“I’ve never been to war before, but when you see a dead body and you know you just have to report it and then keep going. How do I even explain what this is?,” said Kietah Martens-Shaw.
The 29-year-old has this week paused her life as a wellbeing and mental health entrepreneur in Byron Bay to work as an emergency responder conducting rescues in the flood ravaged areas around New South Wales’s northern rivers.
Her transformation is much like that of Mullumbimby, which has turned from a laid back community into a disaster zone.
The devastation in nearby Lismore dominated media attention in the aftermath of flooding this week. However over in “Mullum”, where the flood waters didn’t rise as high, the extent of damage is now becoming apparent.
Landslides and broken roads have cut off scores of residents in the surrounding areas.
Homes have been picked up and moved hundreds of metres, and large-off road cars have been crushed and swept away.
Sliced bridges jut out from the green bushland, with much of the damage yet to even be understood or reported by authorities.
So with the emergency response capacity spread thin across Lismore and around the state, a makeshift community response has sprung into action in Mullumbimby to fill the gaps the officials couldn’t.
The local civic hall on Dalley Street now resembles a military base, and is run with military-like efficiency, with an ad-hoc group of leaders coordinating a sea of volunteers from the town and region who are showing up to help. The dust from the muddy waters carried into towns during flooding is thick in the air.
It was bustling on Friday, as hundreds of locals arrived out the front of the hall, they were organised into teams based on their skills, and sent off into the hinterland to check on those not heard from in days.
Others are asked to take food, water, or jerrycans of petrol to cut off residents, with organisers drawing up a whiteboard of addresses based of word of mouth and social media posts. Properties to visit are listed by priority, with some including residents living alone, unheard from since before the flooding.
“I need six volunteers for labour, moving heavy items,” one of the organisers shouts, as seven people raise their hands almost instantly and are in a vehicle on their way to a home in less than a minute.
“It’s an absolute nightmare,” Jacqui Lewis says, abruptly walking away to take a phone call from an army official consulting the volunteer group for information. “I need these people airlifted,” she said.
Lewis, who ordinarily works in communications, says thousands have come through the civic hall this week, including those donating food and other supplies in such high quantities that the building next door has been commandeered as a sorting centre. Water and free meals are also available.
Meanwhile, a van carrying donated supplies pulls up. One of the designated organisers – a woman in her fifties – shouts “I need four strong men for an easy job, two minutes, to help unload that van”. The van is emptied and the delivery spot is cleared.
Lewis says the scene has been getting busier and more chaotic each day, as locals finishing with their own immediate flood recovery needs become available to assist. “But we desperately need more ADF mobilised here now,” she said.
“Volunteers are coming-in, going-out, and coming back in again to do more. These are civilians doing rescues, they’re not trained for this,” Lewis said, before hurrying off to someone shouting her name.
Martens-Shaw is one of those locals performing rescues.
After the immensity of the flood recovery became apparent, she and two of her friends decided they “were keen to get our hands dirty and help”.
As experienced divers and canyoners who own four wheel drives, the women were immediately sent on rescue on missions, and had done four so far this week.
Most are gruelling, entire day endeavours that involve driving to a broken road and trekking through water and mud for hours to reach a cut-off property.
“We’re in wetsuits going through hip-deep water, flooding roads, rapids, landslides, carrying grocery bags and not knowing what we’re going to find,” she said.
On Thursday, the group discovered a man in his 70s with a heart condition who had no reception or road access and had been unaccounted for since before floods. After he hugged each one of the group, an emergency services helicopter airlifted him to safety. The group then hiked back to Mullumbimby with the man’s dog, Bentley.
The group – which comprises musicians, divers, tradies, entrepreneurs and marketing professionals – have since adopted the name “Bentley’s Crew”.
However other rescue missions have been far more gruesome.
On Friday, they were attempting to visit several isolated locations they had been tipped off to from social media, when they discovered a body.
“His body was just there in the water. We called the SES (state emergency services) right away to report it.
“It was pretty fucked up, we all found it very confronting. We’ve never experienced this before, you know, we’ve all put our jobs on pause to be here.
“When we saw the body it hit home just how important this work is we’re doing, and how important it is that people worried about someone get in touch so we can check on them. Possessions and homes are of secondary importance at this point. In and around Mullumbimby there are still people that we don’t know if they’re OK,” she said.
Police later announced the discovery of a 40-year-old man’s body near Terragon – where the crew had been on Friday.
Throughout the week the local SES crew, the Fire and Rescue agency, the volunteer Rural Fire Service and defence force personnel have been criticised for not having a presence in town, facing claims they had forgotten Mullumbimby.
Byron Shire Council deputy mayor, Sarah Ndiaye, was at pains to stress this wasn’t the case, and said the SES station in town had coordinated rescues. So too were the organisers at civic hall, who believe the claims made on social media are making a small and overworked SES volunteer base frustrated.
Captain of the local Mullumbimby Fire and Rescue NSW branch, Josh Rushton, is honest about how overworked the various government rescue teams are across the region, and watches the ongoing operation at Civic Hall – located next to his station – with awe.
“I’ve never seen that level of community engagement operating in such a functional way in my career,” Rushton said. “They’re running like an army,” he said.
Part of this is because many of the organisers formerly worked with official state emergency organisations. Mullumbimby had one of Australia’s lowest vaccination rates before Covid, and uptake of the coronavirus vaccines has been low.
“I had four of my best members leave after the vaccine mandate, and I know the SES has lost even more because of it,” he said.
Now, many of those skilled emergency responders are performing the jobs they would have been, in an unofficial capacity, based out of the civic hall.
“The civic hall is being run in the same way you’d run any state agency, it’s sensational,” Rushton said.
Over at the centre, organisers are figuring out how to make the most of other donations.
Throughout the week, piles of ruined furniture have lined suburban streets since flooding peaked on Monday, as the town – without diesel, phone reception, internet and credit card facilities for days – reverted to a cash-based society reliant on word of mouth for news. The collapse of telecommunications in the region has dramatically hampered the recovery effort.
On Friday, one local business owner donated equipment to boost phone and internet reception in the cut-off hinterland. Organisers had to figure out how to transport it there.
As the community effort in Mullumbimby pushes on, locals are pleading for more federal assistance. And as telecommunications are gradually restored, they’re also desperate for their plight to be recognised.
For Martens-Shaw the disconnection between the lives now being led here and just a few dozen kilometres away is striking.
“When I drive back to Byron each night and everyones just doing their Byron thing, I think ‘You’ve got no idea what I’ve seen today’. People have no clue what’s happening just half an hour away.”
