Floodiversary

Tuesday, the 11^th of January 2011 felt like just a normal Tuesday. Sure, I had to wear gumboots to work *again* but that wasn’t so strange, given I’d done so almost every day through December. It was a particularly rainy Summer, which was frustrating, but no one seemed to think it was weird. On Tuesday the 11^th I walked across New Farm Park to my work at the Powerhouse, sloshing through puddles, hoping that our regular Tuesday meeting wouldn’t be too boring. I don’t remember if we ever had that meeting, because Tuesday the 11^th of January, 2011 was the day Brisbane started filling with water.

I don’t remember how we first heard about the flood, but I do remember that work basically stopped happening after we did. I brought up news sites and twitter feeds and sat glued to them for about 20 minutes. Then we made the decision to move all the lighting and sound equipment up from the lower levels. I ran around with everyone else, moving equipment in an impractical dress. At some point my mum called. To be honest at this point I hadn’t really thought about my family home. My workplace and house were in New Farm, I was confronted with the issues in front of me, and I had no clue about the ones that were to come.

Mum and Dad were frantically driving back from a holiday in New South Wales, a holiday cut short by literally hundreds of phone calls from friends, worrying about my parents’ home in Sherwood. Mum asked me if I could go across town to rescue their dog from a kennel, the staff there weren’t sure if they could get all the animals to higher ground (spoiler: he was rescued, it was fine). I think that’s when I first started panicking. Later I found out that my response to mum, that unfortunately I couldn’t because I was needed at work, and my housemate and I were desperately trying to work out whether or not we were going to evacuate, was when mum started properly panicking too.

I ran home across the sodden park in my dress and gumboots. One of my housemates was overseas, but my other housemate and I sat on our lounge room floor and tried to make a plan. We still didn’t really believe it was all that bad, but we were worried about her car, and about what would happen if we got stranded. So I put my birth certificate and some other prized possessions on top of a bookshelf, we packed up a bunch of our food and clothes, and went to our friend’s house in Bardon.

Some parts of that week are completely etched into my brain, and other parts are a big blur.

Blur:

1.     How long we stayed, it was almost a week I think?

2.     What we filled the long hours with?

3.     Did we even talk about anything other than floods?

4.     Why did we think it was ok to go to that party in the middle of the week? That was weird. I had a panic attack.

Etched:

1.     Going for a walk near a swollen creek and being convinced that the guy randomly standing on it was going to get sucked under and die in front of me.

2.     Watching press conference after press conference featuring Anna Bligh

3.     People coming to visit us like we were some kind of flood coping epicentre.

4.     Twitter

5.     The phone call from my mum on the Wednesday.

You know how in movies, people sink into chairs after receiving bad news? Even as I was doing it I was conscious of how dramatic I must have looked, sinking into a chair. I’d last spoken to mum on Tuesday afternoon, there was water in their backyard and they were evacuating. I thought they were going to get water in the bottom storey, an area largely devoted to concrete, storage and washing machines. But on Wednesday morning my mum said she’d gone down at 5am and the water had reached the top floor, and it hadn’t peaked yet. The next day it got to about waist height on the top floor.

I don’t know why I hadn’t thought this could happen. Even while watching other houses go under on the news, even though the area had gone under in 1974, even though I knew they had evacuated, I still somehow thought that it’d get a bit wet under their house and we could all move on. But no, actually this happened:

The water reaches the top story (the house is on a hill sloping backwards)

The water is slightly lower than it's highest point here

  

Our house in New Farm was unscathed, though we didn’t have power for more than a week. I went back at some stage, to get some things and to throw out the food we’d left behind. The whole suburb stank of rotting food, thrown into skips left around by the council.

We joined the clean up in Sherwood on Saturday. Me, my housemate Samara, our evacuee saviour Mim, my boyfriend Jeremy and our friend Chris. We couldn’t get there any earlier, and it took us more than an hour and a half to drive from Bardon to Sherwood. It was hot, it was stinky, but in some ways it was fun. Production lines of volunteers tried to remove the actual sewerage from the yard, walls were ripped out, photos were salvaged. I had to keep doing things; otherwise I think I would have cried. Everything was grey, muddy, it looked like a war zone instead of a suburban street. There was a pumpkin in my parents’ yard. A pumpkin. There was a metal barrel stuck in a tree next door.

Who needs walls anyway, right?

Clean up in the back yard

It’s the 13^th January 2013 today. It’s been two years and two days since the flood came, two years and one day since I dramatically sunk into a chair, two years to the day since the flood peaked. My parents have rebuilt, have repainted and returfed. They have replaced the things they lost, and are in many ways I think stronger for what happened. Sometimes I almost forget it happened, and other times I see a photo of floods and get all weepy. I know that we had it lucky, no one died or was seriously injured, the house is in a nice area and lots of people came to help and clean and be supportive.

I know that in poorer suburbs and towns, people felt neglected, felt forgotten and abandoned, and that this isn’t fair. But the flood was the hardest thing I’ve had to cope with in my short life and was one of the biggest things my family has ever gone through together. I guess I just wanted to tell you about it, because it’s kind of the anniversary, and I’ve never really spoken about it on my blog before. You can’t take much from this story except “well floods are shit” but I am glad you’re here, reading my blog, and I hope you stick around into the very exciting year that is 2013. I promise it won’t be this serious too often.