Environment
In a first-time coordination with emergency services, the people of the Mid North Coast are pulling through the flood disaster. They now face the aftermath, with no insurance and inadequate government aid. By Holly Rankin.
How to integrate communities to improve flood response
I want to tell you a story, about water and chaos, blindness and forgetting, broken structures and foresight. Mostly, though, about people. And the power they hold as things fail around them.
On May 21, the water in Taree rose over 6.5 metres, slipping just beneath the bridge and pushing through the main street, chest-deep inside shops. Entire suburbs went under. The State Emergency Service made 806 rescues. For three days, more than 50,000 people were inaccessible. Multiple bridges were broken or in need of repair. Ten thousand homes were damaged or destroyed. Fifteen thousand livestock drowned. Some were found 50 kilometres away, washed ashore on the beach outside my house on Worimi Country.
I was born in Taree but have lived much of my life 20 minutes down the highway in Forster. The Mid North Coast is a little-known part of the world that rarely attracts the national spotlight, let alone holds it long enough for critical changes to take place.
In the face of threat, my intuition is always to turn to community. Based on previous natural disasters, I knew our community would be crucial not just in the first few days, but for the months and years ahead.
That Saturday, I gathered with seven women in a boardroom in Forster (never underestimate seven women in a boardroom, especially in a regional town). As the driest, largest community close to Taree, we sat together to think rapidly about how we could be most effective. Within 48 hours, we had more than 600 volunteers on a digital list and had formed a social media team, a community organising team and a ground team. I buzzed my close friend, Worimi woman Tanika Perry, who became co-lead of the First Nations response. She would go on to consult with about 30 First Nations organisations and doorknock to check on mob over the following 10 days – alongside the wonderful Uncle Will Paulson, a Biripi Elder.
I called my friends from the Northern Rivers for advice and was put in touch with Elly Bird, executive director of flood recovery charity Resilient Lismore. She connected me with Katie Moulton from the SES, a state volunteer coordinator who has been developing models for community mobilisation for some years now. Within 48 hours we had launched the first joint operation between community volunteers and official emergency services in Australia.
Over 10 days, more than 1200 community volunteers joined us, working under the direction of the SES. We brought an extra 1200 people to the 2200 emergency service workers on ground, making up a third of the total boots-on-ground of the response. Until this mobilisation, there had been no tested framework to empower community volunteers to help their friends and neighbours. Yet communities are always the first responders in any disaster and, arguably, the most reliable.
Among the people we helped was Shirley, a 73-year-old nurse who lives in a 120-year-old farmhouse in Wingham. Situated on a leafy, broad road by the Manning River, her home had never flooded – now it has, twice in the past three years. She lost 40 of her beloved chooks, her shed, her machinery, everything in her house – all completely destroyed. “I just can’t do this again,” she told me, holding back tears. Shirley’s home is not insured – the premiums were just too high. She is eligible for $1180 in payments from federal and state governments to help her recover from the floods. It will barely cover the cleaning of her back porch. The SES and community volunteers have removed Shirley’s belongings into piles on the street. The rest, and its cost, is up to her.
I went to school with Sam Halloran, who lost his entire house and everything in it. He, his wife and toddler were rescued by helicopter from its roof as the water rose so quickly there was no way out. After the 2021 floods, he was quoted $30,000 a year to insure his house. Like everyone else in the street, he and his family couldn’t afford it. The mud has been shovelled out of the house, but all he can hope to get from the state and federal governments is less than $2000.
James Neal, a dairy farmer with 500 cows, has lost not only a significant portion of his herd but also his milking sheds and machines. He is one of the most notable producers in the region, producing 9000 litres of milk a week. This week he has barely reached 2000. He has 30 staff and sits on the board of Dairy Australia. He is broken. The state government is currently offering primary producers a single payment of $25,000, barely enough to cover a fortnight of wages. After the 2021 floods, Lismore primary producers were granted $75,000 – farmers in the Manning Region are asking the same.
As I speak to James, a familiar brain block begins to take over – the one I first felt at the front of the class in Year 3, when I had to say my times tables by heart. It’s the feeling I get when things don’t add up.
It’s estimated that about 50 per cent of homes affected by these recent floods are uninsured, due to impossible increases in premiums after the 2021 floods (when they spiked to an average of $35,000 a year per home). About 150 dairy farmers in the region will experience at least a 70 per cent downturn in profits for the foreseeable future.
Realities like those faced by Shirley, Sam and James are seldom encountered by city dwellers. Theirs are the quieter realities of uneasy conversations with banks in stuffy regional outposts, gut-curdling decisions at 3am to sell livestock so their staff can eat that week and choosing the cheaper brand of bread so they can buy their child a school jumper for the winter. These Australians grumble little – many are just getting on with producing the food we all take for granted on supermarket shelves.
After a major disaster, we hear stories about “picking up the pieces”, “the road to recovery” and “the clean-up effort” – restorative phrases that suggest mending or getting back to normal. The story of this last, gruelling couple of weeks is one in which the pieces do not fit back together. The systems and structures that are meant to support Shirley, Sam and James are failing – indeed, they were never sufficient to deal with this.
The society we have built relies on forgetfulness and a wilful blindness to the human origins of essential things like milk and bread. When a Woolworths chief executive can earn more than $8 million a year, but the farmer who underwrites that fortune lives on a week-to-week grind that can’t withstand the constant whiplash of ongoing disasters, we have to stop and think: is this system really working for us?
Big business and bureaucracy have taken over the spaces where community once sat – and built walls around halls of power such that community voices are now seldom heard or consulted. Those are the voices of women and farmers who are too proud to make a fuss, the voices of First Nations people who should have been consulted from the very beginning. Their realities aren’t reaching politicians in time to help the people they are supposed to serve. The people on the frontlines of disaster need simple things like food and housing in times of extreme need, and, dare I say, equitable access to insurance.
As Manning Valley local Lucinda Fischer wrote on Facebook this week: “It shouldn’t take disaster after disaster to remind us that recovery is not just about rebuilding homes – it’s about rebuilding entire systems…the ones that are supposed to hold us, yet – Just. Keep. Failing.”
Our community volunteer effort has shown me that when community has a seat at the table, when we have a voice that is valued, change can happen very rapidly. As this country grapples with critical questions about preparedness for the disasters to come, we have to put community back into systems or we risk failing ourselves altogether.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on June 14, 2025 as "The real world underwater".
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