This was one record Lismore hoped would not be broken

The rain was falling when Patrick Tatam woke up on Sunday morning at his property in Whian Whian, half an hour’s drive north of Lismore. It’s hilly, lush countryside, full of creeks and waterfalls, and it forms part of the upper catchment for the Wilsons River.

Tatam bought his patch in 2013, taken by the birds, and the quiet, and the stars at night. He lives there these days with his pet dingo, Dingo, and a family of platypuses that have taken up residence in Branch Creek, a normally placid brook which runs around two sides of his bottom paddock. “It’s like fingers coming into the palm of a hand. It’s a choke point for what is coming into Lismore,” he says.

Severe flooding hits Lismore in northern NSW in the worst flood ever recorded on Monday February 28 2022. Photo: Elise Derwin / SMH. .Credit: Elise Derwin

When he went to empty his rain gauge at 8am on Sunday, he could see the creek was higher than usual, and running faster, but it didn’t alarm him.

Down in Lismore on Sunday morning, where the rain was also falling, the talk about town was that the Wilsons River could flood the next day. They’re used to floods here. They’ve had 29 since 1870 so they know what to do to prepare for one.

For the most part they thought any flood would be lower than in 2017, when the Wilsons reached 11.59 metres. And they never thought it might surpass the flood of 1974, when the river reached 12.15 metres – a height still marked on doorways and telegraph poles across Lismore, and etched in the memories of the town’s old-timers.

Even so, come Sunday morning, Flock Espresso owners Kymee Strow and Sarah Jones weren’t going to take any risks. They had lost a cafe in Brisbane’s 2011 flood and another one when Lismore went under in 2017.

Kym Strow lost her business in town and home with her partner on Dawson Street.Credit: Elise Derwin

They weren’t worried about their house in Girards Hill, just a few blocks up the road – it had never flooded – so after closing early, they spent the afternoon moving their stock and furniture at the cafe on Woodlark Street up into the second floor of the building. Every business owner was down there on Sunday afternoon, doing the same thing. There was no sense of panic.

But back up in Whian Whian, Tatam was starting to worry. He was emptying his rain gauge every two hours to make sure he counted every drop falling from the sky and the figures were big, and getting bigger.

By midday, his creek was “up and rushing and roaring”. It was about 15 centimetres below the banks of the paddock, but it was still rising. In 2017, the creek had looked like this too. It had eventually flooded his paddock about 2pm, 14 hours before the Wilsons River breached its levee in Lismore, leading to widespread flooding. Tatam reset the rain gauge and beat a hasty retreat back inside, where he picked up his phone and called the SES to report the rainfall figures.

About 26 kilometres away in Goonellabah, the highest part of Lismore, Adam McGowan was working behind the counter at Liqourland. Customers were talking about the rain, McGowan says, “but no one was expecting a giant flood ... we were expecting the usual”.

South Lismore residents Adam and Naomi McGowen lost everything from the flood Credit: Elise Derwin

As he headed off early to start clearing out under his house on Barnes Avenue in South Lismore, his workmate warned him to be prepared for a record-breaking flood – it could get up to 14 metres.

McGowan brushed off the warning – no one else was saying that, and that would be even higher than 1974. So he headed home to his new wife Naomi, a childcare worker, to help her lift the washing machine and tools upstairs.

Across town, in Diadem Street, behind Lismore Square, people were also preparing their properties, clearing out under their houses and packing away their yards. Taylor O’Moore-McClelland and his wife, Sarah Cassidy, looked at their portable swimming pool in the backyard and wondered if they should empty it.

″⁣Our neighbours were pruning their gardens,″⁣ O’Moore-McClelland recounts. ″⁣It was pretty peaceful.″⁣

Water levels are dropping and clean up has begun after severe flooding hits Lismore in northern NSW in the worst flood ever recorded. Taylor and Sarah O’Moore-McClelland lost everything in their home.Credit: Elise Derwin

They popped out to the shops at Lismore Square about 3.30pm and in that half-hour, floodwater had cut off the way they had arrived. The SES began to block off roads.

At 5.30pm, the SES sent a text message to phones in Lismore, warning residents that evacuations would be likely for low-lying parts of Lismore sometime the next day, and to start getting ready. The couple decided to pack the car with some belongings and their dogs, and drive up to their gym, 15 minutes away in Wollongbar.

Back upstream in Whian Whian, Tatam had been calling the SES regularly since midday to let them know how much rain was falling and what was heading downstream to Lismore. Then about 7.30pm, his bottom paddock went under water. It went from half-flooded to fully flooded in an hour.

″⁣The water across the paddock was like a storm-tossed ocean. There were surf waves. There was a huge tree trunk that had been dragged all the way across the paddock, and huge rocks that had rolled across it.″⁣

Patrick Tatam’s creek floods his bottom paddock in Whian Whian on Sunday.Credit: Patrick Tatam

He called the SES again, to let them know the paddock was under and the Lismore levee was almost certainly going to go too. Over the next five hours, an increasingly frustrated Tatam would battle a very poor phone signal and the pouring rain to also call the local ABC radio twice to get the warning out. “I didn’t know what to do to get that information through,” Tatam says. “I was by myself, with my dingo.”

In Lismore, the McGowans were eating pork for tea and watching the NRL on TV before they went to bed. The SES issued an evacuation order for South Lismore at 9.30pm, but they never received it.

