The first thing that hits you is the smell – the reek of overflowing sewage, rotting animal corpses in the river, decaying vegetable matter, toxic waste, all the things the flood brought up. It gets into your skin that smell. Under a low grey sky in bacterial heat, the town of Coraki is a wasteland, a dystopian nightmare. In the air above us, helicopters drag bales of hay across the brown inland sea that surrounds the town.
Piled high outside almost every house, are belongings encased in sludge and mud, the entire lives of the occupants. No one has escaped this disaster. People are still very raw. Coraki is where the Richmond and Wilson rivers meet and the area felt the full brunt of both flooded rivers. On Monday 28 February firefighter Shane Cox was wading around in the water helping people, when he says it “went up another 2 metres”.
