When Billy Curry arrived by boat at McKenzie Street, Lismore on Monday, he saw what he described as “a bad dream”.
What was once a suburban street had turned into a river, its current rapid and the waters brown and deep. While emergency crews in hi-vis gear crewed boats, waves lapped at treetops and powerlines.
And at the RSL LifeCare at Home, the local aged care facility down the road, windows were slowly disappearing beneath rising waters.
“There was water up to the second or third floor,” Curry says. “You couldn’t tell, the water was that high.
“It was a total lagoon.”
Curry, a 46-year-old marketing manager, is not from Lismore. He lives a 40-minute drive away, in Lennox Head. He saw countless posts by Lismore locals calling for help on the SES Facebook page and decided to hitchhike into town and help.
“I have a lifesaving background of 20 years,” he says. “Lifesavers naturally take action.”
He arrived in Lismore at 10.45am, and found a friend from Lennox Head, also keen to help out. While talking with SES members and other volunteers the pair learned of the retirement home on McKenzie Street and they joined that rescue team.
For the next three-and-a-half hours the group lifted 64 elderly people through a widow, on to a slippery veranda roof and down 2 metres into boats.
Many of the residents were anxious and confused and some could not walk, Curry said. So the task of carrying each person out the window, and handing then down to a boat, was “very difficult”.
They tried a makeshift staircase to get people to the window – made up of a microwave, a small table and a larger table.
When that didn’t work they began using sheets to lift each person on to the veranda roof.
“There was a risk of falling through the roof,” Curry says. “And if you fall through the roof, and you have an old person, it is going to be difficult to stop them drowning.”
But, with the sun going down, “it was our only route”.
The rescue crew was made up of SES volunteers, army personnel, one female police officer “who started work Sunday evening and hadn’t slept”, a boat driver, aged care staff and other volunteers.
“You can’t understand how severe it is,” Curry says. “It’s hard to quantify the depth of this disaster.”
As flood waters recede after days of destruction across Queensland and New South Wales, the extraordinary efforts on the ground by locals like Curry, local businesses and emergency rescue teams are being told.
These remarkable stories of survival include the rescue of an elderly woman inside her flooded Lismore home by two senior constables from Oxley police district.
Alongside SES volunteers the officers made their way down Barnes Street yelling out for signs of life, according to a statement posted to Facebook by NSW police. They heard “a faint call for help from inside a home with water up to the eaves of the house”, the statement reads.
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One of the officers “dove through an open window” and found a 93-year-old woman “floating on a mattress, with no more than 20cm of room between the roof and the water level”.
The woman was pulled back through the open window on a boogie board, and on to a rescue boat.
Louis Hollman, of Louis Hollman Electrical, has spent the past several days on similar rescue missions; in a boat with two colleagues, checking homes for people left stranded.
“I was seeing houses submerged in water, families losing everything,” Hollman told Guardian Australia.
“Now the water is going down,” Hollman says he and other local contractors are “going around to see what’s left”.
He says most switchboards and electric meter boxes need to be replaced. “Getting at least some power back is essential.”
His wholesalers in Lismore went under, “so we don’t even have any gear”. But having “no power makes it even more unsafe”.
“You can’t cook fresh food, or keep water cool,” he says. “At night-time, even having just one light makes you feel less lonely.”
In Casino, a 40-minute drive from Lismore, T&W McCormack Real Estate has been lending its services to help on the ground, too. In response to countless livestock that has been “floating away,” Matthew McCormack and his team are locating, mustering and transporting lost cattle.
“There are cattle everywhere on the outskirts of town, unaccounted for and not retrieved yet,” McCormack told Guardian Australia.
He says cattle are coming from local farms, after being “washed away off the edge of the banks” from areas like Coraki, Woodburn and Broadwater.
“We get a lead off one, then it goes from there. We pick them up out of town, and have a steady yard system on the edge of town where we bring the cattle back to.”
McCormack says “the cattle are pretty stressed”. “So we get them on some feed, water, and let them settle down.” There are at least “a couple hundred” lost cattle that McCormack is aware of.
And the helping hands are coming from beyond the state too. A team of nine from Sikh Volunteers Australia drove from Victoria to NSW overnight to provide fresh meals and water to the Lismore community hit by floods.
They left Melbourne at 6am on Tuesday and arrived in Woolgoolga at 4am on Wednesday. There they prepared food in the Guru Nanak Sikh Temple, then drove to Lismore, where they have been serving the affected communities.
“We have received lots of calls from Lismore,” a spokesperson told Guardian Australia. “They are especially asking for water.”
“We know we can’t do everything, but we can help a little bit.”