Sydney floods: Blue Mountains family given 10 minutes to escape home amid landslide
A Sydney family are lucky to be alive, after they were given just minutes to escape from their home after their front yard started collapsing right before their eyes.
A Sydney family have lived through a “scary” ordeal where they had just 10 minutes to flee their home after their front yard fell away.
Rasleen Buksh, 41, went to the local shopping centre with her eldest daughter on Monday afternoon.
When they left their Emu Heights home near the Blue Mountains, a minor land slip had occurred as a result of heavy rainfall in the area.
But by the time they returned, just an hour and a half later, their entire front yard including the driveway had slid down the hill, forming a crater of sorts.
“If you look at the crater it’s unreal,” Ms Buksh told news.com.au. “I’m expecting an alien to crawl out of there.”
Her husband and her four kids had just a few minutes to gather their things from their home while the fire brigade waited to take them to safety.
Luckily, the mum-of-four had a green Woolworths bag leftover from the Black Summer bushfires of 2020 packed with the essentials including all their passports and birth certificates.
While she madly ran about collecting two pairs of clothes for each family member, the fire department desperately honked the horn telling her to hurry up.
“It’s scary. It [the front yard] was still falling as we were standing there,” she added.
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Ms Buksh said the first sign that something was amiss was when she went outside to pick flowers, around 9.30am Monday.
“A couple of boulders were gone, they rolled down the hill and took the trees with it,” she recalled.
“It was raining a lot, I didn’t think much of it.”
By 2.45pm, after returning from their shopping trip, most of the driveway was gone.
One of their cars is still stuck, unable to reverse out of the non-existent driveway.
“I told my kids to stay in the car, apparently I screamed, I cried, I don’t remember any of that,” the distraught homeowner said.
She immediately called her husband Naizal, 45, who was in an important meeting but immediately rushed home.
“My daughter called triple-0,” Ms Buksh added. “They told me you had 10 minutes to get what you need and get out.”
It comes as the Blue Mountains area has been declared a Natural Disaster Area following the record-breaking rains.
Now, less than two days later, the family have been told by a council engineer that it is safe to return — a comment that has outraged Ms Buksh.
“As we were standing there chunks of land was falling out when the engineers said we were safe,” she said.
“I said ‘If it’s your family in question, would you go in?’”
The family have been staying with relatives ever since, now with eight people crammed into a home meant for half as many.
Ms Buksh and her family have lived there for nearly a decade and she said “never would we have thought something like this would have happened”.
Ms Buksh is hopeful that insurance claims will pull through providing the family with enough cash to fix the home.
Her children, aged 11, 14, 18 and 19 have grown up there and she doesn’t want to give up on the house.
“It’s our home, it’s not just a building,” she explained.
“Our memories are in there, I would not sell it for the world. I’m hoping we can get back to what it was.”
Authorities have estimated that the damage from the floods spanning across both Queensland and NSW will cost as much as $2.5 billion when it is all added up.
Private insurance claims for ruined property such as houses and cars have already reached $936 million.