Exhausted Lismore residents ‘rattled’ after major flood warning

Lismore residents say the latest flood threat has been like a never ending nightmare for a town on tenterhooks. The fright of receiving the knock at the door, and the grim potential, has ignited a wave of calls for government action.

Mali and her mum Sam Kelly who live in South Lismore.

Lismore collectively breathed a sigh of relief as the weather system that threatened to inundate the town heads south.

The sound of sheeting rain pounding roofs and the sight of streets closed off from flash flooding was all too familiar.

The decision on whether to stay or go was like a nasty case of deja vu for Sam Kelly in South Lismore after SES knocked on her door on Sunday night to advise her home could be inundated - again.

“We wouldn't have gone anywhere except that the SES did knock on our door and I guess it put the fear in us that it would reach the 10.7m level. If they were slightly wrong and it was just a bit more, then the levee would have broken,” she said.

Mali and her mum Sam Kelly who live in South Lismore evacuated last night, fearing the worst after major flood warnings.

“We didn’t want to be those people getting rescued again.

“For us it was better to be safe than sorry. It was easier to be gone.”

They made the call to get the kids out and they stayed with family out of the flood zone.

“Once my kids and I left I had a little mini breakdown because it felt so real again,” Ms Kelly said.

“It’s certainly that PTSD – I didn’t think I was suffering, but it hit me last night.”

Ms Kelly and her husband have spent the past four months rebuilding the ground floor of their raised home, with their daughter just moving her bed back into a recently restored room.

The thought that they could lose everything again was devastating.

“To think that we could have come home and everything be gone again,” Ms Kelly said.

Her daughter, Mali Kelly, 17, said the flood warning left her feeling “heartbroken”.

“I get so anxious and worked up and start moving things upstairs and then wake up and everything’s fine,” Mali said.

“We just did all that for nothing. But we’ll never know because if they don’t give enough notice it could rise up to where it was last time.”

Over in North Lismore, the flood water inundated Orion St/Molesworth Street, lapping at the boundary of Renee’s property.

The flood water on Orion St/Molesworth St stopped just short of Renee's house in North Lismore.

“Yesterday, I was panicking. Like absolutely panicking,” she said. “I was watching the weather and at about 3 o’clock in the afternoon I finally said, ‘nope, I can’t’.”

She packed her car with the essentials and evacuated for the night. She couldn’t bear to stay in the house with the threat of another flood.

“We’re very rattled in Lismore,” she said. “I’ve lost everything.”

“In order for me to get a good night's sleep and function as human being because I’m expected to get up and go to work today and carry on as normal … I basically have to pack up this bottom level and evacuate and go to sleep somewhere else,” she said.

This latest major flood warning was just another reminder for Renee about how long the NSW Government has taken to give Lismore residents any indication about their future.

“Can the NRRC (Northern Rivers Reconstruction Commission) please hurry up and make their announcement to move us?” she said.

“They’ve been saying any day soon since the beginning of August that they’re going to make the announcement.

“We’ve been waiting for three months for them to make an announcement as to what they’re going to do as far as land swaps, flood mitigation and buy backs, house relocations.

“The whole town is completely on edge.”

When the warning came to prepare to evacuate, Brett O’Driscoll immediately left work to come home and prepare to flee.

Brett O'Driscoll in South Lismore. He has been a security guard at Lismore Base Hospital for 18 years. He got the call to prepare to evacuate while at work yesterday.

“Waking up through the night and just hearing that rain. It sort of brought back memories of February 28. That same sort of sleepless night,” he said.

He has just recently restored two rooms in his house after the February floods, and he had two more rooms worth of building materials under his house in range of the potential flood waters.