Bonnie Ongle in the house she shares with her partner. They were denied access to the nearby town of Mullumbimby and did not want to live in the flooded area, but that was all they could afford. This 1800s house moved to the side during a flood. Photo by Eliza Delvin.
This year on Sunday, February 27th, the people of Lismore knew what to expect. It was the penultimate day of an exceptionally wet summer, when it rained in the northern mountains and in the basin itself. Lismore’s 25th major flood in over 100 years is approaching. If the river overflows the dam, the central business district will be under water again, and downtown streets will be filled with shopkeepers and friends packing their gear and merchandise.
In St. Andrew’s Church, about 50 parishioners interrupted morning tea after the sermon. Ray Nickel, who was on the waiting list for a lung transplant, was suffering from heavy rain. He survived five floods, none of which were caused by intubation of an oxygen concentrator. His chaplain and friends escorted him to his blue-stilt home in North Lismore, inevitably the first suburb to flood, and helped him carry his precious collection of vinyl records and books to safety. Nickel packed his bag and went to a friend’s house in the hills on the outskirts of Gunellaba.
Elsewhere, people also seem desperate. While most houses are on higher floors, they have little insurance, and neighbors spend sleepless weekends bringing things downstairs — lawn mowers, washing machines, cabinets, tools — and stacking them — hard drives, heaters, clothes, books — on the tables. beds and refrigerators.
Across town, in East Lismore, Cary Patterson finishes her hair and sits down to tequila and kombucha. It’s his weekend with the kids. His ex-wife lived nearby but higher up, and she looked around to see if they needed to be picked up. He asked the children if they were worried. Their high-rise buildings are four stories above forecast flood levels, stock up on supplies and have Netflix. No, they said, they were right. Toward evening, the Pattersons ventured to take the dog for a last walk. Ovals are soft. Patterson pointed to the ants that had gathered on his street sign. “Here it is, boys.” The hunchbacked neighbors passed them in the pouring rain, hurriedly pushing motorcycles, caravans and cars up the hill. At the airport, the North River Aviation Club tows a dozen single-engine aircraft to a specially built stand.
Downstream, on Molesworth Street, a digital pressure gauge on top of the Browns Creek pumping station starts counting the inches between the river level and the top of the dam wall. The pumping stations supporting the dam are located on the sides of the offices of the national Aboriginal newspaper Koori Mail. When night fell, crews gathered in their building to move everything they could to the ground floor. Behind the houses, the river is fast and muddy. Ahead, water gushes down the road and into the basement from what was once Browns Creek, now a 400-meter-long car park.
At 10 pm, Naomi Moran, the paper’s general manager, locked the door behind her. As soon as she returned home, she noticed warnings that the flood could be bigger than the previous ones. The first floor of Koori Mail has high ceilings, and the height of the first floor is much higher than the waterfront. But the floods that Moran has heard about from his elders since childhood are much bigger than the floods of 1954, 1974 and 2017, and the floods could even inundate the high ground on which the cathedral sits. She drove back to the river with her husband, the baby in tow, poaching friends along the way.
In her corner office on the first floor, she watches the countdown to the pumping station. Water meters are installed a few meters above the 12.4-meter flood mark “100 years”. Her team strived for further improvement. Copiers and printers were moved to the tables, regular computers, hard drives and servers were moved to the second floor, and rain pounded in my ears. Around one in the morning, the Morans collapsed into bed. Two hours later, the river flooded the dam and continued to rise for the next 12 hours, eventually even drowning the digital meters.
Three months after the Great Flood, a tall, bearded man in a hoodie and jeans walked in the middle of deserted Molesworth Street with his arms outstretched, palms up, facing the sky and shouting, “Yes, yes, yes!” When he opened his eyes and saw me, he said, “This is something I haven’t done in a long time, bro. Walk in the sun. Super good”.
It’s like the whole of Lismore, with a population of 27,000, is taking a collective deep breath: finally a sunny day, a dry day, a day without trouble. “The rain doesn’t stop,” the people kept pleading. After a record summer flood, three times the average rainfall fell in autumn. These include the second major flood on March 30, Lismore’s sixth flood, which swept through the city center again, leaving people who spent weeks cleaning dirty, rotting and smelly shops. Hopes for an opening were dashed.
About 3,000 homes and commercial buildings in the city were flooded on 28 February, including nearly all of South Lismore and North Lismore. Most of these houses were empty shells, stripped of interior walls, insulation, ceilings, carpets, and cabinets, all of which had been thrown into the street in heaps almost as high as floods. It was like a tsunami. Overall, about 70,000 tons (approximately 14,000 trucks) of household items end up in landfills, and that’s not all. Meanwhile, the broken fenced yard has turned back into a swamp, and the entire street looks deserted except for a few RVs parked in the driveway. Even at higher elevations, golf courses and municipal parks are too filthy to mow, and fast food franchise fences are covered in grey-black mold stains.
