At 11pm on Sunday, February 27, Kym Strow knew something was very wrong.
That afternoon, Kym and her wife Sarah Jones had started to worry a flood might come through — the rain had been hammering the town for a while now. They decided to shut their popular Lismore cafe Flock early — much to the annoyance of their customers — and move their equipment up to their mezzanine. Most customers were telling them to chill out, it wouldn’t flood badly, just chill out. But having lived through the horrendous 2017 event, Kym was anxious.
Three o’clock came, and they locked up the cafe. “The 2017 flood came to my chest height,” Kym tells me, sitting on a verandah in a leafy house in Brunswick Heads, where they’ve been staying in temporary accommodation. “So we lifted everything as much above that. We’d done the best we can. There’s nothing else we can do. Everything else was upstairs. That’s fine. And then we went to our house and essentially just started doing the same thing.”
They moved all their belongings up to the top of their cupboards — some 13 feet high — while neighbours told them they were being over the top. Even in the ’74 flood, they were told, these houses hadn’t flooded, they were above the line. Chill out, chill out. They settled in for the night, had a shower, and tried to relax. Then the SES text messages started to come through, warning the levee would breach. After a while, the messages started to come in capital letters. At 11pm, they started to hear a gurgling sound. It was their toilet, the floodwaters had arrived.
They tried convincing their elderly neighbour Bruce to get out, to no avail. He was stubbornly insisting that the water had never reached that height before, they’d be fine. By that stage, the water was pouring down the hill at the back of their house, the rain was still coming down fiercely, it was pitch black. They looked along the road and saw the water spurting up out of the gutters.
They piled into the car with their three dogs and tried to find a way up to higher ground. They were trying to get to Ballina Road, which would lead them up to the eastern suburb of Goonellabah. The water was rising at a horrifying rate. “We’re at this intersection and the water was at our tyres,” Kym recalls. “By the time we’re at the next intersection it was hitting our car door. It just came in, that’s how fast it was. Incredible.”
The rain was coming down at such speed the car’s windscreen wipers were almost useless. The two continued to drive, barely seeing the road — there were flashing lights everywhere. “I said to Sarah, ‘If we don’t get out, we’re going to die’. We were gonna be hit…it was just so heavy.”
They eventually parked on the side of the road up on top of a hill and sat there through the night. Messages were coming in from their staff and customers, stuck on their roofs, unable to get through to the SES or 000, begging them to call for help. Down below them, in the dark, residents found boats and went through the town pulling people from roofs and out their windows — some were stuck in their roof cavities, the water rising around them.
“If we don’t get out, we’re going to die.”
When dawn eventually broke, Sarah and Kym went to some Goonellabah shops to find water and a toilet. They called a friend in Lismore Heights, and when he answered, Kym burst into tears. “I’d just lost it,” she says. “A lot of the people — our customers and people we loved a lot — were still being rescued from houses and yeah, it was all a lot.”
Unable to get anywhere near their house or the cafe, they stayed at their friend’s house until Wednesday. All-day Monday they were trying to call their neighbour Bruce. “I felt so sick ‘cos he is 80 years or old, so white and Aussie and so stubborn. I just didn’t want him dead in his house.”
They finally got through to Bruce — he’d been pulled out of his kitchen window by someone in a canoe in the middle of the night. He burst into tears, Kym says, and told us our house was fucked.
Unprecedented, But Not Unpredicted
Four people reportedly died that night in Lismore — elderly residents in their 70s and 80s, unable to escape the rising waters. The floodwaters broke the levee and reached 14.4 metres, over two metres above the previous records. The devastation was almost too incredible to behold — thousands of homes destroyed, the CBD inundated and decimated, pets and livestock washed away in the chaos. It was a complete catastrophe, the likes of which the Northern Rivers had never seen before.
Lismore Labor MP Janelle Saffin had been dramatically rescued in the middle of the night, swimming through the floodwaters and holding onto a tyre that was wedged under a tree; she could hear screaming from nearby houses where people were trapped. Her electorate officer rescued them, and their elderly neighbours, in an inflatable canoe.
A month after the first flood — and just over a week after the second major flood hit the town — I find Saffin walking through the doors of Southern Cross University in Goonellabah. A colleague and I had been wandering, lost, in the bowels of the university trying to find the MP’s makeshift office (her own office in the CBD was destroyed in the flood). Thankfully, just before we’d almost given up hope, she appears right in front of us, finishing up a phone call.
She’s warm and friendly, asking questions about our work and my former school, Trinity Catholic College Lismore, which she visited many times over the years while I was a student. We sit in a small office and she tells us about the “blur” of the flood’s immediate aftermath.
“I think like a lot of people shocked with not just the height and the speed of the flood, but the damage,” she says. “I just went into… ‘Okay, what do I do here? I’ve gotta do a lot of things because this is pretty bad and I’ve got to try and help as many people as I can’. So I just sort of went into that mode of gotta keep working…we just sat in the car to keep the phones charged, with the engine running.”
