Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Hi, I’m David Brown and like many of you I’ve experienced first hand the harsh extremes
of weather in this state.
For some reason, floods appear less threatening than other natural disasters. But ask anyone
who has experienced a flood and they will tell you the physical, emotional and financial
stress is huge.
All flooding events are dangerous and unpredictable and you’ll never get two floods the same.
So even if you think the previous flood you will find it might be a completely different
case this time around.
It’s a disaster on a monumental scale. Floodwaters have swept through Victoria’s northeast
with frightening speed and devastating consequences.
200mm of rain was dumped in 24 hours. Twelve major rivers broke their banks, and the worst
flooding on record sweeping all before it engulfed entire towns.
It was very devastating for a lot of their town. I think it peaked around about 2am in
the morning. A lot of shops had water through them and so did a lot of houses.
We were in full production and not knowing that the water was going to come in here and
I think I started work at two in the morning and by 6.30 it was all over.
Pretty surreal at first, yeah. To sort of open your front door and have the water lapping
like the incoming tide. That’s something you’d never experienced.
It took just over an hour to turn the township of Benalla into a flood plain, filling hundreds
of shops and homes and forcing the evacuation of more than 1,000 people.
Everywhere, right up through the lounge room, everywhere.
Terrified, because I’ve never seen anything like it.
You don’t know how high the water’s going to go either. You didn’t think it was going
to come in and all of a sudden it’s this high. You don’t know whether it’s going
to get that high. You’ve got no idea.
We had to shut for three days. They cut the water off because the water line got damaged
from the water supply. So it made it very hard to clean up.
Emotionally my mother never liked that house again. She had to sell it and build another
one. She never got over, as a lot of people in town still don’t. Every time it rains
heavy now, especially a lot of the older generation, they really get nervous.
It’s hair raising. It doesn’t hit you for about two days after and it was terrible.
It was amazing. I hope I never see it again.
The main street of Creswick flowed as a river, emergency services doing all they could to
rescue residents trapped by the floodwater.
We’ve got people still stuck in the houses.
We had to jump in a boat with the kids. My wife and two girls went first, and they came
back and got me after that.
Locals could only watch on in disbelief.
We started to go around the town and warn people it was coming. It was quite interesting
because a lot of people didn’t want to believe us, that there was this amount of water coming.
And we actually got told that we were doing a bit of scaremongering as well.
Once in a lifetime sort of thing isn’t it?
You’ve never seen it ever before in years and years.
Unbelievable. Unbelievable. I’ve never seen anything like this before.
In the 50 year history of the park it’s flooded now 27 times and seven of those have
been in the last 18 months. Of those seven times the park has been completely underwater
so it’s put us out of action for about 90 days overall. A good example of how high the
water was, it was up about this level and this vehicle here actually went under at about
this level here.
Every flood is different and the time to prepare will vary. For some it’s a race to be ready.
For others it’s a long, anxious wait. But in every situation there are some key things
you can do to make your home, business and family floodsafe.
In all the floods that we’ve had, there have been a number of rescue calls that emergency
services have had to go out and rescue people who have been trapped in their cars in floodwater.
So there are still a lot of people out there that don’t seem to be picking up the message
as to how dangerous floodwaters are.
All our machinery out the back that runs our fridges is all above the 93 flood level on
stands. There’s things like moving the band saw and the sausage filler and all the expensive
machinery, getting them off the ground if there’s a flood alert.
If you’ve got warning, there’s lots of things you can do. If you’ve got no warning,
there’s not much you can do.
There are a few things that you can do to prepare yourself. You need to look at the
SES website and start implementing a flood action plan and also do your home emergency
kit as well. These are just valuables that you will need during the flood because it
could be up to three days before someone can get any food, water or assistance to you.
And it’s also very important to not forget your pets, so make sure you have some leads
and food for your animals as well.
It’s inevitable. You’re in a flood plain, so we will flood and we will flood again.
It’s just getting there and making sure that the effects of the flood don’t affect
the park as badly as it has in the past.
Listen to the warnings, take notice, prepare yourself, move your stuff up off the ground
if you have to to try and minimise your loss.
It’s a very dangerous, scary situation. And you don’t want to walk, play, drive
in floodwaters.