If I could avoid re-living any day in my life, it would probably be this day — February 28 — one year ago.
It's a sentiment no doubt shared by hundreds, if not thousands, of people across the Northern Rivers.
That day, in the early hours, my ABC North Coast colleagues and I rushed into work knowing the flood situation had taken a drastic turn for the worse.
At that point, it was hard to fully grasp how serious the situation was, let alone how bad it would get.
I called my brother, who lives in Lismore and found out he had evacuated and was safe up the hill.
We would later learn the flood water stopped just shy of his ceiling. He lost pretty much everything. That's despite his house being above a one-in-100-year flood level.
I tried calling my mum, who lives in North Lismore — one of the most flood-prone areas — but my call went to voicemail.
Flood level update hard to comprehend
It was my job to do the morning TV crosses to ABC Breakfast and News Channel, so we packed the car and drove through torrential rain to the Lismore City SES base a short drive down the hill.
The flood water was already creeping worryingly close.
As we were setting up, we watched the SES launch two boats into the flood water before a power outage cut the streetlights, throwing us into darkness.
Just minutes before my first cross at 6am, we learnt the forecast flood height had been increased to 14 metres.
That would easily top the disastrous flood I had experienced in 2017, which reached 11.59 metres.
It was hard to comprehend.
Two minutes after the cross, Mum called.
She was alone in her house, trapped and water was starting to rise through the floorboards. Just months earlier she had the house raised to 30 centimetres above the highest flood on record.
At that point, I thought the water still had another 2 metres to rise, which would be over her head.
Calling triple-0 and getting nowhere
I went into the SES base and asked for help.
They told me there was nothing they could do. They were getting hundreds of calls. People were clinging to power poles.
"Tell her to get onto the roof or into the roof cavity," they told me.
I burst into tears.
My colleague bundled me and the sopping wet gear into the car and drove back to the office where I spent the next few hours on the phone to Mum assuring her the SES was coming, knowing full well they weren't, calling triple-0 and getting nowhere.
I was terrified I might not have a mum at the end of the day, terrified of being on the other end of the phone — unable to help — as she slowly drowned in flood water.
The water was up to her knees when a neighbour in a leaky tinny rescued her.
She was taken — with more than a dozen other rescued residents — to a house on higher ground in North Lismore then to a makeshift evacuation centre at Modanville Public School.
It was another two days before the flood receded enough for me to see her.
The next day I came into work early to read the morning radio news bulletins.
I struggled to read as my voice cracked
The first — at 6:30am — was like the hundreds of others I've done over the years. Only harder.
But as I sat in the studio listening to the breakfast program just before the 7:30 bulletin the talk of countless people trapped in roof cavities struck a nerve. An exposed one.
I pictured them lying in the pitch black, cold, with the relentless rain pelting roofs. I imagined the cries for help and the feeling of water rising up through the ceiling.
I struggled to read as my voice cracked, catching on words like "stranded on top of a roof", "life-threatening", and "death toll".
At that stage, we didn't know how many had died. As we watched footage roll in of mass boat rescues the day before, I thought we would be extremely lucky if it was fewer than 40.
By some miracle of human courage and kindness it was far fewer than that.
Days (or was it weeks?) later I was filming a local politician. His wife told me my voice on the radio the morning after the flood — the one breaking with emotion — made her cry.
It's become easier, with help
There's a part of me that still feels guilty for not being able to hold back my emotions.
My experience, after all, pales in comparison to many stories I've heard over the past 12 months:
- The mother and her toddler in a kayak tethered to a clothes line, praying it didn't break
- The retired couple around the corner from my mum who clambered into their roof cavity only to have to smash their way out when the water rose through the ceiling
- The person who held their neighbour's head above the floodwater for hours
- The people who literally swam for their lives
Every interview I did in the weeks that followed took me back to the emotions of that day.
In the 12 months since, it's become easier, in no small part because I was able to process those feelings with a professional in much the same way one would with a GP for a physical injury.
Twelve months on and everyone is at a different stage in their recovery and the path is by no means linear.
There are ups and downs and slips backwards on that steep road winding up and out of the floodwater.
There is some solace, I've found, in weighing probability, of all things.
It's not impossible that I'll experience another flood like this.
But it's highly unlikely.
There's safety in statistics — or a measure of comfort at least.
