In the Northern Rivers, we live amid post-flood brokenness.
For months, we’ve been crushed by incessant rain and the thick, low cloud of La Niña. Of the year’s 24 weekends, it has rained on 19. Someone is counting rainy days, yet time here has stalled. Shops are abandoned, and people are camping in the shells of houses without walls or kitchens.
The cold is closing in – even cardboard is hard to come by, because it can be used as makeshift insulation.
The Northern Rivers Reconstruction Corporation, set up to lead the reconstruction, doesn’t yet exist. It won’t come into effect until 1 July – 17 weeks after the floods hit.
Instead, we have inquiries. Different inquiries collecting the same horror stories: emergency services were inundated, there’s a catastrophic housing shortage, families live in tents without water or cooking facilities. (The latest SES figures say more than 4,000 houses are uninhabitable and a further 10,849 damaged.)
An independent New South Wales flood inquiry led by a former police commissioner and scientist is examining response times, preparedness, emergency resources and recovery. It won’t report to the premier until 30 June. A NSW Upper House committee is also investigating responses to major flooding, while the federally funded Lismore Flood Mitigation Study – looking at how to reduce future floods – was held up because a contract signing between the CSIRO and the National Recovery and Resilience Agency was stalled by the change of government in Canberra.
It’s now been three months since Marcus Bebb was plucked from the roof of his submerged South Lismore home, yet he still feels stranded.
Bebb is caught between committing to a rebuild of the family house (so his wife and three teens have a home) and waiting to find out if the NSW government will announce a property buyback. The premier, Dominic Perrottet, has said he will adopt recommendations from the independent inquiry, including proposals for relocating homes.
“I’m stuck in limbo,” Bebb says from the caravan he and his wife sleep in at Lismore showground. Their teens have a second van.
He is insured, but reluctant to start fixing the extensive damage to his house. “If the government finally decides that we are going to do a NSW Northern rivers buyback scheme, where does that leave me?” he asks.
The sentiment on the ground is that government botched the emergency and now it’s botched the recovery. We are the canary in the coalmine – a forewarning that most of Australia doesn’t have systems to deal with severe weather events.
Lismore only has a population of 27,000 and affected villages like Coraki and Woodburn are smaller, but what happens when a perfect storm – floods or fire – exacerbated by climate change hits a heavily populated area in the Hawkesbury, Adelaide Hills or western Victoria? Will the emergency response and recovery be any better?
It is hard to convey the current Lismore experience. Only about 20% of businesses have reopened. Many people have exhausted their savings trying to repair properties. “I don’t think – bureaucratically – it’s understood, the scale of the trauma,” Lismore’s mayor, Steve Krieg, told the upper house hearing.
Every time I drive through town I’m reminded of CS Lewis’s description of “grey town” or purgatory in The Great Divorce.
“I had been wandering for hours in similar mean streets, always in the rain and always in evening twilight. Time seemed to have paused on that dismal moment when only a few shops have lit up and it is not yet dark enough for their windows to look cheering,” he wrote.
“And just as the evening never advanced to night, so my walking had never brought me to the better parts of the town … I found only dingy lodging houses, small tobacconists, hoardings from which posters hung in rags, windowless warehouses, goods stations without trains … the whole town seemed to be empty.”
Is it a stretch to say that this new climate change reality feels like purgatory?
