It’s been a month since the January 10 flash floods that tore strips off Toowoomba and destroyed the Lockyer Valley. The first run of the flood zine is almost sold out, which is pretty exciting. There are more copies on the way and I’m going to keep selling them until demand drops off. If you’d like a copy, Smells Like Zines distro is selling them through their web store for AUD$3 + postage. All the money I get from them will go to local flood appeals.
I visited the Lockyer Valley on the anniversary of the floods to check in on the people at Postmans Ridge that I wrote about in the flood zine, as well as visiting Grantham now that the road into the town is open. A lot of the hard rubbish has been carted away, but there is still plant debris everywhere. It’ll be decades before the natural environment recovers.
The survivors are having a hard time too. People I spoke to immediately after the flood who had vowed to rebuild are starting to realise exactly how difficult and draining it will be. They’re depressed and fatigued - they sound like my parents did after the 2008 Emerald floods ruined our family home. On top of all this, the survivors have to deal with the deaths of their friends and neighbours. It’s incredibly tough.
Sylvia Baillie’s body was found on the 17th of January. It took a few weeks for the DNA identification test results to come back, which need to be positive before people can officially be added to the death toll. Sylvia is the 23rd official death of the flood. There are still many more people missing and the recent bout of hot weather is making finding and identifying bodies all the more difficult.
The block where her house used to stand is neatly fenced off, with a small white cross hammered into the earth next to the foundations.
I checked in with Barry Bull down the road. You might remember him as the guy who owns the Packed To The Rafters car, or the guy who had raw sewage go through his house along with flood water.
Local tradies have helped them out, re-tiling and re-painting their house for free, but the amount of work needed to get the property back to how it was is daunting.
You can read the story of my visit with Barry here, along with photo galleries and footage of the flood itself, courtesy of Barry’s daughter Charlotte.
[caption id=”attachment_213” align=”alignnone” width=”493” caption=”Bull family toilet - after the flood, then after the clean-up. Check out the high-water mark!”]
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The highway to Grantham opened last week, so I was told to go there and take photos. The place was a ghost town in the true sense of the word. I didn’t see a single building that wasn’t badly damaged and the only people there were police and contractors putting up power poles so the electricity could be re-connected to the town. If this was Grantham cleaned up and open to the public, I’m glad I didn’t see it earlier. It was utterly heartbreaking.
My story and photo gallery of Grantham can be found here.
