From Northern Rivers activist film maker Cloudcatcher Media's March 2022 flood aftermath in Lismore, Ballina and beyond....
NSW: You have a problem that you need to do something about. pic.twitter.com/Yimr6DrDFX
— Alan Baxter ♛ (@AlanBixter) March 9, 2022
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| Coraki, Northern NSW, as the flood waters recede, March 2022 IMAGE: The Daily Telegraph |
The Sydney Morning Herald, 11 March 2022:
The real disaster has been the failed response, writes Cam Hollows.
I'd been covering the Catholic hospital in Lismore for the first couple of days of the floods. With many other doctors cut off, we'd been treating patients offloaded from boats.
When I heard that Ballina District Hospital was being evacuated to higher ground on March 1, I threw my medical kit in the back of a four-wheel drive.
I also dressed in my wetsuit and dive boots. I had my snorkel too. As I drove into Ballina, power failed as we were passing the Big Prawn.
It was scary. I knew if we couldn't cross from West Ballina, we would be spending the night evacuating people in floodwater in the dark.
But we got to the hospital. It was a long night, treating and moving Ballina patients in a relatively orderly way to a local school where the hospital was relocated.
That night I was just another pair of hands helping out.
It was also my 40th birthday.
As the floods worsened the next day, a colleague and I offered to volunteer at one of the two major evacuation centres in Lismore only to find they were well-staffed. Many of the volunteer medics there had lost their homes or clinics but kept working.
But there was no doctor left in Coraki, the local Bundjalong's people's word for the place. Everybody in the Northern Rivers knows that Coraki - which sits on the confluence of the Richmond and Wilson rivers in northern NSW - is where floods hit worse, as it's where four of the northern rivers meet.
More than 600 people and their pets had already spent a few days crammed into an evacuation centre. With no roads in or out, they'd been cut off from help or supplies for many days.
I hitched a ride there in a JetRanger helicopter. Knowing I was of little use without medical supplies, I signed out as much as I could think of from a local base hospital. And, with help from a medical student, packed it on the chopper.
Looking down from above, it was nothing but brown water and debris as far as the eye could see. It was like Vietnam's Mekong Delta but with fewer boats.
Where Coraki is located, everything was underwater. The water had severed the town in half. Some residents were trapped on islands.
I remember thinking, "We don't need the army. We need the navy."
It smelled worse than many of the more unfortunate places I have been where there is no sewage (I used to live in Papua New Guinea).
Septic tanks were overflowing. The irony is that Coraki is a town full of plumbers who could do little to help because they'd lost their tools in the floods.
Arriving at the evacuation centre in the Uniting Church, I found local nursing, fire and SES staff and volunteers dead on their feet but still functioning. Who knows how? Again, many volunteers there had lost their homes but not their spirits.
They were working in a room filled with human misery. As a medical student, I had spent three months in a trauma hospital in Vietnam. Needless to say, that was better equipped than Coraki last week.
For the next two days and nights, I only napped on a bed requisitioned from a "state of the art" health facility disabled by lack of power and planning.
Together, volunteers and I established a functioning resuscitation centre and a wound clinic.
We treated locals whose feet looked like bags of mince. We patched up rescuers so they could get back on boats. Oldies had run out of medicine. There were loads of sore tummies, and sick and scared kids.
Mental health was a challenge for all generations.
I reviewed a patient's arm that had been savaged by a kangaroo. Locals said they had treated a range of these injuries from roos that had panicked in rising waters.
Before I arrived, local nurses - many stranded from jobs in nearby towns - had triaged patients for medical evacuations, which we started loading onto helicopters.
The locals, including a NSW health nurse who had also been stranded from work, had been doing an outstanding job. But without additional help, it couldn't last.
Until I was relieved after a couple of days, we didn't see an additional NSW or Defence Force doctor or nurse.
I relied on locals and a Queensland optometrist who had been stranded on the island. The irony of a Dr Hollows working with an optometrist was not lost on anyone.
We also had to check on the 50-bed nursing room cut off at the other end of town.
It turned out to be lucky that I had taken my defibrillator with me. A team of locals used it to resuscitate a man who had a massive cardiac arrest in the lounge room of a house nearby. People rarely come back to life outside a hospital.
