Eugowra neighbours, Darryl Coleman and Colin Fabish share their concerns in the wake of the one-year flood anniversary.
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00:00 a flood. We always get flooded. We're one of the first houses in town to get flooded.
00:04 We've got everything generally built up downstairs to the height that saves them from the flood or
00:11 lifts them out of the flood reach. But of course this flood was double that and it just pummeled
00:16 everything downstairs. But that's all we can do. We can't prepare for a flood like this again because
00:21 it was just too big and too powerful. We could just prepare for our major flood level which is
00:26 about 9.6 or 7 meters. We lost fences and everything but the house stayed still. Our
00:30 neighbor's house here, he lost the back wall. You've seen the house across the roads,
00:34 lost the front wall and back wall and punched all the internal walls out. Do you think our region
00:39 with climate extremes happening, let's say this similar flood happens again in 6 to 12 months
00:46 from now, is our region prepared? Walking away, no I'm walking away. Walking away? You wouldn't
00:50 stay here? No. Where would you go? Australia. Mobile home. It's a big country. There'll be room
00:58 somewhere for us. This flood was exceptional. It was a flood on top of a flood. We got a double
01:04 height flood here but the other side of town that never gets flooded had the same height of water
01:10 on that side. So it got to a level here then it pushed down that way so it didn't get any higher
01:14 here. So it was unusual. That's what people are trying to explain to people. It picked up that
01:20 crop, it dammed itself up and it pushed across the town, that crop of canola and that was the
01:26 weight of the canola in that water that flattened things. I mean signposts flattened 45 degrees to
01:32 the ground and posts and steel fences ripped out of the ground. And given what this community has
01:38 gone through already and there's been loss as well, in terms of flood preparation what are
01:44 your thoughts on people being mentally prepared in the future for this happening again? I think
01:50 it might break quite a few people. Quite a few people are hanging on now mentally. If another
01:58 flood like that comes through again, I don't know how they'd cope. And would you say there are
02:10 people here who are suffering in silence? Yes, definitely. If you get them aside and you start
02:16 talking then the conversations come out and you hear their stories. So it's still top of the list
02:23 in everyone's mind when you get a few people together and we start to talk and it all comes
02:27 out and you hear that person's story and you hear how they suffered and how that Nigel has a ladder
02:32 against the back of his house because his kids won't go to bed without the ladder being there.
02:36 So there's trauma everywhere.
02:38 [BLANK_AUDIO]