NSW floods: Condobolin, Euabalong in firing line as Forbes, Eugowra clean up
Towns north west of Forbes and Eugowra are bracing for historic flooding with one community sandbagging a four-kilometre wall in hopes of preventing further devastation.
NSW
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The slow moving but epic tide of floodwater moving through the centre of the state will peak in the town of Condobolin at 7.8m this week before moving further west as victims of the disaster face a mammoth clean up.
Residents of towns including Forbes and Eugowra will get some relief with rain expected to hold off for a few days as they assess the full extent of the damage to their homes and businesses.
Some families are facing the prospect of being homeless at Christmas with the clean-up expected to take months after a wall of water inundated the Central West towns.
SES incident controller for the Lachlan Valley Ken Murphy said as the volume of water moved west along the Lachlan River through Condobolin, SES volunteers were inspecting houses in Forbes to hose out the mud contaminated by fuel and sewage.
“In our initial estimations in Forbes, there are approximately 700 residential and commercial properties which have been damaged,” he said.
Their attention has been on installing sandbags to fortify Condobolin ahead of the 7.8m peak expected on Wednesday and also supporting a small village just west called Euabalong where the residents have now been cut off by floodwaters and can only be rescued by helicopter.
“We have offered a number of the residents voluntary evacuation,” Mr Murphy said.
While the focus had been on supplying medicine to those marooned by floodwaters and flying helicopters to homesteads to give families groceries to eat, they were also working to help cattle and wildlife get to higher ground.
“Most of the kangaroos are being rescued by boat and they are fairly subdued … in most cases they are happy to be rescued and taken to higher ground and safety,” he said.
At Euabalong on Sunday, emergency services organised helicopters to move an estimated 2000 sheep to higher ground in a cage attached to the aircraft by a long rope.
Locals had worked together to construct a levy in a bid to protect the town but everyone had to be evacuated.
Farmer David Gleeson was having a beer at the pub after working on building a levy all day when someone raised the alarm that water was getting in.
“Everyone was finished, one of my mate’s, as he headed home he saw the water and he rang me,” he said.
“He went and found where the water was coming in and it was too big of a breach to fix and we started evacuating everyone.”
The entire town left their homes and congregated on higher ground at the town cemetery, while others worked through the night to build a second levy.
“Through the night we made a new levy bank, we managed to get it to hold until daylight and we’ve worked on it all day today so it will hold out until tonight,” Mr Gleeson said.
Meanwhile Essential Energy has told Condobolin residents to prepare for power outages in the coming days as they switch off the electricity.
“Depending on the extent of the flooding, power in parts of Condobolin and surrounding areas may be off for a number of hours or even days,” a spokeswoman said.
Condobolin local Brayden Davis has been photographing the extent of the damage with a drone last week and said everyone in the region was simply worn down after battling flooding for much of the year.
“I think everyone is worried, they’re a bit unsure about what is going to happen,” he said.
“We have had it bad, we haven’t had it this bad for years — for a lot of the locals, we think it is done and then something else comes in again.
While locals are hopeful the makeshift 3km wall of sandbags would stave off the worst for the town’s CBD, he said some homes had already been flooded.
Mr Davis said for those homes and others in the area surrounding the town, the clean-up could take up much of next year.
“There will be families without houses at Christmas time,” he said.
Residents are now bracing for swarms of mosquitoes while farmers must face damaged crops and fences after years of drought, Covid, and the mice plague which had all wreaked havoc for local farmers.
In some good news, members of the Wellington Football club managed to salvage the disused shipping container they used to house their sporting kit which had floated away in recent flooding.
Bureau of Meteorology duty forecaster Dean Narramore said the weather in Central West NSW would be windy but thankfully mostly dry for much of the week.
“The west of the ranges should have a dry week, which would be the first time in a while that’s happened,” he said.
“If we look at the next seven days, we’re going to see little if any rainfall, we could see 5mm to 10mm … Even if they do get those showers, they will be light.”
FORBES
Forbes has been torn apart in this recent flood event.
The overflowing Wyangala Dam left communities along the Lachlan River in tatters after spilling at a rate of 230 gigalitres a day. It was eventually reigned in to 80 gigalitres a day a few days later.
All of last week, the river threatened to exceed the town’s 1952 flood record of 10.79m – which it eventually breached last Tuesday.
Some of the dramatic rescues included a chopper crew plucking a family and their two dogs to safety from a table outside their flooded Forbes home.
In town, 14 people and three dogs were rescued from The Plainsmans Motel as it went underwater, then two hours later, a helicopter winched a family of three – including a couple aged 84 and 78 and their daughter – along with their two small canines from their Forbes home.
EUGOWRA
Last Friday, an angry Eugowra resident confronted NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet over the state’s emergency response to the flood disaster.
More than a fifth of Eugowra’s population evacuated as major flooding swept houses off their foundations and overturned cars across town.
Residents were reportedly using social media to headcount a population of 700 people, and in one night alone, emergency services worked to perform 150 flood rescues in Eugowra, including 100 on rooftops.
NSW SES Commissioner Carlene York said emergency crews answered an “immense number of requests” for assistance in Eugowra where the river had risen “much quicker” than anticipated.
“It was incredibly serious and significant,” she said.
“We saw river heights double in size through to 8:00am on Monday morning, where it peaked at 9.75m and the emergency warning was issued at 6:14am.”
There was tragic news late on Saturday, after a body, believed to be that of missing 85-year-old Ljubisa “Les” Vugec, was found on the outskirts, near Casuarina Dr. It comes after the body of another missing Eugowra local Dianne Smith, 60, was discovered by police earlier in the week.
COWRA
Cowra copped 121mm in a single weekend – the largest dump of rainfall it has witnessed in 118 years.
The town was wiped up by a combination of heavy rainfall and inflows into the overflowing Wyangala Dam.
A few days later, locals watched floodwaters recede merely 16 hours after the town was cut off.
MOLONG
A massive clean-up is still underway in the small town of Molong, where the CBD was partially submerged following devastating flash flooding.
People returned to the town last Tuesday to assess the damage to shops and businesses after thousands of residents were isolated in the “worst floods in recent times”.
“It’s certainly bigger than the 2005 flood,” Orange state Shooters, Fishers and Farmers MP Phillip Donato said of the floods, after witnessing the devastation in Molong first hand.
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