again from nothing. Flood insurance is beyond the financial reach of most people. There are piles of belongings that are debris now along nearly every road. Some people have lost their business in town as well as their homes.
It will take months for the full scale of this disaster to unfold, to understand how many people have been displaced, how many homes destroyed. On Friday afternoon, the military was due to be deployed to assist.
Elliott says: “We need to get provisions to people, food, water, shelter. And in the long term we need a lot of financial support for the recovery. It is going to have a huge long-term impact.”
It feels like something has changed and shifted. When we return to normal that it won’t be the same again.
The country community of Murwillumbah pulled together magnificently in 2017. And they are doing it again; donating food, clothes, forming groups to clean houses, volunteering. The offers of help just keeping coming and coming. Because what remains in this shattered community when so much is lost, is love.
