Some residents are still homeless after the 2022 floods and many more are still traumatised. Alfred is coming anyway
Almost three years to the day since floods wiped out large sections of the Northern New South Wales town of Murwillumbah, comes Tropical Cyclone Alfred.
About 4,000 homes in the area were deemed uninhabitable after the 2022 floods. Some people are still homeless. The trauma goes on and on. It is a community that has been for ever changed.
“I definitely still have flood trauma” says Gemma Martin, whose cottage was inundated.
“I didn’t think that I did, but if it rains heavily, I have flooding nightmares. It just happens. It’s floating around in the subconscious.”
Alfred could be worse.
“On Sunday” says the mayor of Tweed shire council, Chris Cherry, “when it was evident that this was going to be upon us I just kind of went ‘oh, no we can’t do this again. We can’t.’ But of course we can. And we will.”
There’s no choice as Alfred bears down and moves closer to land. The cyclone is expected to arrive at 1am on Friday morning. And night-time is the worst for ferocious water and wind. In the dark of night is when the accidents happen.
On Wednesday there is gentle, polite rain as the sky grows darker. The wind is eerie. It is hard to believe that within 48 hours we will be hit with a cyclone. Alfred is a different beast from the floods, which came after 90 days of continual rain, when the ground was saturated and the rivers engorged. The floods seemed to come out of nowhere. Alfred has announced himself, and he will bring cyclonic winds.
“The thing that is unknown is the wind. We’re used to the rain here” says councillor Meredith Dennis, “but not the winds they’re predicting”.
Just as the floods were the biggest in history, Alfred is another historic event for this region.
“With a normal flood, I have got flood data going back to before 1954 so we can have an insight of what is going to happen once the rain starts falling,” says Chris Christo, an intelligence officer at the SES.
“With this one, it is 50 years since the last cyclone so we have no corresponding data to compare it against. We are a bit blind and have no idea until the rain starts falling in the catchment as to what we can anticipate. Like all floods it will start off as a minor flood, go to a moderate flood and to a major flood and we’ve just got to react as it happens.
“Our priority is saving lives, secondly property.”
Christo says that people are “hyperactive. They were here at first light filling sandbags. Everyone is proactive. The shopping centres are bare. A lot of people are contracting us to see what they should be doing. Some with some crazy ideas that we can build a 30 metre levee for them.”
During the floods, people were trapped in their houses as the water rose and rose. Now Denis says “people are scared, they are really scared. You can see people getting short tempered. They are stressed, it is not far on from the floods.”
“There is a lot of PTSD out there,” the president of volunteer resilience group CORE, Katrina Semple, says.
But she says: “we will get through this. We’ve got great systems in place now so hopefully it will all be handled a lot better with the coordination of volunteers and jobs.”
The residents know they will lose electricity and internet for an extended period of time. They know there will be flooding. For better or worse, they are experienced at this. All they can do now is prepare, brace and wait with dread. Move garden furniture inside, anything that could fly and hit someone’s house. Have food, candles, first aid kits ready.
“We have learned a lot from the floods” says Cherry.
“The best way we have found to help people in this situation is to help them be as prepared as possible this time. The council has done a lot of preparatory works in the last three yeas. We are making sure we have got equipment and staff deployed around the shire to be able to work on ensuring we have got water and sewer happening through the whole event. We have got new flood pumps that were only switched on last week.”
Still, it is going to be bad. Traffic is gridlocked in the main street, slowed down by horse floats as people move their animals to higher ground.
But what this community has proven again and again is that they will pull together. They always have.
After the most recent floods came acts of kindness: volunteers who pulled off herculean tasks in helping others, hiking out into the hills to check on people who live under the radar.
It has already started. An offer of a truck to move livestock for free, an offer to drive elderly people to safety.
And so Murwillumbah waits.