As beeping trucks and heavy machinery collect flood debris strewn down her street, Eugowra resident Alison Teml surveys the damage to her home.
"All our possessions pretty much have been destroyed," she says.
"It just looks like a bomb's hit the house."
The steel frame is still standing, but she and her husband lost everything that was inside, when a tsunami of flood water barrelled through the town, east of Forbes.
"We got out with just the clothes on our backs really," she says.
"We've had to strip all the gyprock off the walls, stripped of all the floor coverings. There's just mud everywhere."
Two people were killed in the flash flooding, which peaked at an unprecedented level of 11.2m in the centre of town.
Hundreds of people needed rescuing, and many were airlifted from their roofs as the water tore houses from their footings, and gutted homes and businesses.
But like many in her town of 700 people, Alison isn't waiting for a payout to help fix the damage, because she couldn't afford insurance in the first place.
"To insure for flooding would've been an extra $33,000 per annum in premiums. And that's crazy," she says.
"We're covered for bushfire, we're covered for theft, we're covered for everything else. But not storm surge, not flood damage, not storm damage."
Paula Jarzabkowski, a disaster risk finance expert from the University of Queensland School of Business says it's not surprising that people were opting out of insurance in flood-prone regions like Eugowra.
"If you've got a $300,000 house and you have to pay $30,000 in insurance every year, it quickly becomes nonsensical," she tells the ABC News Daily podcast.
But she says insurance companies have little choice but to increase premiums in areas that are at high risk of flooding.
"It's called risk reflective pricing because it reflects the risk you bring," she says.
"It's a terrible thing for those people who want to protect themselves but are unable to do so because the prices make it impossible."
Australia approaching a tipping point
Professor Jarzabkowski believes Australia is approaching a tipping point where climate change, combined with a history of building houses in flood-prone areas, is making insurance unviable for many people.
"We have less natural means for the flood water to run off, [and a] more built environment, exacerbating the flash-ness of the flooding," she says.
"Those houses that were already perhaps a bit prone or not in optimum areas have now become much worse areas."
Professor Jarzabkowski says Australia should follow the lead of other countries like Spain, France and Switzerland in making insurance more sustainable.
Is there a better way?
One approach pursued in these countries is to create a "reinsurance pool", in which all policyholders contribute a small amount to a fund specifically designed to cover natural disasters– also known as a protection gap entity.
The private insurers pass on the risk to the state-owned protection gap entity, which uses the pooled premiums to ensure everyone is covered for their specific disaster.
Similar systems are already being used in New Zealand for earthquake coverage, and through the Flood Re scheme in the UK.
'A certain number of houses in the UK are highly prone to flood because of these legacy assets," Professor Jarzabkowski says.
"They can't afford insurance, so every home owner pays £10 ($18) from their policy.
"It goes to a flood reinsurance pool, and that flood pool then enables the insurer who sells you your premium to sell you your premium at a lower cost, even if you're in a high flood zone.
"Everybody's premiums subsidise your premium."
She adds part of that subsidy could come from the private sector including global reinsurance companies, or it could have a government backstop.
"[Then] we're getting at least some global capital fixing Australian disasters and some of it could be then on a government balance sheet," she says.
"Otherwise it's always on the government balance sheet and [flood victims] just have to rely on government disaster relief funds and charity each time."
In some places, these kinds of solutions are already in motion.
In July 2022, the federal government began a new scheme to improve insurance coverage in northern Australia through the Cyclone Reinsurance Pool.
It allows insurance companies to transfer their risk for cyclones and cyclone-related flood damage and is backed by a $10 billion Government guarantee.
More solutions needed, say insurance experts
New data from the Insurance Council of Australia (ICA) shows that since January 2020, the insurance bill for floods and storms has topped $12.3 billion, with $477 million in insured losses from the most recent October floods in Tasmania, Victoria and NSW.
ICA chief executive Andrew Hall says insurance can only go so far.
"We must not ignore what this data is telling us to do – invest in community-level mitigation, home retrofits, home buybacks in the most extreme cases, and better early warning systems," he said.
"We also need to stop building homes and in harms' way and make new homes stronger."
