00:00 To be honest, right now the conditions are a lot more favourable for us in terms of weather,
00:06 but in terms of the situation at hand, I mean we're completely locked in here in Cape Trib
00:12 as is the whole Daintree Coast community.
00:14 So if you're familiar with the area, that's everywhere from the Daintree ferry north.
00:19 There's one road in, it's completely impassable.
00:22 We haven't even got our ferry up operating, so there's sort of no immediate clearing of
00:28 the roads or any sort of assistance that is coming by road for quite a few days I would say.
00:35 How long have you been trapped there and how's everyone feeling about the situation?
00:40 So I don't actually live in Cape Trib, I live just a couple of kilometres down the road
00:45 which is inaccessible because of huge landslides.
00:48 But I've been stuck up, well we've all been stuck here since the flooding, I don't even
00:52 know what day it is, two nights ago where it just went absolutely crazy.
00:56 No one up here that lives up here or that has lived here has ever seen anything like
01:00 this in their lives, so it's pretty wild to be a part of.
01:05 We've heard you've got no food, water, fuel etc.
01:09 What is it like for you guys up there?
01:11 Have you got anything to sort of get you through the next few days?
01:15 Yeah, so we've gone around, I mean we are a community that lives and operates off grid
01:20 as it is, so we're always reasonably stocked for our wet season and minor floods and things
01:28 like that.
01:29 So we've worked out we've probably got an average of maybe four or so days for food.
01:34 That really is dependent on the usage of diesel, so the diesel is how we run everything up
01:40 here in terms of our bigger properties being off the grid and having no connection to mains
01:45 powers anyway, so that yeah, it really just hinges off the diesel supply which we're already
01:50 rationing and we're now currently trying to put a contingency plan in place to get the
01:55 local vessel that operates out of here, Ocean Safari, to get her back in the water and start
02:00 bringing in supplies ourselves because there's been no assistance whatsoever from any sort
02:05 of organisation you can think of.
02:07 Well that was going to be my next question, whether there had been any assistance from
02:11 authorities, have you heard from any of those authorities at all?
02:17 We allegedly through a friend of a friend and Facebook messaging have heard that potentially
02:22 the Army is going to try and access today.
02:25 We've given them coordinates of where they can land.
02:27 We're hearing troopers fly over to the community north of us.
02:30 We understand that there's pressure on not just us, really the whole region is definitely
02:36 under pressure with resources and whatnot, but we are a community of about 600 people
02:41 that are stuck up here, so yeah, we can only go for so long.
02:47 This is usually a pretty busy time of year for far north Queensland, but this recovery
02:52 could take weeks.
02:54 What's this going to mean for tourism and the livelihoods of people operating businesses
02:58 in the area?
03:00 Yeah, I mean, it's hard to think about really.
03:03 Yeah, it's hard to think about.
03:07 Yeah, absolutely.
03:08 Do you have a message or something you want people outside of far north Queensland to
03:15 understand about the help that you need in Cape Tribulation?
03:21 We just need diesel.
03:24 Diesel fuel immediately and we need to get people evacuated out of here.
03:27 We've already started collating a manifest of sort of trying to prioritise who needs
03:32 to be heading out first.
03:34 We've got displaced tourists, we've got elderly here.
03:36 We're going to need more medical assistance as the days and weeks go on.
03:41 So yeah, we're just trying to do our best right now with what we have and we're not
03:44 really waiting around.
03:45 We just have to get the show on the road and just do what we can for one another.
03:49 [BLANK_AUDIO]
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