She picked up some thongs and a pair of pants from the evacuation centre — “I’m little, so it was hard to get little things” — as she hadn’t had either for a couple of days. “We didn’t have anything,” she says, before pausing slightly. “I can’t get beyond thinking of all those people in attics and roofs and families with their pets — they’re family too. And people with disabilities. To me, that was the worst part.”
The flood was unprecedented, she says, but not — crucially — unpredicted. “There’s a difference,” she says, “After the 2017 flood people were told there could be bigger floods — some even as high as 16 metres, we were told by reliable authorities.”
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But the town was clearly not prepared, and the speed and ferocity of the storm caught everyone off-guard. On the night of the flood, Saffin and her colleague were putting the call out for boats to help with rescues — posting in Facebook groups, knocking on doors. Curiously, Saffin says, a call for boats was initially put out by the SES, but was then rescinded.
“The SES, they’re wonderful,” she says. “But they were overwhelmed totally with the minimal resources that they have. And then there’s a question of preparedness, you know, could you ever prepare for it? What can be done to prepare?”
Her voice hardens when she turns to discuss Resilience NSW — previously known as the Office of Emergency Management.
“One of its key functions is preparedness, and I didn’t see any preparedness,” she says. “Maybe I’m not seeing what they see. I certainly didn’t see it on the ground…we’ve been through this so many bloody times and it’s gotta be fixed this time. I don’t mean perfection. We just need to know if a big, catastrophic event like that is coming.
“So who’s doing that? How will it work? What do we do? We’re told, you know, go up into the roof, go into the attic — but what if you can’t get out of the attic?”
What Is The Way Forward?
In the aftermath of the first flood, Sam Daley, an occupational therapist from Yamba who’d found herself spearheading the relief effort in Woodburn, was working in the donation shed when an elderly woman wandered in, looking lost.
Sam asked her whether she could get her anything, and after a pause, the woman asked for some mascara. Then she burst into tears.
The woman was rescued from the top floor of her house in the midst of the chaos of the first flood, as Sam tells us, sitting on the riverbank in Woodburn. The helicopter was circling overhead, as the woman desperately tried to get her 93-year-old mother into the harness. Her mother wouldn’t leave, she explained, because she couldn’t bring her two dogs with her. In the end, the woman and her son forced her mother into the harness. They watched, swinging from the helicopter, as their two dogs floated down the river on a mattress.
She just wanted some makeup to feel a little normal, Sam says, after she’d lost everything.
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“I honestly don’t think a lot of them will be okay,” Sam says. “There are already significant mental health issues, and there will be more, and there’ll be chronic respiratory issues [due to mould]. I think on a community level, they’ll be lucky to survive at all… just traumatised people, this is going to take years.”
People tremble at the sight of clouds, at the forecasts of rain. The week we were there, everyone was convinced a third flood event was coming, that 200ml of rain would fall. Jesse Smith tells us he’s caring for school kids that are afraid of water. The second flood event brought an almighty storm, he says, that sat ominously over the town for 12 hours. My mother, working in a relief centre in Woodburn, tells me of people starting to tremble when clouds float overhead.
There’s no telling how long the psychological recovery will take, and the physical rebuild is shaping up to be equally as difficult. Last week, NSW premier Dominic Perrottet launched the Northern Rivers Reconstruction Corporation, a single authority that will guide the reconstruction of the area. According to The Sydney Morning Herald, compulsory land acquisition and subdivision, and fast-tracking of proposals through the Department of Planning and Environment will be part of its remit.
It’s something Saffin had repeatedly called in the aftermath of the floods; she spoke about it at length during our interview, which took place a couple of weeks before the official authority was announced.
“It speaks to the difficult conversations we’re gonna have to have, or we are having. Do we rebuild on that bit? How do we make that flood-resistant? How do we look at flood mitigation?” she says. “The reconstruction commission would be able to do all that in a structured way with the community. And the community could engage knowing it’s not just an endless mindless conversation — that it’s going somewhere.”
She points to the rebuild following catastrophic flooding in Grantham, Queensland in 2011, and to similar situations in New Jersey following Hurricane Ida. Grantham, in particular, could serve as a precedent for the future of Lismore. Following the 2011 Queensland floods, in which over 20 people died, parts of the community were shifted to higher ground, using a process of land swaps.
“If you had a small block, you could swap it for a small block. If you had a large block you could swap it for a large block. It was all done by a ballot system,” Grantham Mayor Tanya Milligan told The Guardian recently. “So people would clear their block and give that block to the council.”
Land swaps bring their own problems, with those that cannot afford to relocate being potentially left behind. In Grantham, those without insurance or the funds to build a new home remained in the flood zone. Government buy-backs are also an option, but there’s the issue of whether the amount people would receive for a house on a floodplain would be enough to allow them to buy elsewhere — housing affordability was a crisis in the Northern Rivers before the floods.
It’s a conversation Saffin, and everyone in Lismore, knows they have to have. Some people flatly don’t want to consider it, she says, but most people are willing to talk about it.
