When Carol Adams went to bed on Sunday night at her home in Shepparton North, she wasn’t sure if she would wake to flood waters breaching the sandbags lining her driveway.
“I didn’t go to sleep until 4am,” she said. “I couldn’t go anywhere, where am I going to go? I’ve got a dog, and four cats, and my brother-in-law out the back.”
The Goulburn River peaked just shy of the predicted 12.2 metres, reaching 12.06 metres on Monday morning. It meant the water was lapping at Adams’ roses, but not her front steps.
Adams has lived in Shepparton for 20 years and said she had never seen flood waters like this. “This is crazy, and a lot of it’s coming in through the drains,” she said.
“Luckily there’s a young mob of kids running around with their cars and trailers bringing [sandbags] out for you … and there are people worse off at the moment.”
Many people had to be rescued from harm’s way overnight, with the State Emergency Service (SES) confirming about 100 rescues in the Shepparton-Goulburn Valley district.
Thousands of homes have been inundated or cut off, but the lower-than-predicted flood peak had spared thousands more.
“That 15cm makes a significant difference to the number of properties either isolated or impacted,” the Victorian SES chief, Tim Wiebusch, said on Monday morning.
“We believe around 4,000 properties are now either isolated or have some levels of inundation. Again, impact assessment will occur over the next week and that is because the Goulburn River will still be at the major flood level for another four to five days.”
Further down the street from Adams, Jennifer Cannon was on her front porch with a cup of tea, enjoying the sunshine and her new waterfront view.
Cannon has lived on the same block of land for almost five decades, and remembers the 1974 floods – the worst in the Goulburn Valley’s recent history.
She was in her 20s at the time, and said there was nothing to do but “sit around and watch the water come up”. “You weren’t as scared then, like with a lot of things,” she said. “All you could find out was on the radio and the TV.”
In 1974 the flood waters breached their house and destroyed the yard. Decades later, it’s been rebuilt on higher ground, as have many houses on the street. “It’s better off now, there’s no water, there’s no nothing,” she said.
Greater Shepparton mayor, Shane Sali’s mind is already turning to recovery. He has barely left the emergency relief centre at the town’s showgrounds since Friday.
“You lose track of what day it is,” he said on Monday morning. “The community has been amazing, though. Since we put in a callout they started filling sandbags. It’s been an overwhelming response.”
Hundreds of volunteers and community groups have poured through the centre in the past four days, shovelling sand until 4am and distributing food and essential supplies to hundreds of evacuees.
Nearly 200,000 sandbags were filled by volunteers alongside the Australian defence force and a rapid response team before the expected major flood peak on Monday.
Sali said there was a sense of relief that the worst-case scenario had not been reached overnight. But with thousands of homes in greater Shepparton affected by flood waters and major roads in and out of town still cut off, the job was far from over.
“It was quite a nervous time last night heading into the early parts of this morning with the expected increase,” Sali said.
“But we were fortunate to wake up with a small amount of positive news … we’re hopeful it starts to recede over the course of the next day or two, when we’ll need community support more than ever.”
