It’s not a matter of if, but when Taree floods again. Locals are asking themselves if they can survive it

By Wednesday afternoon, most of the mud had been cleared from Michelle Bennett’s house.

There’s still some seeping through the floors and gaps in her Croki home, but the shovelling and hosing down is done, and she’s in good spirits.

“We’ve got a mud-free house,” Bennett says. “I appreciate the small things in life now.”

When the swollen Manning River finally receded last week, Bennett and her partner, Mario Agius, returned from the refuge of their neighbour’s home on higher ground to find every inch of floor covered in a thick, brown sludge swept in from the waterway, which reached a record height days earlier.

Michelle Bennett’s Croki home was inundated when the Manning River burst its banks.Credit: Kate Geraghty

Since then, the pair has relocated to a caravan parked outside while they slowly work to rebuild their lives. Metres away, the kettle and microwave on the front verandah is the closest they can get to a kitchen for now.

“It’s like glamping, but with more mud,” Bennett says.

Without insurance, it will be a long, costly road back to normality for Bennett and Agius, who will be left thousands of dollars out of pocket to make their home “flood friendly” for the next time the Manning breaks its banks.

“We’ll get there, we’ve still got a roof over our heads,” Bennett says.

The devastation has taken its toll, though. When the Manning River started swelling, it was exciting seeing how high the waterway would rise, Bennett says. Then came the adrenaline rush of preparing for the flood to hit. That, too, was quickly replaced with the reality of the destruction.

“We all have our moments,” Bennett says.

Like Bennett and Agius, many in Croki, a village a few kilometres along the Manning north from Taree, were left without insurance after flooding in 2021 upped premiums by more than $30,000 per year.

Bennett is collecting donated clothes from Cundletown’s community centre, just across the river from Taree, when the Herald speaks with her; without power or a working washing machine, she’s been wearing the same clothes for days.

In the madness of cleaning up, she’s lost her last hair tie and been left with an unruly mop for days.

“I’ve got one, and I lost it the other night,” Bennett laughs.

Soon, though, a volunteer at the community centre is on the hunt for a pack among the piles of gifted goods.

“The little things, hey?” Bennett says. “Warm socks and hairbands.”

Dozens of bags of Bennett and Agius’ muddied clothes and bed linen have been picked up by neighbours and volunteers to be washed since the roads cleared.

“It’s amazing what our community does to pitch together to help,” Bennett says. “Different people in the community have been doing all different sorts of things. It’s amazing.”

Bennett and Agius know the risks of staying put on the banks of the Manning after two major floods in the past four years, but haven’t once considered leaving their home.

“It is what it is,” Bennett says. “It’s just Mother Nature doing her thing at the moment.”

Their neighbours, though, are less optimistic and grappling with the decision to stay or go.

Toby Uglow, who has lived with his wife, Rachel, in Croki since 2006, says while his home was spared any damage in this flood, some of the village’s less fortunate long-term residents have decided to move on.

“They can’t do it again,” Uglow says from beside a bonfire locals have gathered around nightly to keep morale high since the water receded.

Kile Nicholas checks on Phil Lorking, 80, in the isolated village of Croki last week.Credit: Kate Geraghty

“It’s just heartbreaking.”

The main driver for moving, Uglow says, is the unaffordable insurance costs that leave locals vulnerable to losing everything each time the village floods.

Uglow was one of only a few of Croki’s few dozen residents whose homes weren’t inundated when the Manning rose. Some had just finished renovating their homes after the 2021 flood battered the village; almost all lost their cars in both floods. This time around, the water stopped two millimetres short of flowing into the Uglows’ home.

“The face of the village is going to change a fair bit after this one,” Uglow says. “It is very sad.”

About 3500 people remain isolated in six communities across the mid-north coast and Hunter regions, while about 700 homes and 400 other buildings have been deemed uninhabitable.
More than 6000 insurance claims have been filed, about a quarter of them coming from the MidCoast council area. The floods have also claimed five lives.

Waters have mostly receded but damage to roads and bridges still prevents access to some parts, with resupply operations continuing.

Lessons from Lismore

Meanwhile just over four hours up the highway from Taree, Lismore has been on its own slow and winding road to recovery since the historic 2022 floods that left much of the town underwater and destroyed homes and businesses.

The lessons learnt there in the past three years could go a long way to better preparing the Mid North Coast, and towns like Taree, for the next natural disaster, says Elizabeth Mossop, the head of Living Lab Northern Rivers.

“They are all going to be dealing with versions of the same problem, and if they can find a way to really work together, to share resources and expertise, that lays the foundation,” Mossop says.

“They are all going to have to make plans for recovery.”

Mossop leads the collaboration between the University of Technology Sydney, Southern Cross University and the NSW Reconstruction Authority which is focused on designing a sustainable future for Lismore. It has offered to carry out a similar initiative on the Mid North Coast.

It’s not a matter of if another large-scale flood hits the region, but when, Mossop says.

“What you hope, is that we can just translate those things very directly so that people are not trying to reinvent the wheel,” Mossop says.

First, though, the region will need to focus on its recovery.

Securing housing for those who were displaced or lost their homes in the floods, and getting businesses back-up and running is at the top of the list to achieve that, Mossop says.

“Obviously, the priority has to be focused on helping to make people whole again,” Mossop says.

“You can’t think about the future while you’re dealing with the disaster, but when we get to the situation where people are starting to think about how to go forward, that kind of planning has to take place with building in an understanding of what it is going to take to make these places more resilient into the future.”

But, Mossop says, that planning doesn’t just need to take place on the Mid North Coast.

