When construction on the new Windsor Bridge began last year, the designers included lines of blue brick through its pillars to mark the historic floods along this part of the Hawkesbury River.
On the weekend, Zac Brookes and his family watched from the third-floor verandah of their home overlooking the river as the lines disappeared one by one. Soon the bridge was gone too, and with it went any sense that this was just another run-of-the-mill case of the Hawkesbury breaking its banks.
“Usually the floods are kind of exciting,” Brookes, 26, told the Guardian on Monday. “This stopped being exciting pretty quickly. It became, like, OK, this is pretty serious.”
Zac’s mother, Suzan, woke in the early hours of Sunday with the same realisation, and the family quickly got to work clearing the stone basement of the 200-year-old home.
While the road outside their house was unusually busy with people “sticky-beaking”, the Brookes family got to work evacuating their chickens and moving their possessions to higher ground.
By Monday lunchtime, the water in the basement was almost up to their ankles, and the usually well-tended garden had become a makeshift swimming pool. They were grateful that an earlier prediction that the water could reach up to 15 metres had been downgraded.
“It was a bit of a panic yesterday when we thought it was going even higher, but we think we’ll be OK now,” Zac said. “Still, it’s not great.”
The residents of Windsor, where the family lives, and the surrounding towns on the north-western fringe of Sydney, are no strangers to floods. As the markers on the new bridge show, the Hawkesbury and Nepean rivers have often broken their banks over the years, but as development through that area has increased in recent years, much of it on a floodplain, stories of homes being inundated have become more common.
On Monday, the Guardian watched as two men rowed a dinghy out of a home in a new development block in Pitt Town, close to Windsor. One of the men used a shovel as an oar. In the background, an advertising sign reading “final release now selling” was only partially visible above the water.
The man with the shovel was Shane Hughes. The house belonged to his mother, who was in hospital after a recent surgery. Hughes had been visiting each day to feed her dog. When he came on Sunday he was still able to get in. By Monday, he had to row.
“I got here and just thought ‘shit’,” he said. “There used to be a road there.”
Experts say it’s unusual to see so many places with such high rainfall across such a wide area.
The extreme rainfall came after three weather systems combined, and fell on already saturated ground due to a wetter-than-average summer, thanks in part to the La Nina weather pattern.
A warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture - about 7% for each degree of warming - so there's more available to fall as rain. If you do the maths, Australia has warmed by 1.4C, accounting for roughly 5-10% of the rain.
But climate scientists say it's not that simple because of the many different factors that influence rainfall. Climate change could also be making weather patterns that deliver downpours more frequent, but again, more research is needed.
He and a friend rowed Buddy out, then went back for his mother’s things, and two cartons of beer. “She’s really upset, honestly,” he said. “I just hope it doesn’t go too much higher than this.”
He may not be so lucky. Late on Monday afternoon, the NSW state emergency service issued a major flood warning for the Colo River as well as an evacuation warning for Rickabys Creek, both of which flow into the Hawkesbury. The Bureau of Meteorology has warned that between 40-80mm of rain could still fall on Tuesday.
The unrelenting deluge that has fallen across the state during the past week has even the most hardened locals concerned. At a park in Windsor on Monday a group of volunteers worked filling sandbags as a line of nervous residents snaked down the road.
One of them, Alistair Dent, a Windsor local, said the men – who were mostly members of a local church – had worked in shifts throughout the night on Sunday and into Monday morning handing out some 150 tonnes of sand.
Dent recently bought a block of land in nearby Pitt Town, which was “now under about a metre of water”. He remained in a cheery mood but said many in the town were becoming nervous.
One of them, Rachel Holland, spent Sunday preparing her house, in south Windsor, before returning for more supplies after she woke to find the water lapping at the back of her property. She and her husband plan to retire to Queensland next year, and she was worried about what any damage to the house would mean for their plans.
“Basically if it happens we’re fucked,” she said.
By Monday afternoon, another Pitt Town resident, Aaron Schwartz, had seen enough. After watching his stables and shed disappear under the growing deluge, he made the decision to get out before it was too late. As he spoke to the Guardian, the water had risen to the edge of his property, and was still rising. He didn’t know where he would be sleeping on Monday, but it didn’t seem to matter.
“Somewhere far away from here,” he said.
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