It would have cost Michelle $35,000 to insure her home. Now mud covers every inch of the floor

The mud squelches underfoot with every step through Michelle Bennett’s house.

There isn’t an inch of ground in the home free of the thick, brown muck that has replaced the floorboards.

Michelle Bennett has started the clean-up at her Croki home.Credit: Kate Geraghty

Every surface is covered with precious belongings, piled as high off the ground as she and her partner, Mario Agius, could get them before the swollen Manning River swept through their Croki home at waist height.

“It’s overwhelming,” Bennett says, leading the Herald through her home after receiving a delivery of medicine for her 96-year-old neighbour, Barry.

“How do you start to fix it?”

By Friday morning, Bennett had hosed down the front verandah. But inside, she doesn’t know where to start with the clean-up – or how she’ll pay for it.

Bennett outside her inundated home.Credit: Kate Geraghty

“I don’t think anyone expected it … it comes so quick and no one expected it like this,” Bennett says.

After the 2021 floods, the cheapest quote Bennett and Agius were given to insure against future disasters was $35,000.

“As soon as we’d gone through that flood, it just skyrocketed, so we couldn’t afford the flood insurance, we got normal insurance, and now we’re not covered,” she says.

Agius says the premium had jumped from $3500.

VRA Rescue’s Kile Nicholas (left) and Craig Barlow on their way up the Manning River to Croki.Credit: Kate Geraghty

“Half of them wouldn’t even touch us,” Agius says of the various insurers he sought quotes from.

After this flooding, Michelle says, they’ve lost all hope of being able to insure their home again.

Almost all of Bennett and Agius’ few dozen neighbours at Croki, a few kilometres upriver from Taree, are in similar situations. Almost all suffered as much damage to their homes.

On the two streets of the small village, where knee-deep water still covered the roads, rows of cars damaged in the flooding sat where they were left when the worst of the rain hit.

Croki, which sits on the banks of the Manning, is still isolated as the road into the village remains closed; travelling via boat is the only way in or out.

Despite the uncertainty of when, or how severely, the next flood will hit, Bennett, Agius, and their neighbours have no plans to leave.

“I know I said this in ’21, but it can’t get any bigger this time,” Bennett says.

“It is what it is really … it’s just a natural disaster that Mother Nature’s chucked on us.”

A swing underwater on the banks of the Manning River in Taree.Credit: Kate Geraghty

Onboard a VRA Rescue NSW boat, the scale of the bloated Manning becomes clear.

Entire trees are swept down the fast-flowing chocolate-coloured river as a cow carcass floats by.

Hugh McLeod, a committee member at the Manning River Rowing Club in Taree, has been separated from his fiancee since Tuesday due to inundated roads.

“It’s the longest we’ve been apart for the last two years,” he says. “It gets to you a bit.”

Taree’s recovery from record flooding will be a “long haul”.Credit: Kate Geraghty

McLeod says many of the rowing club’s members have been isolated and lost income because of damage to their businesses.

Around the corner from the rowing club, piles of soaked furniture, stores’ damaged stock and rubbish lined the footpaths on either side of the town’s main street on Friday afternoon. Outside the local sports store, a mountain of unworn football boots sits waiting for collection.

Inside businesses, floors are slick with mud as workers toss destroyed goods to the kerb.

A pile of water damaged shoes on the street in Taree after the sport store was flooded. Credit: Kate Geraghty

Ahmed al-Abboodi, who owns The Ocean Barber with his brother Mustafa, will be out of business for weeks, but considers himself lucky compared to others who have lost homes and family members.

“We’re lucky because the family is safe,” he says. “It doesn’t matter what happens with the business.”

Already, Taree is focused on its recovery as locals walking the main street offer help to clean out sodden shops, cafés and restaurants.

“We’re lucky we live in this town,” al-Abboodi says.

Locals in and around Taree have criticised the warnings issued as the record flooding – the Manning reached its highest level since 1929 this week – claiming they were told too late to leave. By the time they tried to evacuate, their escape routes were underwater.

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

“There’s a lot of anger in people [that] everyone feels right now. I can understand. People feel more should have been done, [but] the reality is ... this is unprecedented,” says McLeod, who has lived in the town for the past decade.

“Even if we had all the best monitoring in the world, it still would have meant loss of livestock and things. People can only do so much.”

MidCoast Council mayor Claire Pontin says Taree’s recovery will be a “long haul”.

“It’s going to be ugly for a while because we’re going to have tonnes and tonnes of waste on the street,” Pontin says.

Pontin expects “many hundreds” of homes to be unlivable when the water finally recedes, but is confident the community will band together.

“Everybody reaches out and helps each other,” she says.

Like Pontin and the volunteers on Taree’s main street, Bennett is upbeat despite the challenges ahead.

Bennett and Agius will stay on higher ground next door while they care for Barry and until the road reopens. Then they’ll have to come to grips with the marathon clean-up ahead. But, she says, it’s just a matter of getting started.

“Just a little bit at a time,” Michelle says. “Just start somewhere.”

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