Daniel Bateman shares story after losing house to flood
A Far North Queensland flood victim has written an emotional piece a year on from the natural disaster. His wife lost their baby, and they have since said goodbye to their beloved dogs. Now he is calling on authorities to do better.
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Exactly one month before my home was inundated with floodwater from Cyclone Jasper, I made a letterbox.
It was a big deal at the time: I’d been promising my wife I’d make one, when we bought our first home together 12 years ago.
Back then, my carpentry skills were - shall we say - somewhat lacking.
I thought a sawhorse was what happened at the Melbourne Cup.
But life changed.
We moved to a different city, bought a new house, made new friends, found new hobbies.
Our new letterbox was made from about 75 per cent recycled materials, including driftwood found on Holloways Beach.
It was proudly installed at the front of our house, a metre high edifice, its base wound with jute rope, for an authentic nautical look.
On the morning of December 17, as we documented the floodwaters swallowing our home, rising up waist-high in our kitchen, family and friends - once they knew we were safe - asked the same question: “did the letterbox survive?”
With the assistance of my neighbours, the letterbox had been planted more than a metre into the ground, held steadfast with an iron post driven through the middle of it.
You bloody bet it survived.
But 12 months on, the letterbox now looks as weatherbeaten as our souls.
For us, surviving Jasper’s wrath was not just about escaping fast-flowing water that consumed our home, our cars, our belongings; sitting for hours in the dark on a neighbour’s roof in the relentless rain, waiting for rescue.
It was about my wife’s pregnancy loss a few days later, from the stress of living through a natural disaster.
It was about putting aside our trauma, to deal with combative insurance representatives, who did not want to provide the thousands of dollars’ worth of services we had paid for, for many, many years.
It was about listening to our insurer’s broken promises and continual extended deadlines, whilst watching the ultra-slow progress of reconstruction of our house and coming to terms with the fact we wouldn’t be back in our home this year.
It was about grieving the loss of our beloved dogs that kept us calm and centred throughout the disaster, and the months of stress that followed.
Tragically, they both passed away, within a week of each other, earlier this month.
And it was about trying to keep each other afloat, whenever our emotions engulfed us, threatening to drown us in depression and anxiety.
I’d love to say that we’re resilient, and well-prepared for whatever this wet season throws at us.
But our confidence is waning, as there are warning signs that despite having 12 months to prepare, authorities have learned very little.
As of today, bugger all has happened in Holloways Beach to prevent a serious flood from washing away more homes.
Mayor Amy Eden, the chair of the Local Disaster Management Group, was interviewed on ABC last week, and gleefully told the interviewer her council was “well and truly prepared for the wet season”.
So prepared, that they started sending pre-emptive text messages on a sunny day in October, warning of “FLASH FLOOD WATCH and ACT.”
So prepared that are still advising us to “Know Our Zone”, despite our drowned house being located in a “yellow” zone that apparently means we were – and still are – at the lower end of the spectrum in terms of risk of storm surge, while houses in our suburb in red and orange zones remained untouched during TC Jasper.
Supposedly state-of-the-art weather alert systems are still being caught off-guard when large-scale storms whip up cyclonic winds and rain.
At the slightest hint of a shower, water still gushes over the same gutters in the same streets, that have been untouched by civic planners, for years.
When the humidity spikes, there are still large-scale power outages across the region.
There are still inexplicable mobile phone blackspots within a few hundred metres of the international airport.
There are still only single roads in and out of population centres.
There is absolutely no way - that I as a Holloways Beach resident, am aware of - to safely evacuate out of the suburb, that does not require someone with a very big boat to navigate furiously flowing water, while dodging floating refrigerators, submerged road signs, and dead cows.
And worst of all, 12 months on, there is still no clear reason why our neighbourhood in Holloways Beach flooded so badly, while homes in other suburbs lining the banks of the Barron River remained bone dry.
There’s only so much you, as an individual, can do to prepare for another natural disaster.
Our go-bags are still packed with cyclone kits and emergency supplies, barely untouched from the previous year.
But it is clear there is a lot that needs to be done, to make our community as resilient as my letterbox.
Jasper and his associated flood wasn’t a 1-in-100 year event.
It was a wake-up call. And for some, they are still asleep.
Daniel Bateman is a Holloway’s Beach resident impacted during last years floods
Originally published as Daniel Bateman shares story after losing house to flood
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