Vicki and John Crow don’t describe what happened to Eugowra as a flood. “It was a 5ft (150cm) wall of water, being pushed by a freight train, going at 100 miles an hour,” Vicki says. “It picked up houses and just moved them.”
When it descended, it demolished their new shed as if it was made of tinfoil and lifted their four-bedroom home off its foundations. The concrete patio floated 10cm above the ground, as did the hallway.
The Crows spent hours neck deep in water before Vicki was helicoptered to safety. John waited for a boat with their great dane Jedda, who survived the flood but was put down the next day on John’s lap due to the impact of trauma.
That he didn’t die in fear is one consolation in the hardest month of their lives.
“The house will have to be demolished,” Vicki says. “Two caravans, five cars are gone. It’s total devastation and the whole town copped it.”
A month on from the floods that tore through central-west NSW like an inland tsunami, residents in Eugowra are facing a long and expensive road to recovery.
The latest figures from the Insurance Council of Australia (ICA) show 4,412 insurance claims have been logged across the region since the floods hit, including at least 2,880 claims on property.
This week, dozens of residents attended two days of ICA-led sessions with insurers in Eugowra and Forbes. Some have been told the claims process will take weeks, others months. In the meantime, their homes remain uninhabitable.
A spokesperson for the ICA estimated the cost of insured losses for the region would be at least $150m.
The Crows, like many in Eugowra, weren’t insured for floods, only storm-induced damage. They couldn’t afford the $25,000 a year in premiums.
They’re living in a caravan provided by the state government – waiting for Allianz to process their claim. If the hydrologist deems what happened to their property was due to a flood, they get nothing.
They’ve managed to reach the company via the phone just twice since the floods hit.
“We haven’t been paid out for cars, we haven’t been assessed in 25 days,” Vicki said. “We’re pensioners, we’ve just got not more money, everything we owned was sunk into that house. That was our retirement home, our forever home.”
A spokesperson for Allianz said its frontline was processing the “high volume of inquiries and claims received in a timely manner”.
They said the frequency of severe weather events and ongoing disruptions of Covid had led to an increase in insurance costs for its customers.
“Late last year Allianz undertook a comprehensive national review of its flood premiums based on updated government flood maps, data and flood risk modelling,” they said.
“For most customers, the combination of these factors have resulted in increases around the inflation rate but for some customers … with high-risk exposures, including some in the central NSW area, larger premium increases were needed.”
According to the Climate Council, around a quarter of homes in Eugowra will be “effectively uninsurable” by 2030, meaning annual damage costs from extreme weather will be equivalent to 1% or more of the property’s replacement cost.
The ICA chief executive, Andrew Hall, says the floods have been “particularly devastating” for residents in Eugowra and Forbes, a region already grappling with affordability and availability concerns.
“We must not ignore what this data is telling us to do – invest in community-level mitigation, home retrofits, home buybacks in the most extreme cases and better early warning systems,” Hall says.
The federal government has committed to a $1bn five-year investment in resilience measures to grapple with the ballooning costs.
The ICA wants it to go further and is calling on governments to remove state taxes and charges on insurance and for land use planning legislation to include a mandatory requirement for approvals to consider resilience to extreme weather.
Legal Aid NSW says timely advice needs to be embedded in government disaster response to prevent homelessness while claims are processed.
The service is grappling with a major surge this year due to a 400% increase in its statewide Disaster Response Legal Service (DRLS) compared with 2021.
Ma’ata Solofoni, a senior insurance solicitor, has been touring the central-west with the DRLS after the floods hit. About 200 people reached out in the first fortnight alone.
Following a disaster, the ICA can formally declare a “catastrophe”, meaning insurers need to process claims as a priority. But Solofoni says it’s been a long year, with a lot of claims.
“We’re still assisting a lot of people from the Lismore floods close to the one year anniversary,” she says. “They aren’t back home or they’re camping out in properties … I wouldn’t be surprised if we’re helping people in the central-west a year from now.”
Hugh and Lyn Ellis had just completed a seven-month renovation of their home when the water hit their Eugowra property.
They weren’t insured for flood events – instead opting to erect a wall that secured the home from a “one in 100-year flood”.
But it wasn’t enough for what descended: a 2-metre tidal wave that blew out their glass doors and exploded the floors “like a volcano”.
“It destroyed the house,” Lyn says. “It’s uninhabitable … we have one room with power.”
The couple are self-funded retirees. Hugh didn’t think they’d be spending their retirement in a caravan.
“People become homeless in the blink of an eye,” he says. “Through no fault of your own.”
The Ellises have spent four weeks waiting for their insurance claim to be processed by CGU. Days have been made up of visits from hydrologists and assessors and waiting on hold on the phone.
“It’s very hard for people to know what to do,” Lyn explains. “You’re suffering enough stress as it is … The waiting is difficult, very difficult. We had a beautiful home for one month.”
A spokesperson for IAG – which includes NRMA and CGU – said it had received 1,094 claims due to the floods in central-west NSW and had completed “the majority” of property assessments received.
“As soon as it was safe to do so, our assessors were on the ground inspecting the damage to our customers’ properties and arranging temporary … repairs,” they said.
“For customers without flood cover, we will assess whether there’s been any storm damage to their property, which may be covered, and this may require a report by a hydrologist.
“If a customer’s claim is declined because they are not covered for flood or stormwater runoff damage, we provide up to three months’ temporary accommodation or a financial payment for staying with friends or family for up to three months.”
In the meantime, natural disasters aren’t going away. In May, the Climate Council estimated one in every 25 properties would be effectively uninsurable by 2030 due to damage costs from extreme weather.
Climate councillor Nicki Hutley said following the central-west floods, it was likely that threshold had already been reached.
“What we were thinking about back in May now seems quite conservative,” she says. “At the time it was released the insurance industry was still saying, ‘there’s no such thing as uninsurable’. But if the price is out of people’s reach, that’s not insurable.”
Hutley says it is inevitable insurers will raise premiums to cover the cost of claims and reinsurance if climate records continue to be broken.
“Insurance companies are not the government; they are a business. We can’t expect them to insure the uninsurable,” she says.
“It’s the question these communities are facing: is there something that can be done at an infrastructure level … or do you need to get up and move? But then the fabric of the community changes … like a mouth with half the teeth missing.”
For John Crow, staying in Eugowra has almost become too much to bear.
He has become so disenchanted with the insurance process, he wants to give up on the idea of home ownership and travel in a caravan instead.
At least that way you can “leave when it won’t stop raining, or when the sun won’t stop shining”.
“You think you’re good but you’re not,” he says. “Hardly anyone in town had flood cover; we couldn’t afford it. Never in my life have I had to ask for charity and this has broken me.
“It was a beautiful area, a beautiful home but it’s all gone. We’ll never get back what we had. We’ve got each other and that’s all we can hope for.”
