North Street neighbours | Central Western Daily | November 6, 2023 - video Dailymotion

Eugowra neighbours, Darryl Coleman and Colin Fabish share their concerns in the wake of the one-year flood anniversary.

Transcript

00:00 a flood. We always get flooded. We're one of the first houses in town to get flooded.

00:04 We've got everything generally built up downstairs to the height that saves them from the flood or

00:11 lifts them out of the flood reach. But of course this flood was double that and it just pummeled

00:16 everything downstairs. But that's all we can do. We can't prepare for a flood like this again because

00:21 it was just too big and too powerful. We could just prepare for our major flood level which is

00:26 about 9.6 or 7 meters. We lost fences and everything but the house stayed still. Our

00:30 neighbor's house here, he lost the back wall. You've seen the house across the roads,

00:34 lost the front wall and back wall and punched all the internal walls out. Do you think our region

00:39 with climate extremes happening, let's say this similar flood happens again in 6 to 12 months

00:46 from now, is our region prepared? Walking away, no I'm walking away. Walking away? You wouldn't

00:50 stay here? No. Where would you go? Australia. Mobile home. It's a big country. There'll be room

00:58 somewhere for us. This flood was exceptional. It was a flood on top of a flood. We got a double

01:04 height flood here but the other side of town that never gets flooded had the same height of water

01:10 on that side. So it got to a level here then it pushed down that way so it didn't get any higher

01:14 here. So it was unusual. That's what people are trying to explain to people. It picked up that

01:20 crop, it dammed itself up and it pushed across the town, that crop of canola and that was the

01:26 weight of the canola in that water that flattened things. I mean signposts flattened 45 degrees to

01:32 the ground and posts and steel fences ripped out of the ground. And given what this community has

01:38 gone through already and there's been loss as well, in terms of flood preparation what are

01:44 your thoughts on people being mentally prepared in the future for this happening again? I think

01:50 it might break quite a few people. Quite a few people are hanging on now mentally. If another

01:58 flood like that comes through again, I don't know how they'd cope. And would you say there are

02:10 people here who are suffering in silence? Yes, definitely. If you get them aside and you start

02:16 talking then the conversations come out and you hear their stories. So it's still top of the list

02:23 in everyone's mind when you get a few people together and we start to talk and it all comes

02:27 out and you hear that person's story and you hear how they suffered and how that Nigel has a ladder

02:32 against the back of his house because his kids won't go to bed without the ladder being there.

02:36 So there's trauma everywhere.

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