Don McKenna leans against the counter of Eugowra’s flood-ravaged pub, cold beer in hand, and sums up a hellish week.
“The last flood they had here was in 2010,” he says. “That was a disaster. This is a fucking disaster. I can’t believe there are not more people dead.”
The scene behind him only emphasises his point.
The Eugowra Central Hotel is gutted. The flood waters left almost nothing for clean-up crews to salvage.
Now, publican John Den has turned the venue into a bottle shop, selling the stock that survived from out of the window.
Den looks over Eugowra’s main street, out to ruined fences, debris, and heavy machinery, occasionally yelling to the endless convoy of trucks that passes slowly in front of him.
“You want a longie?” he yells to one driver.
Late last week, Den says, the street was a hive of activity. Today, he’s only sold five longnecks and two stubbies.
“It’s quiet now,” he says. “Yesterday was quiet, Friday was chaos. Three hundred machines, 300 hundred trucks, 3,000 to 5,000 people in town, just cleaning up.”
Eugowra, one of the hardest-hit towns in the current flooding disaster, is starting to creep back towards some semblance of normality.
Some locals are returning to work or school. The rural trade centre down the road has opened up.
It’s a transition that brings its own dangers.
Not far from Eugowra’s pub, a team of Lifeline volunteers has been busy cooking up a feast.
By day’s end on Monday, they’d served about 250 people, half of whom stopped for a chat. Many were greeted by a friendly dog named Evelyn Crumpet, who the Lifeline central west chief executive, Steph Robinson, describes as her “icebreaker”.
Robinson says the adrenaline that sustained the town through its initial disaster response is starting to wear off. It can be an overwhelming time for anyone who has endured trauma, she says.
“There’s a huge crash, yeah,” she says on Monday.
“It’s a lot quieter around here today … so it’s really about, for us, now looking out for people and just that presence that is here, getting to know people quite well.
“What we look out for is that there are certain signs that you see in people that may be distressing to others, but that we know are very normal responses to trauma. It’s now about keeping an eye on them to see if they’re not settling a little bit … that’s when we might need to connect them with additional help.”
Further west, in Forbes, another devastated town is taking its first small steps towards normality.
With no significant rain forecast for the state’s central west this week, authorities are assessing the damage.
Hundreds of homes in Forbes have been assessed. Some residents have been allowed back in. The Australian Defence Force is helping with sandbagging and cleaning homes. SES volunteers are hosing out mud contaminated by fuel and sewage.
The service’s initial estimate is that roughly 700 residential and commercial properties were damaged.
The immediate danger for Forbes appears to be over. The river receded back below major flooding levels on Monday.
But the Lachlan River is now swelling further downstream, threatening communities like Condobolin, where the peak is expected on Wednesday at 7.8 metres.
Authorities are keeping a close eye on the 3km levee around Condobolin’s CBD which SES Ch Supt Dallas Burns says is expected to hold back the expected peak.
The SES is working closely with local councils to ensure levees are maintained.
“Obviously with this flooding coming up and down so often over the past months there is quite a bit of damage happening to those levees just from erosion, so that’s something we’re very concerned about,” Burns told the ABC.
For Den, like many others in this region, life is now being taken one day at a time. Immediately after the floods, he told a news crew he was done with the pub.
“I vowed on Channel Nine news … that I was done, we were out of the pub,” he says in Eugowra. “Well, we’re out of the pub and we’re into a bottle shop. So I didn’t lie.”
