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”.
Dominique Sorrenson had about 4% battery left on her phone when she put a Facebook post up to let people know she was at her house. A water surge had come through her home and cut off her electricity. “I had my elderly father who had health conditions, the next morning a boat rocked up and picked us up because of my Facebook friends,” she says.
Coraki was marooned for five days by flood water and residents were forced to fend for themselves without help or supplies. The army broke through on Sunday. People’s legs are cut and bruised from being in contaminated water full of sharp objects. There is a risk of mosquito borne diseases. Electricity has started coming back on in some houses, but the internet is still sporadic. People are living on the streets, under tarpaulins, disoriented, despairing, running on adrenaline.
“Everyone,” says volunteer Sharsha Witthahn, “is tired and broken”.
The outlying communities are still in the rescue phase. On Thursday private boats were being loaded and launched with provisions and medical supplies for those still out there. For the first time paramedics were on board, after volunteers had become concerned about mental health issues. Volunteer Miriam Meyers says the paramedics were “administering tetanus shots, antibiotics for infections gotten from moving machinery and metal debris, dressing wounds”.
“People are presenting with chemical burns because of leaking diesel,” she says.
Kate Coxall, a reporter with the Lismore App, a former volunteer firefighter and a trained support facilitator, had thought she might be “overzealous” when she evacuated her daughter and dog from her house at nearby Bungawalbin to her neighbours on Sunday 27 February. “I just felt something was wrong, I moved my landlord’s cows that day from thigh-deep water to the top paddocks,” she says.
Returning to her house the next day, she says: “I was absolutely shocked.” She waded through 1.5-metre-deep water to rescue her chickens.
On the way back to her neighbour’s house Coxall says she saw a family of five carrying an outboard motor and a boat trying to get to Coraki, nearly 20km away. Some of them were shoeless, one had a big gash on his head. “We begged them, ‘please stay with us, it’s not safe,’ the waters at this point were raging,” she says. “They didn’t listen, and then an hour later we saw an urgent message for emergency services because they had chained themselves in the tinny to a tree.” Coxall spent several hours frantically trying to get help for them before hearing they had been rescued.
At her neighbour’s house, the water kept rising. Coxall had left a flashing torch on a fence post, deck lights on and had been waving at passing choppers but they were missed in the cloud cover.
They were there for two days with a ladder up against the roof, her neighbour starting to get sepsis in her foot. “There is nothing worse than feeling like you have been left and forgotten and accounted for as collateral damage,” Coxall says.
When the ADF chopper finally came she had to leave her dog behind. “She tried to follow us, I will never forget her face.”
From the moment she landed in Lismore Coxall was trying to get her dog and other people’s pets rescued. “Gathering GPS coordinates, addresses, numbers of people, numbers of animals and all that sort of thing,” she says. “Organising choppers and going out on boats myself. For us, it is day 14 and we’re still doing rescues.”
A few days after her own rescue, her dog was brought out by a private chopper helping in the area. And Coxall, who has lost everything, remains indefatigable in helping the community still out there.
“The water is only dropping half a meter each day and … we’ve only lost 5 metres of height,” Coxall says. “If there is more rain they could be out there for another two weeks easily.
“Most [locals] have no vehicles left. One of them had a severe back injury, he couldn’t move, he’s there by himself with five dogs. It took us two days to get medication to him.
“We’ve got people with cuts, we’re worried about septicaemia and people self-treating with whatever they can get from neighbours. I’m worried about people’s mental and physical health. I’m seriously worried about anyone who may have a time sensitive injury, there are so many brown snakes out there.”
Most of the properties are on 100-acre blocks run by tough and stoic people. “They will say other people are worse off than us and they are in a really shit situation,” volunteer Meyers says. “There are people on remote properties who are not on social media, they don’t have the resources to ask for help. If you are not on Instagram no one is going to turn up to help.”
Coxall agrees: “Yesterday we suddenly found out that there was a family under tarps with nothing. It is not even as though we have accounted for everybody yet. And that is what is terrifying. We think there are at least 50 people out there.”
Some people are choosing not to leave their properties because they have horses and cattle to look after. “They don’t know where they would even go,” Meyers says.
“At this point it is about welfare. They are in ankle-deep water, none of them are taking care of themselves. They are all troopers, reclusive, they don’t want the fuss. But I can tell you for sure, they are very happy when they see you on the boat.”
