For the second time in just four years, Michele Bennett has lost pretty much everything.
The 50-year-old returned home on Friday to find most of her belongings destroyed after a record-breaking flood engulfed her house in Croki, a tiny community north of Taree, earlier in the week.
“All the beds are gone,” she says. “I opened the fridge to get a can of soft drink out and there was two foot of water in the veggie crisper.
“It’s [still] two inches of water right through the house. The washing machine – everything’s pretty well gone.”
Bennett and her partner, Mario Agus, sheltered with their 96-year-old neighbour, whose house is on higher ground, as a coastal trough inundated the New South Wales mid-north coast and Hunter regions.
Five people have died. Another 50,000 are isolated. In Taree, the Manning River rose to an unprecedented 6.5 metres, surpassing the previous record set in 1929 by half a metre.
By Friday, the rain had cleared and locals were taking stock of the damage. In central Taree, people wheeled shopping trolleys full of debris down Pulteney Street, dragged soaked mattresses out of buildings and filled skip bins with mountains of rubbish.
Croki, right on the Manning River between Taree and the coast, was also badly affected.
Many residents, still recovering from serious flooding in 2021, couldn’t afford rising premiums and were uninsured for flood damage this time around, Bennett says. She and Agus are among them; faced with a $30,000 premium, they had to opt out.
“We’ll just have to start saving and buying the essentials as we need them [and] just sort of start again, basically,” Bennett says.
“Everyone in the community has been a bit flat … but at the same time, you’ve got to look at the good in life. We are all safe, we are dry, and we all have each other.
“This morning, there was a beautiful rainbow. I’m not sure if Mother Nature was playing tricks with us or not, but it was fantastic.”
‘It’s destruction and debris everywhere’
Bennett says the NSW State Emergency Service (SES) volunteers have been “really good”. One dropped off a gas bottle for someone who was out, another came round with a Webster pack for her elderly neighbour.
Out on the flood plain, Ian Crisp said he and his nephew were trying to help feed 250 head of cattle on a “massive” dairy farm that had been “just destroyed”. Some farmers were forced to leave their cows behind to drown.
“It’s dead cattle and destruction and debris everywhere,” Crisp says. “Like, high water’s high water, but what it does to people’s livelihoods is the devastating part of it.”
Crisp, an oyster farmer, and another oyster farming family from the area rescued dozens of people and their pets earlier in the week. In terrible weather, they steered their oyster punts down the submerged streets using Google Maps to work out where the roads would have been.
“We rescued some older people who were just absolutely in shock. They had no idea where they were going to go and what was going to happen to them,” Crisp says. “We were helping these people get in boats and with their dogs and their medication and an overnight bag and all that sort of stuff.”
Crisp is critical of the SES, the volunteer organisation which is the lead agency in responding to floods. The other oyster farmers rescued many people from Dumaresq Island including a family of six that was stranded.
He claims SES volunteers on the ground told the oyster farmers they weren’t allowed to put the family of six in their boat until they “got permission from command”. The SES strongly disputes this claim.
“The NSW SES does not require flood rescue crews to seek approval … before allowing community members into boats,” a spokesperson for the agency says. “In a lot of cases, members responding to incidents have encountered others needing rescue along the way and have picked them up.”
The floods have reignited long-running tensions between the SES and the firefighters union, who have pushed for Fire and Rescue NSW (FRNSW) to take over as the lead agency for all disaster responses.
“For years we have campaigned for the lead combat agency for large-scale emergency events of this nature to be allocated only to professional agencies with trained operators ready to respond,” the Fire Brigade Employees Union wrote in a Facebook post on Thursday.
In the same post, the FBEU claimed its members were being “left to sit on their hands while SES members struggle to turn out with adequate crewing”. The FBEU declined to comment further when contacted by Guardian Australia. FRNSW also declined to comment.
One Taree resident, Val Schaefer, believes some of the response could have been better coordinated. Her partner, who is a retained firefighter with FRNSW, had to assist in evacuating aged-care residents from the Bushland Care units with rubber rafts at 3am on Wednesday.
“They talk about pre-deploying assets? We couldn’t get our heads around why they didn’t pre-evacuate the aged-care residents,” she says.
‘Professional outfit doing extraordinary job’
A NSW SES spokesperson said it commenced a coordinated response on 14 May and has been working closely alongside all partner agencies, including FRNSW, since then. They rejected any suggestion that the SES could not cope with the number of calls.
“At no time during this recent flooding event has the NSW SES exceeded its capacity … for call taking,” they said. “The NSW SES has answered over 12,000 calls since the start of this event, with the average speed of answer being sixty-two seconds.”
The SES says it has more than 11,400 volunteers and the number is growing. “Since the beginning of this flooding event, the NSW SES and partner agencies have responded to nearly 7,000 incidents, including over 700 flood rescues,” a spokesperson said.
The emergency services minister, Jihad Dib, says “there are always things that can be improved” and reflected upon, but he had confidence in the SES remaining the lead agency for this kind of disaster.
“This is a professional outfit that is doing an extraordinary job,” he told Guardian Australia. “It’s a longstanding and known fact that the FBEU would think paid firefighters should be replacing volunteers.
“They think they could do what the volunteers could do, and I don’t know that the capacity is there.”
Dib said the government had invested “quite heavily” in flood rescue capability and worked hard to improve the way different emergency services coordinate their responses to disasters, following the catastrophic northern rivers floods of 2022.
“I want a situation where all of our emergency services respect one another. I’m seeing it on the ground,” he says. “In the worst of times we see the best of people. I’m seeing that.”
Schaefer says seeing her beloved Taree underwater made her “just want to cry”. People have been cooking meals for one another and offering each other hay and rescuing cows that have washed up on the beach, she says.
“There’s so much kindness in our community, she says. “But they’re also sad.”
