For days, Lismore residents have watched the dark skies. Now, they are looking at the river

For days the people of Lismore have trained their eyes on dark skies. Now they’re looking down over the concrete wall between their city and the Wilsons River, which is brown, stewing with currents and bubbles, and threatening to rise.

The grating advance of ex-tropical cyclone Alfred is summoning waves of diagonal rain to the floodplain and its heaving tributaries. It’s midday, and the latest update from the Bureau of Meteorology holds that Lismore’s CBD will flood.

State Emergency Service community liaison officer Ian Leckie stands nearby, war-gaming with police rescue officers. For the patrols of SES vans and police trucks hitched with boats, the emergency has just begun.

“We are still at a very high river. The Richmond River is high, the Wilsons River is high,” he says. “The best thing people can do at the moment is if they’re in an evacuation zone, not to be there.”

Nervous Lismore residents watch the river rise at the Browns Creek Pumping Station.Credit: Nick Moir

Next to the carpark of flitting spectators to the Wilsons River is Browns Creek Pump Station, which hosts a tall blue sign stamped with key river heights: the major flood line at 9.7 metres (the river is half a metre off it), the levee height of 10.2 to 10.95 metres and, monstering all measurements, the 14.4-metre February 2022 flood, so giant it swallowed churches.

By 1pm, the deluges are thick and heavy, but the bureau no longer believes the CBD will fall: a flash of mercy on the day of Alfred’s landfall, but there’s more rain to come. Lismore is just one of the regions coloured emergency red on the SES’s hazard map, urged to get out or seek higher ground.

“It may crack the levy. It may not. I don’t think so. It’s hard to say,” says Darren Ackerley, standing at the door of a petrol station with dwindling fuel supplies that he’s trying to keep open for emergency vehicles. He says it’s been stressful copping evacuation orders without seeing major flooding.

“One bloke said the next time, no one’s going to listen.”

Midwife Jolanda Blans has worked 18-hour double shifts at hospital – she delivered two babies as Alfred bore down on Friday – and still found the energy to prepare her house with a water-diverting trough, which has been gushing “like a river”.

“It’s very, it’s very scary when you’re pregnant and you feel like you need to be in hospital but you can’t get there,” she says. Many of her colleagues moved away to higher ground or were foiled by road closures; the ones that can work have slept at the hospital for the past four days.

“Love, not fear”: Johann lets bubbles fly on a tense morning in Mullumbimby.Credit: Danielle Smith

In Mullumbimby, where residents were urged to evacuate by 8am Saturday and are now told to “avoid the area” as moderate flooding sets in, electrician Steve Smith is waiting for his chance to drive to Queensland and get to work rebuilding fallen power lines. Alfred put 300,000 people north of the border in the dark.

“Last night was the worst – wind and rain continually for the whole night,” he says. He had to abandon his house for the local motel four days ago after swollen creeks made it impossible to return. As soon as it’s safe, he’ll head north to resurrect those poles and wires.

“Everyone will just show up with as much manpower and machinery as they can,” he says.

In the nearby town of Billinudgel, the pub had defiantly stayed open for days. But it was hit hard on Saturday: last night’s weather forced people to sleep on the pub’s floor. One end of the main road in town is inundated with rain, and there’s a strip of cars flooded up to the windows.

But Whitney Kinnear and Jasmine Love, taking a coterie of stir-crazy cattledogs and spaniels for a splash in the shallows with toddler Koa, consider themselves lucky.

“The heavy rain didn’t come with the high tide,” says Kinnear, who lives at the lip of the current floodwater. “If we get 80 millimetres today, with the high tide at 4pm, we’ll have serious problems.”

Koa Love, 17 months old, plays on the street in front of his house with local dogs in Billinudgel, northern NSW.Credit: Danielle Smith

They’ve chucked their life into a caravan and dropped it kilometres up the road. The owner of the general store packed everything except the deep fryer and bolted – she can’t lose it all again.

“We thought it’d be over quicker. And now it’s just lingering,” Kinnear says. “But it’s Mother Nature. When she goes for it, you have to move.”

Back in Mullumbimby, a town marked by a sign spelling LOVE in white 3D letters, there are bubbles in the air. They lead to Johann, a man with a splayed blue jacket, beard flying in the wind, fishing hat adorned with feathers. Exhausted passersby on supply runs film on their phones.

So why the bubbles?

“Bubbles are love,” he says. “I’m doing love today, not fear.”

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