For the vast majority of my time in Coraki, communication was cut off, and rumours were flying everywhere, one of which turned out to be true. I worried when I heard there was a woman who was pregnant with a severe medical condition who had been sling-lifted to the evacuation centre to Coraki from her trapped home. We finally found her and organised to get her airlifted to safety.
I was very relieved when replacements arrived, former medical colleagues with whom I had shared many sick patients and night shifts in the past.
I got home on Saturday to find a letter from my six-year-old daughter, written while I was away. "Dad, don't want you to go." She wrote she was "wuryd".
I returned to Coraki last Tuesday, the ninth day of the flood. Apart from phone coverage which I had helped organise, no doctor had yet to visit the nursing home. Yet again, aged care had been forgotten.
Australia is a nation where battlers survive natural disasters. But the real disaster was the lack of planning and failed response from government. Our weather has changed, but it is clear our government hasn't kept up.
There are still plenty of people in Coraki - and other places heavily impacted by flooding - living in tents, shelters and cars. I can patch up wounds, but the mental health scars will remain long into the future.
Please be careful putting your hand in your pocket to help out, especially if you can't afford it. Instead, ask what the government has done with the money it has already taken from you in taxes.
Cam Hollows is a doctor in the Northern Rivers and a member of the Hollows Foundation, which his father Fred Hollows, an ophthalmologist, set up. It has restored sight to more than 2.5 million people and distributed 100 million doses of antibiotics for trachoma to prevent blindness.
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| Ballina Hospital evacuation to higher ground at local high school IMAGE: Daily Mail: Australia, 2 March 2022 |
Listen to this part of Prime Minister Scott Morrison's question and answer segment at the end of his Wednesday 9 March 2022 press conference in Lismore in the NSW Northern River region.
This is the sacred land, with gorge, watercourse, ancient stone burials and secret business places that Morrison supports destroying. The place where once the water is stopped from flowing freely will permanently inundate core endangered Koala habitat and eradicate endangered Eastern Freshwater Cod breeding habitat.
And for what? The proposed 50 gigalitre Dunoon Dam on Rocky Creek in a catchment area of roughly 50 sq km, even when combined with the existing 14 gigalitre dam on the same creek, would never mitigate or stop flooding of Lismore City and environs.
I note that Morrison openly blames unspecified Northern Rivers residents who have "resisted" flood mitigation measures (hold all term which includes dams and levees) for the frequency and severity of flood events in recent years.
Given the adverse weather events currently being experienced across Northern NSW and climate change promising more unwelcome experiences to come, I'm not sure whether this would be considered an enviable job......
Echo, 8 March 2022:
So, you think you can manage an emergency?
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| Lismore flood. Photo Darren Bridge |
All over the Northern Rivers, amateur crisis response co-ordinators have filled a vacuum left by under-resourced and under-prepared official agencies.
Most community volunteers have felt little other choice and getting paid for the pleasure of helping their neighbours is unlikely to enter their minds.
But doesn’t hard work deserve decent pay? Like, around the $100K mark?
Perhaps it’s time we reconsidered a disaster response system based largely on volunteerism, especially when studies in recent years show fewer and fewer Australians have time to volunteer thanks to work and family pressures.
Emergency work in paradise
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| Live and work in Paradise! Photo supplied. |
Enter: the NSW government’s Emergency Management Coordinator.
It’s a newly advertised position with a starting salary of around $99K plus super.
An ad for the full time Local Land Services job position earlier this week said it included responsibility for the central & North Coasts including Newcastle, the Hunter Valley, Port Macquarie, Lismore and the Far North Coast.
The job location was negotiable, the ad said…..
The Emergency Management Coordinator would have to be adept at ‘functioning in an operating environment of change where risks and issues require challenging responses’, the ad read.
Other requirements for the role were:
The successful candidate also needed a current NSW Driver License and an ‘ability and willingness to travel throughout the North Coast Region, including overnight stays’, the ad read.
The new Emergency Management Coordinator would have to report to the government’s ‘Team Leader Partnerships’, form productive relationships with regional stakeholders and provide advice to landholders.......