Lights were on at sunset in some houses, but very dimly, as those who returned were actually camping, staying in a room or two, often without hot water or heat and relying on a repaired electrical outlet. The night was filled with sirens when petty crime flourished. Air conditioners installed above the flood level are a special target.
Otherwise, there will be very little traffic. One cold night I stopped in front of a tall building in an unusually deserted street in East Lismore. In the former kitchen, Brad and Kristen Hoskins wear donated clothes and huddle on recycled chairs around a 40-gallon bucket that Brad installed on the chimney. At their feet are three dogs. Donated socks, underwear and shirts are dried on wires upstairs. There is a lingering smell of flooding, although it could be a dog.
Hoskins made his living “boiled leaves” – he was a boiler operator at a tee-three oil plant – and initially returned to his home in a kayak the day after he was rescued when the water dropped below ground level. so he could probably hose the mud out before it dries and scare off the looters.
“We were lucky that we never had to do repairs,” said Kristen. Hoskins also owns the house next door where Kristen’s daughter lives. Kristen rose to fame when footage surfaced of her three-month-old granddaughter swimming in a chest-high inflatable pool in the living room. An infant, two siblings, her parents, their pets, and three other nocturnal children were rescued from a boat window.
Another daughter narrowly escaped death when a huge ebony tree crashed into her house during a landslide near Nimbin. “She’s really lucky,” said Kristen. “A little.”
With insurance premiums reaching $24,000 a year, relatively few affected homeowners were covered by flood insurance. After all, this is a catch. Census maps show a clear socioeconomic disparity between Lismore’s lowlands and hillside suburbs, with Lismore in the north, south and east in the bottom 20 percent of the national median household income. This gap increases with each flood: the less insured the property, the more likely it is that those who suffered the least losses will return to live there. With Lismore in dire need of affordable housing ahead of this year’s flooding, tenants are now being forced to move to centers such as Grafton, Casino, Ballina and Brisbane. Others do local couchsurfing or rely on friends. About 1,300 more people remain in the crisis in mobile homes and tents, according to Resilience NSW.
Meanwhile, homeowners didn’t see their options. The NSW Government legally authorizes the North Rivers Reconstruction Corporation to rehabilitate Lismore in any way it sees fit and is expected to allow up to 1,000 houses to be voluntarily bought out, followed by a land exchange. Company CEO David Witherdeen and Prime Minister Dominic Perrotte said they would be guided by the recommendations of the New South Wales flood study led by former state chief scientist and engineer Mary O’Kane and former police chief Mick Fuller. Their report was delayed by a month, until July 30th. Perrotte emphasized that this “moment of uncertainty” is necessary to make the right political decisions, and not to succumb to “immediate pressure to return everything to normal.”
In the meantime, however, emboldened by $20,000 in cash grants for repairs, people and businesses are steadily returning to the “wok,” as some Ridge residents like to call the Lismore subtropical basin. A dire shortage of crafts, tools and supplies didn’t seem to be holding back much: social media sites show people lining walls with cardboard, corrugated iron, blankets and even campaign crepe paper, which is pretty darn flammable. Another factor driving people back to their skinny homes is the fact that they are separated from their pets in temporary housing. Almost as many dogs were saved from the flood as people, but hundreds had to be left in care or adopted, or worse.
Volunteer-run recovery centers across the region are closed. Here, flood-affected people can borrow tools, get cleaning supplies, request labor, order hot meals, get humanitarian aid, get donated items, and seek advice.
Local council member Ellie Bird, who coordinates the Resilient Lismore center, says it will be needed for years to come. Resilient Lismore is across the street from the disaster relief area, and people come here to take hot showers, do laundry, get government services, and, while up the northern river, meet an herbalist. In the background, a parking lot lined with fig and cardboard trees echoes the calls of tropical forest birds—fruit doves, fig birds, lorikeets, and parrots. But when you look up, you see more junk—a pair of jeans, a few planks, a roll of carpet still dripping with dirt.
“It’s a city in limbo,” said Byrd, who founded Resilient Lismore after the 2017 floods. “People’s initial reaction was, ‘We can’t do this anymore,’ but it’s true. They do it again because they are unhappy and frustrated that the authorities are taking too long to make decisions and rethink the city. We must be ready for this. What are we waiting for? Another flood?”
