River Murray flood: Kingston On Murray Caravan Park owners Barb and Geoff Calvert yet to reopen
More than a year after the River Murray floods, a caravan park that was the lifeblood of a small community remains closed, with the owners still searching for answers.
SA News
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Barb Calvert pauses when she’s asked to describe how she and husband Geoff have coped since last summer’s River Murray floods turned their world upside down.
Behind her, workers on earth moving equipment are busy carting and flattening soil as the couple continues the long process of restoring Kingston On Murray Caravan Park after it was gutted by the floods.
The park the Calverts have owned since 2016 has been out of action for more than 12 months and they don’t know when it will open again.
If everything goes to plan, they say, it might be Easter. Hopefully. Maybe.
But at least now they have a path forward to reopening.
Only a few weeks ago, they weren’t even sure if that would ever happen.
They weren’t even sure if they would even be able to move back into their home, a modest living area above the park’s reception office.
This summer, their office and home is about 200 metres from a picture-perfect river inlet as the Murray meanders by harmlessly.
Last summer, the office was a metre or so under water as the Murray’s biggest flood in 50 years left a trail of destruction.
The Calverts’ Kingston On Murray Caravan Park spent weeks under water after the river breached a levee that the couple had poured their life savings into – but were unable to finish before the SES ruled it was unsafe for them to continue building. But more on that later.
They lost 11 cabins and nearly all the park’s infrastructure in the flood, before a drawn-out battle with their insurance company.
Meanwhile, battling bureaucratic red tape has made their past 12 months a living nightmare.
“In a nutshell, it’s been quite devastating,” Mrs Calvert says when asked to reflect on their experience.
“It’s been devastating and traumatic – to the point where I didn’t really want to be here at certain stages.”
She credits the support of family and friends for getting her through.
“Mentally, it’s not as simple and easy as to say: ‘just get up and go and build again’,” she says.
“There’s so much mentally to cope with.
“And the horror of seeing everything you’ve spent years doing just come to nothing.
“I’ve been through so many phases of giving up and even some days now I wake up and have to tell myself ‘no, just do the thing in front me’ so I can get through another day.”
The Calverts moved to SA from Phillip Island when they purchased the caravan park in February, 2016.
When the water rose in November-December that year, it inundated a non-powered site area on the river side of the levee that protects the rest of the park.
But the levee itself was never under threat in the flood of 2016, and the couple spent years working hard to improve the park’s infrastructure.
Before last summer’s flood they were finally in a position to take a break themselves.
They had even spoken about taking on a park manager so they could hit the road.
That was before the river started rising.
They realised early on there was a chance their existing levee might not be high enough, so they drained their savings and borrowed some more to spend about $350,000 raising and strengthening the levee.
But then on December 13, 2022, Mrs Calvert’s 61st birthday, she received word that the State Emergency Services had ruled the levee was in danger of breaching and ordered them, and the few remaining residents living in the park, to evacuate.
“A girl who I worked with had taken me out to lunch and when I got back (to the park), I got a phone call saying our levee had been breached,” Mrs Calvert said.
“I said ‘no it’s not, I’m here in the park’ … and within half an hour not only the police turned up, but everybody else.
“It had been released on the SES Facebook page saying it (the levee) had been breached and we were being evacuated.
“We knew nothing about it.
“So I went from celebrating (my birthday) to … just disbelief.”
As part of the evacuation order, the Calverts were also unable to keep raising the height of the levee.
They are confident that if they had been allowed to do so they could have built it up enough to save their park.
Without the extra height they were planning to add, however, the levee breached eight days after they were evacuated and their beloved park and their retirement fund, went under water.
They have spent the past year battling their insurance company and attempting to navigate their way through the process of a maze of red tape that comes with applying for government flood relief grants.
They discovered they were underinsured and there was likely to be a gap of more than $2m between their insurance coverage and the total cost of redeveloping the park.
They became caught in a vicious cycle of uncertainty during which neither the government nor their insurer would commit to a payout until they knew what the other would provide.
The closure of the park meant visitors to the tiny town, with an official population of 312, dried up and the local general store and post office closed after recording a 75 per cent drop in earnings.
So Mrs Calvert, 62 and a survivor of three bouts of cancer, has stepped up to sort the mail and runs the post office out of the Kingston On Murray town hall.
The Calverts finally moved back into their home in December, after nearly 12 months renting in town, but there’s still a power of work to do before they can reopen.
The park is a hive of activity when The Sunday Mail visits. Two excavators, a bobcat and an earth compactor work frantically while Mr Cavert is digging a trench for TV cable near where some new cabins will soon be installed.
Mr Calvert, 55, is too busy to spend much time with us.
The bobcat has just knocked over a newly installed power pole, and he’s not sure if fixing that damage will be a 10-minute job or push everything back a week.
It’s just another task in the seemingly endless list of jobs.
When I ask how he has coped with the past 12 months, he shrugs his shoulders.
“You’ve got no choice, you just do it,” he says.
“Just focus on one little job at a time and get that finished and then start the next one.
“If you look at the whole big project, you’d be in a heap.”
The Calverts say the tight-knit community has been critical in helping them get through the past 12 months, and locals Mike Smith and Ron Neal are helping Mr Calvert with the trench.
Like the Calverts, they want the park back open as soon as possible, to inject some life back into the tiny town, about 200 kilometres northeast of Adelaide, midway between Waikerie and Renmark.
They still fume at the way the evacuation was handled 12 months ago, when the Calverts were unable to finish raising their levee and say the loss of the park has been devastating.
“If you don’t have a park here and people coming in and spending the money and seeing the place, you’ve got nothing,” Mr Smith says.
“That’s what happens with little towns, they just slowly die, you know.
“You can’t live off the stale money in the town, it’s got to be fresh income.”
It’s a precious commodity the Calverts have been without for too long and Mrs Calvert says it’s been “embarrassing and humiliating” to ask others for help
But after a traumatic 12 months during which they also had to deal with family tragedy, Mr and Mrs Calvert hope the reopening of their park this year will help get their lives back on track.
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