Eugowra floods: Resilience in disaster’s cruel wake

When you live in the bush, the reality of Australia’s infamous droughts and fires and flooding rains is never far from your mind. A truth all too familiar for the residents of Eugowra.

When you live in the bush, the reality of Australia’s infamous droughts, fires and flooding rains is never far from your mind.

If disaster strikes, the loss of property and personal belongings is truly devastating – forcing victims to face the brutal hardship of having to recover and rebuild lives.

But property damage and material loss cannot compare to the grief of suddenly losing a loved one through such a terrible event. Yet, it’s in these moments when the resilience of those who live in regional Australia shines through.

Around 4am on November 14 last year, the Eugowra fire station alarm unexpectedly broke the main street’s usual pre-dawn silence, instantly waking anyone who wasn’t already aware of the calamity about to hit this small rural town in NSW’s Central West.

Word had filtered through that the neighbouring town of Toogong, 30km to the northwest, was under an incredible 10m of floodwater and Eugowra was now directly in the path of an unstoppable deluge.

Flooding in Eugowra last November. Picture: Twitter

The locals were no strangers to the reality of flooding. After all, the town is neatly divided by Mandagery Creek where there had been several major flood events over the years. But what happened when the flood struck Eugowra that morning nine months ago was something else altogether.

In the dark, the flood had become a rolling wave that had amassed unstoppable power and momentum – a wall of swirling, filthy brown water destroying all before it, smashing its way through the entire town, picking up everything and anything that lay in its path.

Eugowra went all the way under.

Houses were torn from their foundations and hurled down the street, empty 4WDs floated downstream at highway speed. So powerful was the onslaught an industrial lathe was picked up and flushed away, shipping containers were washed up at the sports ground, a camper van was found in a tree. The flood level at the town bridge reached an astonishing 11.2m.

“The wave came through and knocked my brother’s house of its piers, punching a hole through the wall out of which I watched his made bed float by,” store owner Dan Townsend tells me, still in disbelief.

Dan’s sister Therese, who lives with her family on the eastern side of the river, walks me through her empty, flood-ruined house, remembering when she first saw the water spilling across her floors.

“We thought we were safe as we live here on the high side of town where it doesn’t flood. And then at about 9.30 the water arrived. It was surreal,” she says.

Eugowra resident Therese Townsend 52, outside her home that was hit by the floods last November and is now living in a transportable pod in her backyard with husband Jim and their son. Picture: Toby Zerna

“I managed to get home inside before the big wall of water came through.

“Then all of a sudden, a log came through the window and the water just poured in. The house was completely flooded within 20 minutes … What happened was nothing like what we’d ever experienced.”

As for what it is like living in a caravan alongside their ­ruined house nearly seven months on, Therese responds realistically: “It’s heartbreaking leaving town and it’s heartbreaking coming back into town. We have no kitchen, bathroom, walls – the house needs to be completely rebuilt.”

Their home is still far from finished. Picture: Toby Zerna

But for Therese, the devastation wrought on her home was incomparable with the unexpected grief she would later face that day, with the flood claiming the lives of two locals – one of whom was Therese and Dan’s sister, 60-year-old Diane Smith, a local receptionist and mother of three.

That morning Diane and one of her sons had been rescued by the RFS after her house had been inundated, with the pair taken to the bridge – considered a safe place. People were then being moved to the Eugowra Showground.

“I was to pick her and one of her sons up from near the bridge,” Therese tells me.

“Diane always loved to be where the action is – so I met them, picked up my nephew but instead of coming with me, she decided to stay.”

Diane Smith, sister of Therese who passed away in the floods.

Diane’s decision would prove fatal. Choosing to drive herself the few hundred metres to the showground, her ute veered off the road after swerving to avoid debris, floating away in the raging torrent.

In hope of being rescued, Diane decided to climb out of the vehicle and cling to a tree.

“The whole time this was happening we were speaking to each other on our mobile phones,” Therese recalls of that nightmarish moment.

“Talking while she was in the ute and while she was clinging to the tree … we kept talking until her phone went dead. That was our last conversation.”

It would be two days later that Diane’s body was found.

“It’s something I don’t think a lot of us will ever get over but each day we get up and keep putting one step in front of another and we keep going,” Diane says.

“We do what we have to do.”

Originally published as Eugowra floods: Resilience in disaster’s cruel wake