Letter from Lismore
There’s nothing like a war and a flood to ease pretend problems like exaggerated viral outbreaks off the front pages. Suddenly Australians have heard of Lismore and Kyiv. (With apologies to Jerry Seinfeld, it will always be Kiev to me). Covid? What is that? The endlessly newsworthy, tedious virus was shoved back into its box this week, and placed in its proper perspective.
This was my first experience of a Lismore flood. Just about every street in town has telegraph poles with markers showing where the 1974 floods reached. These indicators provide intel – or so everyone thought – on all sorts of things, like where to buy and not buy houses, and where it is safe to leave cars during floods. People moved their cars to “safe” higher ground on Sunday night. Into our designated “safe” (1974) street.
I saw a cricket field downtown under water at lunchtime Sunday. Noteworthy but not (I assumed) alarming. It pelted rain all day Sunday and into the night, following days of on-again, off-again downpours. The place was already soaked. But no one seemed overly concerned. To report that no one really saw this coming is both accurate yet (on reflection) unbelievable. Really? This is Lismore, where the town’s name and “floods” do routinely appear in the same sentence.
By dawn on Monday, the floodwaters were, suddenly, creeping relentlessly up our “flood-free” street. Cars were disappearing underwater. Concerning. Near-neighbours’ houses suddenly had water lapping at their doors, then their windows. And the rain still poured down. Without pause. At around noon, the floodwaters paused. Twenty metres from our house. They stopped coming. It was as if the ghost of Barack Obama had appeared, miraculously, and had commanded the waters to recede.
We had worked most of the morning to clear prized books from downstairs, fearing the worst. All the while watching the skies, because we have a drain easement through our backyard that thunders water from up the hill down towards town and into the still momentously rising waters from Wilsons River. Three hours later, we seemed safe, although Wilsons River was still to reach its record-breaking peak. Fully two metres higher than the previous (1954) level. By Tuesday morning, we could see a little more of the street, as submerged cars began to reappear.
The week has seen both heroism and cliches. Disasters always do. The NSW Premier’s “one-in-a-thousand-year flood event” would be a contender for the worst cliche. “Unprecedented”, inevitably, has had a good run. And a ministry of resilience? Of course! But the heroism is anything but cliched, as are the many random acts of kindness. I witnessed but one of the thirty or so pop-up evacuation centres across town. Normally an indoor swimming and recreation centre, up on the hill in suburban, relatively dry and still-powered Goonellebah. The worn-out volunteers here were providing tea and coffee, donated hot meals, showers, links to medical service providers and, in this twenty-first century crisis, the most precious commodity of all – the charging of phones. I met one man who had been rescued by volunteers in the middle of Sunday night. With nothing left. No possessions, bits of his home missing, neighbours deceased. With literally only the clothes on his back. His family are staying with friends. His old dog, who hates water and boats (!) is safe if discombobulated after a stressful rescue.
The blame game was on even as the bodies – likely to be significantly under-reported – were being recovered. The General Manager of Kyogle Shire had a go at Telstra. The freshly minted Mayor of Lismore, unusually a businessman in this green-left-rainbow town, was elected in the spring with an astounding majority and a back-to-basics agenda, had cause to upbraid the State Emergency Services performance in the crisis. Only two boats? In Lismore? Seems like a good question for the NSW Emergency Service Minister. I did hear that unvaccinated SES people were prevented from joining in the rescue operations. Surely a windup by a conspiracy theorist? What is fact is that the Lismore head of the SES was on Facebook telling volunteers to keep away from rescue efforts because the SES people had just completed “months of training”. What if those persistent volunteers hadn’t ignored this corporatist rubbish and had not struggled on? They simply got on with it, through the darkness and terrifying waters. For two days our flooded street resembled a marina with volunteers launching their tinnies, a scene replicated on any number of Lismore streets. I surmise that the death toll would have been immeasurably higher had the SES instructions been heeded. And that would NOT have been good news for the official rescue family and their political masters. Even swept to awful, premature deaths.
The recovery operation had been going for days. I think that city-based media types were, by Friday and prompted by the appearance of dreadful aerial photos of the town, finally beginning to realise that we had our own Kyiv in Australia.
As I say, this is my first flood in Lismore. Everything is new. Seeing the gut-wrenching, piled-up contents of homes and businesses in the streets. The carnage of the CBD, resembling more the after-effects of a tsunami. Such was the sheer force of the gushing torrents. The stench. Yes, there really are dead cows, canoes, palettes of timber, to name but a few disparate items on roofs. One friend had a dead donkey lodged at the back door. The tales of looters on the move – on Sunday night! Downtown businesses with bits of their buildings missing. The ever-present whirring of Black Hawk choppers. The utter black darkness of the nights. The fact that follow-on rains are actually welcomed to help soften the mud for the gurneys to work (if you’re lucky enough to have power to make use of one). The water restrictions. The shortage of earth moving equipment.
