Massive recovery effort underway as floodwaters recede

ABC NEWS (Australia)

A mud army will be back on the streets of cairns this morning, as the scale of the flood disaster in far north Queensland becomes clear.

Transcript

00:00 We're in Holloways Beach where the Barron River came down four or five days ago now

00:07 and blasted a new route out to the Coral Sea through this area.

00:11 Water was up around this height.

00:13 And the most obvious sign of the flooding is these piles of rubbish that we see outside

00:19 homes here now, which is what you typically see after floods like the Brisbane floods,

00:23 the Townsville floods.

00:25 And the priority will be getting rid of this because psychologically it's a bit of a hit

00:29 to see this kind of stuff day after day for residents.

00:34 And so they'll be, the council has been pretty good so far actually and officials in terms

00:39 of getting going on cleaning things up.

00:41 Just a couple of hundred metres that way where the Barron River blew a hole through the beach.

00:47 They're already nearly finishing a causeway through there.

00:51 They've been dumping rocks over this water and they've nearly completed this causeway

00:56 to reconnect about 50 residents to the rest of the world who've been isolated.

01:01 It's pretty early here still but Ray's got up for us and he has that coffee, Ray.

01:07 Yeah, bloody beautiful.

01:08 Good stuff.

01:09 Yeah, best night's sleep I've had for four nights.

01:15 You're actually back in and the power's on now?

01:17 We've got power.

01:18 We've got no hot water or air con.

01:22 But yeah, when the power come on it was, you know, thanks to Toucan Electricity they've

01:28 done that all hefty more than ever.

01:29 Sent them out, thank you and thank you to them.

01:32 But yeah, it's been a hectic couple of days.

01:36 And so what do you want from authorities now around here?

01:40 Well, the biggest problem that I found as an older bloke, I'm 76 years old, and the

01:45 biggest problem I found was communications.

01:50 And if you did get through on the radio when you got there, you had to dial four or five

01:56 times and sometimes you'd get through, sometimes you wouldn't.

01:59 But when you did get through, they sent you to a government thing, dot com, dot this,

02:04 dot that.

02:05 And I'm thinking, well, we've got no Wi-Fi, we've got no NBN, we've got no electricity,

02:10 how in the bloody hell do we get to the computer?

02:15 Yeah.

02:16 And that was the biggest problem.

02:17 I speak to a lot of older people around here and they're all on the same boat.

02:23 It was the communications and I don't know how the government could do something about

02:29 it but.

02:30 That's got to be fixed for next time?

02:31 The NBN's, I don't know whether.

02:33 When we, I went through a flood in Ingham in '76 and we had communications because we

02:38 had landlines.

02:39 With this one we had nothing.

02:42 And that was the anxiety, the anxiety was way up here.

02:47 But otherwise, when this power come on down there, you could feel it going out of your

02:52 body.

02:53 This was last night?

02:54 Yeah, you could feel it going out of your body.

02:56 Yeah.

02:57 Yeah.

02:58 Yeah.

02:58 [BLANK_AUDIO]

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