“There are very few places anywhere in Australia that have thought seriously about the kind of adaptation work to minimise the impacts of flooding,” Mossop says.

“We’ve thought about it, historically, in a kind of 20th century way of ‘How can we defeat the floodwaters, how can we keep the floodwaters out of here?’ And we’re now dealing with a scale of events where that’s not possible.

“We have to think about it in this different way ... what can we do if the floodwaters are coming? What can we do to minimise the damage that they cause, to minimise threats to safety, and to minimise the period of disruption that is caused by these floods.”

And it’s not just floods, the regions’ resilience against other disasters, including bushfires needs to be improved.

What that looks like going forward is not yet clear.

In Lismore, a $900 million buyback scheme, under which homes in the city’s most flood-prone areas have been bought by the NSW government, was introduced to move properties and people out of harm’s way. No such scheme has been locked in for the Mid North Coast, but it is one of many options on the table.

Plan and adapt

Mal Lanyon, chief executive of the NSW Reconstruction Authority, says authorities are working through disaster adaptation planning to understand the risks associated with each region, and what kind of mitigation can be put in place, so residents can live safely in communities.

“It’s not just about recovery, it’s about trying to prevent the impacts of disasters before they happen, knowing that obviously we can’t stop disasters in the types of rainfall that we’ve seen in the past couple of weeks,” Lanyon says.

While it’s too early to say whether Taree and the Mid North Coast’s recovery could be modelled on Lismore and the Northern Rivers, Lanyon says there have been significant lessons from the past few years, including how quickly clean-up started.

“We’ve made significant strides,” Lanyon says. “We had a plan in long before any of the water started to recede.”

But, for all the lessons that were learnt from previous floods, there are many that weren’t.

Some locals in and around Taree say they were left in the dark about the scale of the disaster flowing down the Manning until it was too late, warned that the flooding would reach only minor to moderate levels. Instead, the river reached its highest levels since 1929.

During some of the heaviest rainfall that hit Taree, three flood gauges immediately upstream from Taree were unavailable. If not for their own research and diligence after similar issues during the 2021 floods, Toby Uglow says, Croki residents would have been caught off guard by the record flooding.

The Bureau of Meteorology says the gauges, which provide the weather bureau with real-time data on river levels, were unavailable at various times during the flooding due to a Telstra outage, but that its weather forecasts and warnings service is “resilient and not dependent on any one piece of equipment”.

“Forecasts and warnings for all regions are based on a combination of many different observing systems including satellites, automatic weather stations, radars, rain gauges and hydrological monitoring stations. The composite nature of these systems allows specialist staff to monitor approaching weather and issue forecasts and warnings,” the weather bureau said in a statement, adding that flood warnings for the Manning, Myall, Paterson, Williams and Hunter rivers had been in place for several days before the gauges were affected.

Paul and Liz Brennan, who were helicoptered to safety from their flooded Oxley Island home across the river from Taree, say they only became aware of the severity of the flooding when it was too late to evacuate.

“It seems to be another one of these examples where we were unable to provide people with effective advice about what was going to happen,” Mossop says.

Rescued: Oaxley Island residents Liz Brennan, her husband Paul Brennan (second from right) and a neighbour (right).Credit: Kate Geraghty

The complete scale of the damage in these floods is not yet clear, but the impact is being tallied as the water recedes; across the Mid North Coast, water inundated more than 1100 homes, more than 15,000 cubic metres of flood debris has been cleared, and more than 1200 cattle carcasses, a number expected to increase, have been retrieved.

Outside the major centres across both the Mid North Coast and Hunter regions, farmers have been hit as hard as anyone.

In Hinton, near Maitland in the Hunter, the Wilson family threw thousands of dollars of milk away when road closures that isolated the tiny town stopped trucks from reaching the farm.

With 200 of the farm’s 250 acres underwater, the Wilsons lost all of their grazing paddocks they rely on to feed their 180-odd cattle. Until at least September they will have to spend tens of thousands of dollars on buying hay while they wait for the paddocks to dry and become workable again.

“The farmers put so much into their land and care for their animals … there is a mental health component right through these sorts of incidents and impacts on those directly affected,” Lanyon says.

It’s farmers like the Wilsons who will be struggling to get up and keep going again, Lanyon says.

“I’ve got little doubt that some people, particularly primary producers who have been through this a number of times, are feeling despair,” he says.

Locals start the clean-up on Manning Street in Taree.Credit: Kate Geraghty

“They’re people that love their animals, they love working the land, and yet they’ve found over the past few years, that they’ve had repeated disasters, which has not only impacted on their income, but certainly on their lifestyle and on their animals.”

Whatever the way forward, planning for the next disaster needs to start now, MidCoast Mayor Claire Pontin says.

“We are needing to have a discussion about where to from here,” she says. “There is not a clear path.”

Pontin is keen to start immediate talks with state and federal governments about what mitigation work can be done to help protect the Mid North Coast.

“It is something that we need to start doing on behalf of the community,” Pontin says.

“Some of our people now have just been flooded so many times they’re tearing their hair out, and they don’t know what to do.”

But, through all the destruction, and despite the long road ahead, Pontin is hopeful the community will recover as it has done before.

“People just amaze me,” Pontin says.

In Croki, as some of her neighbours plan to leave their flood-prone homes, Michelle Bennett is grateful for the little things.

While most of her furniture and many of her possessions have been ruined, it’s not physical objects she holds on to. And, like Pontin, she is amazed by people’s decency in the face of a crisis.

“A lot of stuff went, but I’ve learnt it’s the people, it’s the memories that are so much more important than those things,” she says.

“It’s brought out a lot of beauty in people.”

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