Coronavirus: Overwhelmed and suffocating in a towering disaster

After being trapped inside her three-bedroom apartment for four days, Amal Abdi, 32, said it felt like air was running out inside her home.

Police on guard at a Flemington public housing tower. Picture: Tim Carrafa

After being trapped inside her three-bedroom apartment for four days, Amal Abdi, 32, said it felt like air was running out inside the home she shares with her husband and seven children.

As mounted police officers patrolled Racecourse Road alongside the Flemington public housing estate she calls home, Ms Abdi said she felt suffocated and overwhelmed.

“It’s just four walls you know? There’s not enough air because you can’t open the windows widely,” she said.

“It’s suffocating, it’s overwhelming. Very overwhelming.”

Ms Abdi is one of more than 3000 public housing residents trapped in their homes across nine public housing towers in the inner Melbourne suburbs of Flemington and North Melbourne.

She said she was trying to stay strong for her children, the eldest of whom is 12 while the youngest just 10 months, who she said didn’t really understand what was happening around them.

“The sad thing is they don’t know what’s going on,” she said.

“They just want to go outside and when I say to them well we’re in lockdown sweetie … They say ‘What does that mean, when is it going to finish?’ And they ask like a million times in a day.”

About 50 public housing towers were built around the inner ring of Melbourne in the 1960s in suburbs such Collingwood, Richmond, Fitzroy and Carlton.

Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews said on Tuesday that once testing of the towers began, residents would live under the same lockdown restrictions as the rest of metropolitan Melbourne.

They are forbidden from leaving their home for at least one more day in some of the world’s harshest restrictions to stop the spread of the coronavirus, while the rest of metropolitan Melbourne can leave to buy food and medicine, to work or study, to exercise and on compassionate grounds. Somali community leader Farah Warsame has been working with the Victorian government during the hard lockdown, co-ordinating donations to get supplies like food and medicine to the trapped residents.

He said with the rate of the coronavirus testing of the residents, it would take about a month for all to be tested. “The people are generally doing the testing but what is happening at the moment is it‘s going a little bit slow,” he said.

“That’s what I’ve been telling the government, saying we have to do more work otherwise it might be more than a month.”

Inside the hard locked down towers, announcements boom over a PA system.

Ms Abdi works in healthcare and said she’d already been tested for the coronavirus, with a negative result. “I was exposed a few weeks back and I tested myself and I self isolated myself,” she said.

“We’ve been doing all the precautions and all the health and safety things but the problem is the virus is out of hand … It’s Dan Andrews fault, it’s not our fault.”

On Saturday, Victoria Police o arrived at the towers at the same time Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews announced the hard lockdown, leaving residents with no time to prepare.

Across the road from the North Melbourne public housing estate, North Melbourne Mosque is bursting with donated goods including UHT milk and nappies.

Getting donated goods to residents has proven difficult and local Somali film company Madaale Productions has been documenting volunteer efforts.

The Victorian government in conjunction with Foodbank and Coles is supplying food to the residents but Australian African Association President Nasa Ige said that was inadequate. “They didn’t deliver enough and the food they delivered hasn‘t been distributed to all of them,” he said.

On Tuesday afternoon, firefighters wearing hazmat suits delivered bags of food to the North Melbourne estate.