As one-in-one-hundred-year floodwaters in the north of Western Australia recede, the full extent of the damage and its physical and emotional impacts on northern industries are being laid bare.
Record floods swept through the Kimberley in January, leaving a trail of destruction.
The region's main freight route, the Great Northern Highway, has been severely damaged, tens of thousands of cattle are believed to have been lost, and the only local export-accredited abattoir has temporarily closed.
Kimberley Pilbara Cattlemen's Association chairman Jak Andrews said recovery would take years, and the scale of the water made it difficult to determine how many cattle had drowned.
"A lot of the country we just cannot access at the moment due to it still being really wet from the flood or it's still raining because we're still in the middle of the wet season," he said.
"Pastoralists won't have a really solid understanding or be able to quantify their numbers until they've completed their first round of mustering later in the year."
The ferocious floods have also prompted fears about lost herd genetics, potentially washing away decades of work in just days.
"It's like for anybody if you've bought a house and you've built it up over 30 years of paying it off and you've put everything into that house and it's suddenly not there tomorrow," he said.
No down time after long season
The wet season is usually an opportunity for pastoralists to take annual leave and rest before the start of mustering, but those impacted by the floods are working overtime to repair the damage.
With labour shortages a profound and ongoing challenge, and only small wet season crews on the ground, many operations are working on skeleton staff.
"I do have concerns about [mental health] especially this year because people have just come out of a long season," Mr Andrews said.
"Instead of getting that break, people have actually had to ramp up their energy levels, to a whole new level again."
There are also concerns about the flow-on impacts for businesses that rely on the cattle industry.
The only local export-accredited abattoir in the region, Kimberley Meat Company (KMC), has shut temporarily, and put its 92 staff on standby, because cattle can't be trucked to the facility.
KMC chief executive Michael Rapattoni said operations were stopped abruptly and a recovery plan was underway to determine when operations could recommence.
"We had 3,500 head of cattle around us that we've had to let out of the yards because of the storms and the wet," he said.
"To ensure their animal welfare and health and safety, they were better and had more chance of survival in the paddocks, so we've let them go out of the yards and it's just too wet to try and muster those cattle."
About 80 per cent of the cattle processed at the facility come from the East Kimberley, with numbers made up of livestock that don't make the grade for live export ships.
"There's contracted cattle physically from the east side of the Fitzroy and traditionally at this time of year we source from the Northern Territory as well," he said.
"But those roads are completely cut off so all our forward contracts through January, February and March have all been displaced at this point."
The next closest abattoirs are thousands of kilometres away in Perth and over the border in the Northern Territory.
"We're very keen to get this infrastructure up and running and offer that solution back to pastoralists," he said.
Freight company flat out
Freight companies are also making plans for the immediate future.
Stuart Kempton, who operates out of Derby about two hours north of Broome, has been working around the clock moving fuel and food from barges to service stations and communities cut off by the floods.
Mr Kempton also carts hay from the Pilbara and West Kimberley to the East, but with the sole bridge linking the regions at Fitzroy Crossing destroyed, he's worried what that could mean for cattle producers when the live export season resumes.
"They're going to be able to travel anywhere from this side of the Fitzroy Bridge back to Broome, and I guess that will happen as normal," he said.
"But for people on the eastern side of Fitzroy, if their cattle are ready and the season dries out quickly, it wouldn't become an animal welfare issue or anything like that quickly, but they can only hold stock for so long if they wanted to ship out of Broome.
"It means they may be forced to going back to Wyndham on a small basis or Darwin resulting in increased costs for them."
Authorities are working hard to repair roads and a single-lane gravel track linking Derby and Broome has now reopened.
But the Fitzroy River Bridge, which connects the East to the West, could take years to repair.
Mr Kempton said any rebuilding works should consider future flooding events.
He is pleased with the amount of progress made so far, but sees the recovery effort as an opportunity to rebuild bigger and better.
"Look I think it's a massive opportunity for some … big picture actions, let's look ahead to the next hundred years, there needs to be some large amounts of money spent," Mr Kempton said.
"State and federal governments really need to take this one seriously — it's highway number one, it's a major arterial route around Australia.
"Everyone says it's a one-in-one-hundred-year flood, but with what we've been seeing around the country over a number of years, we don't know that it couldn't all happen again."
Hope 'everything' in place by muster
WA Agriculture and Small Business Minister Jackie Jarvis said the government was throwing everything it had into fixing routes as quickly as possible.
"We certainly hope that everything will be in place by mustering that has been my primary concern, and I've actually let my colleagues know that and we've been working on this basically since the emergency was declared," she said.
But in such remote territory, authorities would have their work cut out for them.
"It is remote, it is difficult, we are working as fast as we can and look this is our government's priority is to actually get these transport routes up and running as soon as possible and then to work with the industry to help it recover."
Mr Andrews said the road to recovery would be long.
"There's a lot of energy around this now, there's a lot of goodwill around this now, but that is going to need to continue for months and years to come because we can't just put a lot of effort in now and then stop because it is going to be such a massive undertaking," he said.
"We'll come out the other side of this, because that's what pastoralists do, they'll get behind each other and they'll back each other, that's really an important aspect of it, but we're certainly going to want some help along the way."
