30/06/2022
Flood zone ⚠️
Finally got to visit my friend Maz in south Lismore on the weekend, or as its now known, ground zero
Her home of 30years & countless other floods has been coated in toxic liquid bitumen up to the ceiling. This is a solid hardwood timber v-jay Queenslander already jacked up on 10mt high steel stilts. Its built for floods & my friend would normally be back living in her freshly scrubbed home, but this was no ordinary flood.
One neighbour, Boral had been storing toxic waste on their abandoned site in silos, which were smashed in the floodwaters and washed straight inside Maz & her neighbours houses at 3am one Monday morning.
Luckily Maz wasn’t home. I’d contacted her the night before to check she was ok, because any serious rain up here, ends up in Lismore the next day. She was already flooded out & couldn’t get back into town. Her immediate neighbours weren’t so lucky. The young family had to escape their own home and swim across cold dark fast rushing floodwaters to be rescued from the roof of the 3storey factory across the ‘road’. While they waited to be rescued, they watched the house right next door burst into flames, while simultaneously being completely flooded up to the burning roofline. Amazing & scary & bizarre.
They all survived & will have great stories to tell. The burnt house family are now living in a caravan in their front yard. Maz has just moved into a cute blue caravan under her own toxic sludged house. The army kindly removed huge amounts of weird flood trash from her garden. There’s still random chairs & fridges lodged high up in the trees.
As we sat on her front veranda drinking tea surrounded by murky stained walls I felt a little sense of what her home used to be, warm & welcoming & a place of so much laughter. If only we could decontaminate the petroleum sludge easily, but this inland oil slick ain’t going anywhere. I don’t know how to fix my friends home & neither does she.
❤️
