Sally Flannery had a shower and a stiff drink, and logged on to Facebook.
It was early Monday morning, and the Lismore resident had just been rescued from northern NSW's flooding emergency.
With emergency crews difficult — if not impossible — to contact, Ms Flannery flagged down a boat from her friend's roof where she was staying.
"Then after that, I kind of just sat in my car, charged my laptop and got straight into rescue mode," she said.
Before she'd been evacuated, Ms Flannery made a post to a small business Facebook group she manages, encouraging others to share their addresses if they needed help.
It sparked a deluge of desperate pleas.
"Please help my best friend, her partner and 2 kids are stuck in the roof."
"Elderly man at 57 — Street needs rescuing urgently"
"Need ASAP evacuation. Waist deep in second storey."
Ms Flannery triaged the requests into a publicly available online spreadsheet.
By 4am the following day, she had a team of more than a dozen volunteers working on the project and had confirmed the safe evacuations of hundreds of people.
"I was like, my experience was s**t, there's probably a thousand people out there that are having the same experience and I just felt like I had to do something to help," Ms Flannery said.
The spreadsheet performed two functions.
Any requests for evacuations from those who hadn't been able to get help yet were logged in a map accessible to the army of volunteers in tinnies that was helping to evacuate residents.
The State Emergency Service (SES) was inundated with calls and run off its feet, and its boss Carlene York even said conditions made it too dangerous to perform rescues in some cases.
It also confirmed that people were safe to loved ones who hadn't been able to be in touch.
The information being passed on was vital, with families relaying details of their elderly relatives, or those with disabilities, trapped in homes with rising floodwaters.
"Elderly disabled man, very worried if he made it out or not. He has a missing jaw and is non-verbal," one entry comment read.
Another said: "My brother, 2 kids ... the 15-year-old has a heart condition. SES have been notified multiple times, still no rescue."
By Thursday night, more than 1,000 rescues had been confirmed on the spreadsheet.
"The moments that we've cried the most have been families that have been reunited," Ms Flannery said.
"[On Wednesday] a 14-year-old boy who'd been trapped by himself for, I think, several days ... they were able to relocate him with his family."
"When you see those kind of things, it just makes you break down and cry."
Collating and sharing who needed to be rescued online proved crucial for so many.
South Lismore resident Josh Sawtell and his family were prepared for a 1974 flood level but was taken by surprise by how quickly the floodwaters rose.
"The water, once it got to the second story of my house, it went from my feet to my knees within five or 10 minutes," he said.
"We started blowing up the floaties for my three-year-old son Houston.
"I did the [Facebook] post and was trying my best to ring people ... heaps of people shared the post."
Mr Sawtell's post had dozens of shares and, sometime later, his family and their dog were rescued.
"If it wasn't for that I don't know what would have happened," he said.
Queensland University of Technology professor of digital communication Daniel Angus said it showed people were becoming "incredibly resourceful" at being able to set up technology to solve these kinds of issues.
"The idea of this distributed approach where they were uploading address data and other kinds of details to try and affect rescue and support to where it was needed was an incredible thing to watch — in terms of that community power, but then also the use of the digital platforms to try and coordinate on the ground."
Professor Angus said the community resource filled a void of official information.
"In the moment of the emergency itself, I think it's incredibly important to have coordinated responses that remain open that people can access regardless of the kind of event they are experiencing," he said.
So far, the flooding in Lismore has claimed four lives.
Some of the victim's bodies were found by the community team that formed in response to the information provided by families and other community members.
They phoned police to go through official channels.
"Yesterday, I learned how to write deceased on a door and clear a house for a body," Ms Flannery said.
"We had six rescues in our system ... and before we called it, I went down and just cleared them."
"That's not something I ever thought I would have to do."