Carey Patterson’s rental home is just a short walk from his upstairs office on busy Keane Street in Lismore. The muddy Wilson River flows on the other side of the city centre, about 700 meters from the hotel. On February 27, his 8-year-old daughter Sasha went to bed at 9 pm. His two sons, Caspian, 15, and Caleb, 18, watch TV. His car was parked on the hill next to his ex-wife. Lawnmowers, wheelbarrows, bicycles and tools are stored on the front balcony, which overlooks the flooded Lismore sports ground.
“It started out very, very hard. I was drinking and thought I was going to stop drinking now. I told the kids, “Are we ready?”
Alerts started ringing on his phone. At 11:00 pm, the Bureau of Meteorology predicted that the dams would overflow and that the river could reach the level seen during the 1974 flood (12.15 meters). “So I thought, yeah, don’t worry about it. Our floor is level 74 – it’s probably ankle deep.” The boys go to bed at one in the morning. At 3:18 a.m., shortly after the river surged off the embankment, Patterson saw a message that the river could reach 13.5 meters. “So I thought, OK, let’s count. My daughter is 4 feet 8 inches – that’s 1.4 meters. My God. Seven minutes later, a message arrives asking for the city center to be evacuated. He looks at the car. on the street, and there were still people in the car. “It’s getting late. You should be able to hear it: fire alarms, car alarms, rain, rapids.”
“That’s when I thought, ‘Damn, we screwed up. The carpet and upholstery started to move, so the dogs got into the living room – they were never allowed in the living room. Then the salon began to move.”
“Kids are freaking out right now. Logs, garbage and gas cylinders burst into the house. And a very strong smell of gasoline. The water is thick.”
He called a friend’s emergency number. She told him that they had withdrawn their boat because it was too dangerous. “She said, ‘Get out or you might die.’
Sasha’s brothers sat her on a chair, then on a table, then on the kitchen sink. “She looked out the window at the water, which was higher than inside. She just started screaming.” Patterson decided to punch a hole in the roof cavity. To this end, he kept the hammer in a “watertight” box, but could not open it under the weight of the water. He found a barbell and punched a hole in the living room ceiling, only to find that there was a layer of hardwood on the outside of the hole. He punched another hole in the bedroom ceiling. Same deal.
He tried again in Sasha’s room. This time he found a passage, and the four pushed and pulled each other into the roof cavity. They caught the smaller dog, Mila, but were unable to get Floyd out. Outside came the roar of a ship. Complete darkness. No exit.
At 6:30 a.m., Patterson sent a message to teammate Craig. Half an hour later, as the water level rose above the doorframe, they heard Craig’s voice coming from the thunderstorm above them. Caleb plunged into darkness and swam down the corridor to the balcony, where Craig was sitting in a one-man kayak, holding on to the ditch with one hand.
Craig hands Caleb a life jacket. He swam up to Sasha and kept her on the surface. Craig pulled Sasha to the ground about 800 meters away, ducking under power lines and avoiding the treetops. Then he came back for someone else. After Caleb brought his little brother on board the kayak, he told his father, “Floyd is gone, dad.
Over the next few days, Patterson worked out how things could have gotten worse. A cargo container landed in a neighbor’s yard. Stumps were torn off from a neighbor’s house. His business went bankrupt and he had no insurance. He kept the propeller at the bottom of his street sign as a keepsake, and that must have been where the lifeboat wrecked. He heard that a woman named Lorraine drowned in the house around the corner. He found that Floyd was still alive.
Looking at Jerry Vanclay’s deck, everything starts to make sense. His north-facing home sits high on a ridge above the golf course, overlooking the Lismore Basin and the Nightcap Ridge, which forms the headland of the catchment. Beyond these mountains, in the next drainage basin, is Wollumbin’s Pen (Mount of Warning), the first place on the Australian mainland to catch the rising sun.
On the morning of February 27, heavy rain covered everything. Vanclay, a professor of sustainable forestry at Southern Cross University, drove into town to help a friend pack his store and then hurried home. During the day, the rain curtain darkens. According to the Bureau of Meteorology, the “regional average” rainfall in the basin was close to 500 mm that day and overnight. Or, as Wanklay later calculated: “It was as if the entire contents of Sydney Harbor had been lost on the southern slopes of the Nightcap Range.”
Not so long ago, the interior of the northern river was covered in dense subtropical rainforest known as bushland. The red cedar was originally felled and carried downstream to a navigable place at the confluence of the Wilson River, which drains the eastern catchment, and the Leicester River, which drains the western catchment. At this crossroads, another 100 kilometers from the sea by boat but only 10 meters above sea level, Lismore was built.
