Sydney: The river that used to run through Bundaberg now runs over it.
The floodwaters surging through the capital of Australia’s sugarcane-growing region are a kilometre wide, but their ferocity is even more striking.
“Listen to the roar of the water, that’s not helicopters,” Queensland state Premier Campbell Newman said when surveying the devastation that has driven 7,500 people from their homes.
“You see a lot of locations where there’s literally rapids, white water out there, so it’s very dangerous.”
Newman, a retired military officer of 14 years, called in Black Hawk helicopters equipped with night vision to pluck families from the rooftops of their swamped houses. More than 1,000 people were lifted to safety.
Then came the Hercules C130 military transports to ferry the sick and the infirm from the swamped hospital and from nursing homes that looked set to go under. They were evacuated to Brisbane.
Newman has promised the battered town that hundreds of soldiers are on their way to help prevent further distress.
“It’s certainly a major effort just to look after people who’ve been displaced,” he said.
Among those displaced and facing many nights in the Bundaberg Civic Centre was Keith Sorrensen, 79, who abandoned his home only when the water came up passed his ankles.
“Never, never in a million years did I think it was going to come that high,” he told national broadcaster ABC. “I’ve lived in Bundaberg all my life and I was an 8-year-old in the 1942 flood and I remember it vividly and it was nowhere near as bad as this one.”
The town is accessible only by air or boat. There is fresh water, but the sewerage plant is submerged.
The river reached 9.6 metres, higher than the 7.9 metres two years ago when 400 properties went under and higher than the 8.5-metre 1942 flood that Sorrensen remembers so well.
Like Sorrensen, Ruby Rozenkrantz has most of her life behind her. She too is in an evacuation centre but hoping to return to her retirement village when the crisis passes.
She was asked by the ABC what she had left behind: “Oh, everything that I own, which isn’t much, but it all means something to me. I can’t afford to start again,” she replied.
Newman’s greater worry is how young families, whose jobs and homes are in jeopardy, are going to cope.
“You’ve got people of quite modest means who are really struggling to pay the bills anyway,” he said. “And often they don’t have insurance. I’m afraid they’ve just lost everything.”
In the 2011 catastrophe across Queensland, which the federal government declared was the nation’s worst natural disaster, tens of thousands of homes and businesses were lost.
Insurance companies hiked premiums for those whose properties and belongings were at particular risk of flood damage. Those who could not afford to pay the premiums had to trust that what the weather bureau called a one-in-100-year flood would not come again in the next few years.
It has, to the amazement of old-timer Sorrensen.
“It’s unbelievable that this could happen, but you see it in other countries and states — not to us,” he said. “Our house will be uninhabitable and we’ll have to find alternative accommodation.”
— DPA