Having escaped the waters, I now understand something of survivor’s guilt. We got lucky. We even have the power back, five days on. We are watching television tonight. The submerged have no such relief, or luck. They are still dealing with mud and putrid slush and destroyed dreams. They face an age of pain, so slow are the processes of recovery and insurance claims. And for many, joblessness. No businesses in town to work in any more. No cathedral for local Catholics to pray in, merely floating pews to be seen at the centre of worship. No other churches available either. They are all located in and around the CBD. With the twin secular cathedrals – McDonalds and Bunnings – both hit, respectively, by the absence of stock and by floodwaters, hence closed as well, all hope seemed gone. What a week to take Neighbours off the air.
Where on earth will we get tradesmen to do the work on homes and businesses smashed beyond repair? I know of tradies who have lost all their tools. Their vans. The national shortage of tradesmen is well known, even absent disasters on a scale such as this. The Mayor of Lismore lost his own downtown home and (café) business. Keeping up a brave front, communicating hope and lobbying for help in a focused way must be very, very difficult.
The work done by Essential Energy has been monumental. For it hasn’t just been Lismore crushed by the flood. The catastrophe has hit all the way up and down the North Coast. Roads and bridges have disappeared altogether. Many properties simply cannot be reached. The way of getting there no longer exists. Just ask all the poor anti-vaxxers of Mullumbimby, coping now with a horrendous mudslide after two years of abuse and derision.
Lismore, a major regional city, faces awful prospects in the short-term and likely beyond. The mall – Lismore Square – apparently was not built to cope with a flood that reached to the ceilings of the elevated shopping level above the car park. Bad idea. No Lismore Square for probably at least a year – so Lismore and surrounds will be without two major supermarkets (at least), K-Mart, Big W, a food court – given the destruction of downtown Lismore, there won’t be much retail joy (essential or otherwise) for the people of Lismore for the foreseeable future.
Normally, you would have expected ScoMo to have landed in Lismore by now (Covid or not). But, no. perhaps he was suitably chastised by his less-than-tumultuous welcome in Cobargo during the fires. It might be wise to stay away. After all, he has a real crisis on his hands with the recalcitrant NSW Liberal Party with whom he is in mortal combat. Mercifully, we have in Canberra Senator Bridget McKenzie, no less, in charge of the disaster recovery. Is there a gun club in Lismore needing a grant? Perhaps the good Senator might consider more innovative ideas rather than just the normal grants. Perhaps she could motivate Telstra to get pop-up mobile phone towers in situ. Get generators sourced and distributed. And fuelled. Supply gurneys that are needed to get the festy rubbish out of homes and businesses need power to work. Faster street cleaning to clear the streets. Try harder to get fuel delivered, so the scenes of cars literally following fuel trucks around don’t need to happen. Darwin in 1974, at the time not much bigger than Lismore is now, had its coordinator (Major General Alan Stretton). Maybe one for Lismore and surrounds? We had one for the non-crisis that was Covid! Oh no, Senator Bridget is busying herself with talking to the ABC abut … climate change! (The NSW Premier, who did honour Lismore with a political visit, has created a new ministry. The aforementioned Steph Cooke is now the State’s Minister for Flood Recovery. Should we be grateful?)
The rain still comes down. Storms pass through on a regular basis. 34 degree days beckon, further baking in the mud. The many brave, practical problem-solvers work on through the days and nights.
Governments have spent two years “doing things” when they should have done nothing. Ruining our lives, relentlessly, without cease. Now, when we need a bit of big and smart, coordinating government on the ground, we are wondering, where the hell are they? There lingers the suspicion that there is lacking at the top the remotest sense of practical problem solving in the face of real crises, while those same, cossetted panjandrums forever pontificate about problems that only they perceive. Meantime, the folks on the ground (we-the-people) save lives, man boats, pull pets and old and young alike from rooftops and out of surging waters, provide warm beds, comfort the crushed, find generators, charge phones. All that stuff.
The NSW Premier is “reviewing” the response from Sydney to the plight of those now stranded – still – without homes, businesses, food, fuel, medical supplies, power, the ability to communicate and, for many, hope. As well he might. And the NSW Police Minister might have a quiet word with the copper photographed pointing his speed camera at motorists outside mud-struck Mullumbimby. Not a good look, officer.
Paul Collits
5 March 2022