However, by the 1900s, 99% of the Big Crab had been cleared for farming. Downpours poured from bare hills and into gutter-like streams, the topsoil turning hazel brown, flooding the river and the surrounding lowlands. In the 50s, 60s and 70s, boats stopped, floods intensified, and hippies went to the mountains.
Benefiting from the advantages of a regional center – a university, an art gallery, a base hospital – Lismore has been in financial trouble ever since. But its waterways are in the worst condition. In the 2015 watershed health assessment, the Wilson River and Leicester Creek received an F, the lowest in the state. “It’s F for failure,” said Diana Devai, a forest planner whose home in North Lismore, on the west bank of the Wilson River, collapsed completely. “Or maybe the ‘F’ stands for ‘fuck.’ The banks are overgrown with poisonous weeds, and all local vegetation has been cut down. It’s just a sewer.
When the rain stopped that February morning, Jerry Wankley woke up to see brown water trickling down the mountain. The river hasn’t even reached its peak yet. He took out his birdwatching goggles and looked at the surreal painting below. “Too busy. Everywhere, small jerry cans, jet skis and kayaks are pulling people off the roof and placing them on top of the Bruxner Highway bridge. Small boats come and go without stopping.”
A few days later, he spoke to another scientist, Barbara Rugendijk, who also lives on the ridge but overlooks a vast floodplain to the south. Geographer Rugendijk objected to the reuse of the term “unprecedented” in the media. From her point of view, the topography of the land suggests that floods of this magnitude and more have shaped the country.
She asked Vanclay to co-author a report to the council in which she argued that Lismore’s town center should be moved to higher ground and the former center converted into a waterfront park. For example, a parking lot at Browns Creek can turn into a stream again. Wanklay objected at first, suggesting that there might be an engineering solution. But then he did math.
On February 27-28, about 240 liters of water poured into Lismore in a day, about the same as the daily flow of Niagara Falls. No amount of dredging, dams or diversions can hold it back.
Rugendike and Wankley drove me down the hill into town, past a golf course where they said a new town center could be built. Coincidentally, this golf course is the same size and shape as the existing CBD and is less than a kilometer away. In the town of Rugendijk, he admits he feels guilty imagining walking towards certain buildings with a red handle – like any regional town, Lismore has its own hideous architecture. She believes its beautiful historic red brick buildings should be restored with flood-resistant materials to create a cultural district. The restored campsites along the river will attract tourists and gray nomads. North Lismore could return to wetlands and South Lismore could have a new golf course. Of course, any floods will still cause damage, but they will no longer bring the city to its knees.
We will drive 10 kilometers downstream from the CBD to the village of Wairalla. The road sank in places, and car bodies are still scattered across the floodplain. The plane at the airport rushed not far from here. We stop at Wyrallah Hall, where a farming community that survived the collapse of its 120-year-old church has gathered to distribute vouchers for fuel, food and hay to affected local families.
Over lunch in the sun, a farmer told me that a man on a boat rescued her octogenarian parents minutes before their house was swept out of the rubble. “He never stopped, he kept saving people.” When I asked his name, she grabbed my arm and pleaded, “I don’t know, but I need to figure it out so I can buy him one case of beer. ”
A manufacturer of titanium trees told how his family lost three houses on two lots. One of them was alone with his 91-year-old mother. When he got to her by boat, the water was up to her armpits. “I said, ‘Mom, you never told me you couldn’t swim.
Congregation elder Fred Hoskins, 87, produces a variety of dairy products, beef, macadamia nuts and coffee in the valley. He said that if 1974 was his 1987 flood, he didn’t know what the flood was. “Maybe you will have to go back to Noah,” he said. “But it will happen again. In my opinion, you cannot mitigate flooding in this way. We must move to the ridge.”
Ray Nickel, 67, was driving his 22-year-old silver Magna parked on a dirt road, looking out at his flooded blue house.
“There is always music coming from there,” he said, taking short, quick breaths through the nasal tubes that ran between us to the oxygen concentrator in the back seat. “I have 400 albums: 52 years of blues, jazz, hard rock, classical… but this is the memory of every album. Friends call me and say: “I’ll come with a bottle of wine.” and turn on the album.
North Lismore, unprotected by dams, has been reverting back to floodplain for decades. Voluntary buyout programs were offered after the 1954 and 1974 floods. On Nickel Street, more than half of the block is now municipally owned and vacant. Of the remaining residents, some have raised their houses four meters above the ground, they look like tree houses. But they were flooded in February.
Post time: Nov-18-2022