CLIMATE COUNCIL STATEMENT ON THE FLOODS
07.03.22
BY CLIMATE COUNCIL
This is climate change. Now is the time for leadership.
The scale and speed of the flooding disaster still unfolding across Queensland and New South Wales is breathtaking. Some communities remain cut off and in dire need of fresh water and food, emergency housing, telecommunications, and power.
The emergency response is still underway, but we already know of widespread devastation with lives lost, livelihoods swept away and entire towns destroyed.
As extraordinary flooding and extreme rainfall were sweeping the east coast, hundreds of the world’s most eminent scientists were providing information painfully relevant to what Australians are experiencing.
The latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change makes it crystal clear that climate change is intensifying extreme weather events including rainfall events like this one.
The report warns that our ability to cope with these events as well as escalating heatwaves, bushfires, and other extremes is rapidly diminishing. It spells out how the decisions of governments this decade will determine how much worse things get.
In short: unless we rapidly and drastically cut greenhouse gas emissions this decade, extreme weather will get much, much worse.
Climate change isn’t a footnote to the story of these floods. It is the story.
Some politicians claim this flooding disaster was something no one could have predicted. The implication is that the heartbreak and loss being experienced by so many Australians right now is unavoidable.
The truth is, scientists have been warning us for decades that climate change will worsen all extreme weather in Australia. Deadlier heatwaves. Devastating droughts. Megafires like Black Summer. Rainbombs such as this.
Many of these flood-affected communities have experienced multiple “unprecedented” disasters in the past 10 years. If we don’t start talking about why this is happening then we won’t be able to respond appropriately to this disaster over the coming months and years. Nor can we adequately prepare for those on the way.
Worsening disaster after disaster – with fewer reprieves between are our reality, because the Earth’s atmosphere is warmer, wetter, and more energetic. This is climate change.
Unprecedented is no reason to be unprepared.
We’ve had decades to respond to expert advice and help communities prepare for a massive escalation in extreme weather.
It’s been almost 500 days since the Royal Commission into Natural National Disaster Arrangements handed its report to the Morrison Government. The Commission acknowledged the role that climate change is playing in worsening disasters such as the Black Summer bushfires: “Natural disasters have changed, and it has become clear to us that the nation’s disaster management arrangements must also change.”
Our frontline responders are being stretched past their absolute limits. Battered communities are struggling to cope, often experiencing multiple record-breaking disasters within a few years. In some parts of Australia people can no longer afford insurance and many will be left with little after these waters recede.
Major investment and careful planning are required to prepare communities and first responders.
Where are our leaders?
Too many leaders are silent or absent. Some are wilfully misleading the public about what little has been done to address the climate challenge. Time and again expert advice is offered but ignored.
Now is the time to talk about the Morrison Government’s inadequate response to climate change, because burning coal, oil, and gas is supercharging extreme weather.
Those who argue otherwise want debate gagged because they are failing to step up on this issue.
Australians are paying a high price for the lack of meaningful national action to tackle climate change and prepare communities for worsening extreme weather.
Elected leaders must be held accountable.
The media has a critical role to play in explaining why extreme weather events are becoming more frequent and severe. Today, it is remiss to report on any extreme weather event without providing information on how climate change worsens these events, and what should be done in response.
Australians want and deserve better than this.
We call on all federal political parties and candidates to:
Tell Australians what concrete steps you will take to prepare and equip emergency services and communities for inevitable climate-fuelled disasters.
Actively acknowledge the destructive role that climate change is playing in driving worsening disasters including these megafloods.
Explain to the public how in the next term of Federal Parliament you plan to get national emissions plummeting by rapidly scaling up readily available renewable energy and building an economy that is free from fossil fuels.
Ensure that towns, cities and communities are rebuilt in a way that takes into account the inevitable future changes in climate and makes them more resilient.
It’s time to show leadership and step up to the most critical issue not just of our time, but all time. We have everything to lose, the time for action is now.
The Climate Council brings together Australia’s preeminent experts of climate science, impacts and solutions. We provide authoritative, expert and evidence-based advice on climate change to journalists, policymakers, and the wider Australian community. Our full team of experts can be found here
For further information, go to: climatecouncil.org.au
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By Climate Council / 07 March 2022
