Emerald Flood

20 January 2008

These were the first photos we recieved from the Emerald lot giving us a little idea of the rising creek.

26 January 2008

Latest correspondence from Emerald......

The last week has been very stressful for us. As you can see from the pics on the news we have been flooded & were evacuated from our home. The first few pics are of the water gradually rising. It started off quite exciting seeing a creek at the back of our place ( the nagoa river is normally about 6-700m away) but then the water started rising so quickly & we became very concerned. The creek then merged with the river & we had a very strong running river flowing thru our yard.

We started to evacuate people from our street in the middle of sun night. (the SES & fire and rescue were taking photos not helping or giving info- but that's a whole other story!!!!)Thankfully my next door neighbour had enquired about shipping containers & we had several delivered that night. 5 houses down the bottom end of our cul-de-sac were evacuated. Thankfully some friends of ours were away at the time & we stayed at their place up the street. This meant we could come down all the time & check our house.

Our neighbourhood really rallied together & we all helped each other. My wonderful friends also helped us immensely. When we were sandbagging the houses ,people from the whole estate gathered to help fill bags.etc. We had virtually no sleep for over 3 days as the flood waters rose.

At the peak of the flood our entire back yard was underwater. It covered our pool, deck and 1/2 way up our shed. It rose to just over the top terrace in our yard- about 40cm away from the back of our house. We have been very lucky. The water didn't get into any houses on our street.

The water has receded to just under the pool deck & our pool now comes complete with fish. The liner (we have an above ground pool ) is completely shredded and one end of the pool has been pushed in. many fence panels have been pushed over and taken away. we can't see the base of the pool yet so the foundations may also be cactus!

Kim's work have been wonderful & offered help cleaning up/moving back in. He's not expected back at work until we sort/ clean things up. My parents arrived mon morn to help and have just returned to rocky with the boys. Kim's dad arrived Tuesday night with more builders plastic and sand bags as we couldn't source any from the SES here- we even had to arrange for our own sand to be dumped in the street!!!

We have just returned to our house and will sleep here on a mattress until we move furniture back in, in the next day or so. We will wait till it goes down more until we do that as it wouldn't take much rain to flood us again.

The dam is at 165%. We have been out and it is a wonderful sight.
Thank you so much to those people who have phoned & helped us in any way we
are truly grateful. Hopefully we will have a much quieter 2008!!!!

1 February 2008

Latest correspondence from Kim....

Our house is the green roof with sand pile out front (pool is under).