“What we ultimately do will come down to community will, sentiment, and government backing. But we have to have those conversations and people wanna have them,” she says. “I’m happy to have those conversations in my own community, because as hard as they are…they need to be done with loving kindness because that’s what it has to be.”
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The Anger
We arrive in Lismore early on a Tuesday morning. It’s an incredibly bright, sunny day; there’s a burning unblemished blue sky as far as we can see. We drive around Lismore slowly, passing my old school, and my friends’ old houses. The smell has mostly dissipated, but the dirt and mud remain; SES and police tape hang from doorways. A strange stillness and quiet hangs over the town.
It’s a week into the clean-up after the second flood, and the scars are everywhere. Roads in south Lismore are torn up, some are impassable, piles of tossed out possessions line the pavements. We pass cars in stormwater drains, couches sitting in the middle of sports fields. Hulking army trucks roll by, a crane on Zadoc Street dumps debris into a pile that’s already a storey high. My colleague and I stand in silence outside my high school, looking up at the muddied water line metres and metres and metres above our heads. A lone security guard and a dog walk around the grounds.
Trinity, my old school, was practically razed to the ground in the floods — the students are now divided between two makeshift campuses: the university, and the other Catholic school in the area, Woodlawn.
Jesse Smith, the newly installed principal, is polite and clipped when we talk in the ice-cold air-conditioned offices at the university, but there’s a hardness lying under the surface. During my school years, I could count on one hand the number of times I heard a teacher express an opinion that wasn’t strictly party lines — but here, Smith’s pain and anger is visible. He’s getting calls from the education department asking him to sign the school up for NAPLAN, he tells us incredulously, when he’s trying to rebuild an entire school with traumatised kids. They just don’t get it, he says.
We encounter the same thousand-yard stare with everyone we speak to in town. It’s coupled with an unrestrained sense of abandonment and anger — at the federal government, the ADF, the SES, the media who immediately flocked in and left. The nation’s eye was on Lismore but for a brief moment, and then it moved on, following the circus of the federal election. In its wake, a community desperately tries to find a way through.
Emergency officials have responded to the outrage in the community, with Emergency Services Minister Steph Cooke telling a budget estimates hearing that everyone was doing their “absolute best”.
“All of our emergency services agencies have worked around the clock for months and months to keep our communities safe and protected at this time,” she said. “Everyone is doing their absolute best. There is absolutely no doubt that our communities have been very deeply impacted.
“I understand that there is anger and frustration in communities. But… I’m not here to point fingers at our emergency services.”
The ADF, in particular, was lambasted by the community for appearing to use the tragedy as a photo-op — footage went viral of the troops filming themselves while cleaning up a front yard. The anger spilled over, leading to verbal confrontations and one soldier allegedly being spat on.
The state and federal governments have been at loggerheads over who dropped the ball in regards to the ADF response to the floods. The NSW government reportedly made a number of requests — including on the day before the first flood — to the Commonwealth for assistance, but there seemed to be significant confusion and miscommunication about the number of troops ready to be deployed.
“They put this nice soft barrier around it. Bullshit. It’s total bullshit. That’s not the scenario.”
Kym says the anger at the SES is understandable, but misplaced (“they’re all fucking volunteers for Christ’s sake”). She reserves her anger for others up the chain, at the void of leadership. “Everyone had the opportunity to step into a place of leadership and be like, you are not alone,” Kym says. “Just say ‘we are here to help’. That’s all people needed and they wouldn’t be anywhere near as angry.”
Saffin agrees. “I’ve said to the leaders, ‘these are uncertain times, but you have to communicate certainty’,” she says pointedly.
“And that doesn’t mean you have to have all the answers. It doesn’t mean you have to know everything. You just have to communicate your intentions, your thinking. ‘We are with you’, all of that. I said that to the premier yesterday and I said it to leader of the opposition — you have to let people know, ‘we’ve got your back’. People get that.”
Positive stories in the media of the community pulling together in the face of adversity also rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. “It almost downplays it, do you know what I mean?” says Kym. “Instead of just sitting in the bad news or the bad support they go, ‘oh, but what about this?’ They put this nice soft barrier around it. Bullshit. It’s total bullshit. That’s not the scenario.
“There’s no denying that the community’s incredible — the community has always been incredible — but that doesn’t take away from the fact that this is one huge balls up by people that are in charge and it should have been better.”
Photo Credit: Dan Peled/Getty Images
On the way out of Lismore one day, we spy a few flags in windows and hanging from fences in front yards, emblazoned with the cartoonish red heart that’s long been a symbol of the town. ‘Fuck The Flood’ is scrawled as graffiti on the side of a house.
When we ask them what they want people to understand, we’re met with varying responses. “Think about who you’re bloody voting for” was one, along with “donate or actually get up here and volunteer”.
In small variations, they all say the same thing: Don’t forget about us.
Jules LeFevre is the editor of Junkee, and grew up in the Northern Rivers. She is on Twitter.
Photo Credit: Saeed Khan/Getty Images