Strow and Jones had gone home on Sunday afternoon after preparing the cafe, “just to be sure”. Their house, an 1890s weatherboard cottage, has never flooded but after seeing the 5.30pm text message from the SES, warning evacuations were likely on Monday for low-lying parts of Lismore, they decided to put their belongings up high.

But like many others in Lismore that night, Strow and Jones felt edgy and couldn’t sleep. The driving rain was not letting up. At 12.43am, their phones pinged. It was another message from the SES, this one written all in capital letters.

“SES EMERGENCY FLOOD ADVICE. LISMORE IS ISOLATED. FOR YOUR SAFETY EVAUATE TO HIGHER GROUND NOW ONLY IF SAFE TO DO SO ... FLOODING AROUND 1974 LEVEL POSSIBLE. LISMORE LEVEE WILL OVERTOP. THIS IS A LIFE THREATENING SITUATION! RISK TO LIFE IMMINENT.“

Strow ran outside. Water was pouring down her street. It was spurting into the air out of the ground. She and Jones grabbed their dog and jumped in the car. They drove up the hill and turned left and left again to go across the highway, where the waters were lapping the intersection.

“When we got to the lights [at the highway], the water was touching the wheels, but within three or four seconds you could feel it coming up the sides of the car.

“It was just at the tyres, then it was splashing up at the windows ... Everyone was super hesitant about going through it.”

They made it across and made their way further up the highway, where they spent the night in the car. The water overwhelmed the Lismore levee two hours later, at 3am.

Four doors up from the Strow-Jones house, as her neighbours fled, Lee Hourigan was sleeping soundly in a house that had never flooded. She’d wake three hours later to water at her bed that rose to chest-height within five minutes. She’d manage to swim out of her house, despite the strong current, and would be rescued by a passing kayaker as the sun rose.

Across town in Barnes Avenue, South Lismore, the McGowans were also fast asleep. Adam got up at 4am to check the water level and could see it was about 1.6 metres against the outside of the house, but it was still well clear of their elevated front door, so he went back to bed. Twenty minutes later, Naomi “put her feet out of bed and it was sloshy and wet”.

As the water rose, they took refuge on their dining room table. “It just kept coming faster and faster,” Naomi says, standing on her mud-covered front lawn on Thursday afternoon, clothes covered in filth as an army of friends and family clean and gut the house. A man turns up to help with a bucket of cleaning products and a crowbar.

“[The SES] told us to wait and that help was coming at daybreak,” Naomi says. “They were telling us to go into the roof, go into the roof...” Adam continues, “but she really didn’t want to go into the roof,” pointing at his wife, who nods her head in agreement, eyebrows raised.

So the couple went outside instead, to stand on a narrow strip of landing near their back door, barely deep enough for their feet. They tried to use a retractable awning to climb up on to the roof, but Naomi slipped and fell into the floodwater and Adam had to scoop down and with one hand, pull her over towards the steps so she could regain her footing.

When a woman in a paddleboard went past, they flagged her over and used the board to climb up on to their roof, where they awaited rescue, watched and heard their neighbours struggle to survive. Many of their neighbours in this pocket of Lismore are elderly and live alone. Adam pointed out they are not strong enough to climb into a roof, or on to one.

“There’s a man who lives over the back there, who’s maybe 80 or 90, and we could see him in his living room and the water was going up to his neck. All I could do was sit and watch,” Naomi says.
Every time the couple saw a boat pass, they tried to point the man out to the rescuers on board, and eventually he was pulled to safety.

The damaged roof next door to the McGowans’ house, where a family had to be rescued from inside.Credit: Catherine Naylor

Then Naomi points to the roof next door, where corrugated metal sheets have been ripped and peeled backwards at the peak, yellow insulation busting out of it. “I could hear them begging and screaming to get out,” she says. “I just wanted them to get out. They’ve got two young kids.”

Eventually the woman on the paddleboard returned and used a piece of wood to help the family next door pry open their roof so they could escape.

The McGowans were picked up by three men in a private boat at 11am, and dropped at the Ballina Bridge, which sat above the flood. From there, they were ferried down the highway by another boat, over the intersection which Strom and Jones had crossed in their car 11 hours earlier, and to dry land a few blocks further up the hill. They saw a police rescue boat a few times when they were sitting on their roof, but they say they never saw an SES boat.

It’s been almost a week since the rain began to fall in earnest on Patrick Tatem’s property at Whian Whian and flood his bottom paddock. It’s been almost a week since that same water – 861 millimetres in the end, in just over 24 hours - made its way down those creeks and over the waterfalls in that hilly country outside Lismore, gathering pace and volume as it went.

And it’s been almost a week since it poured into Leycester Creek where it merges with the Wilson River and raged into Lismore in the dead of the night, forcing families into their roofs, destroying homes and businesses, and claiming the lives of at least four people.

The 1974 flood never left the people of Lismore. The flood of 2022 will leave scars that may never heal. Premier Dominic Perrottet admitted as much yesterday, noting the trauma that people had suffered.

Sitting on a mud-covered couch that should be in his living room but now sits in his garden, O’Moore-McClelland can’t get over the destruction of his neighbourhood, given on Sunday morning he thought the flood wouldn’t even breach the levee, and he was worried about emptying a swimming pool. He’s been told the pool ended up floating over all the neighbours’ gardens.

“We wouldn’t be alive today if we’d stayed,” he says. “No way.”