TIDE OF DESPAIR

Flood-hit Yam Islanders plead ‘don’t forget us’

OUT of sight, out of mind, and out of a home.

Yam Island families clawing back their flood-ravaged homes feel forgotten by mainland Australia.

Islands across the Torres Strait are in recovery mode after a trifecta of gale-force winds, storm surges and a super moon king tide battered coastlines last week.

On Yam Island, about 70km south of Papua New Guinea, Ben Songoro (above) was helpless as water filled his corrugated iron home in the low-lying neighbourhood known as the “tin sheds”.

He has lived there for more than 40 years.

“It has never been this bad. It floods every year, but this is the worst one we’ve ever had,” he said.

Mr Songoro, known as Uncle Ben to many of Yam Island’s 400-or-so residents, said locals felt invisible to decisionmakers who had the tools and taxes to improve their lives.

“It’s like we don’t exist,” he said.

The island’s seawall was built in the late-1980s – a slapdash pile of rocks and cement mixed with dead coral that washes onto the beach.

Year in, year out, it fails to hold back the king tide, and residents have become accustomed to packing belongings into plastic containers and carting them to higher ground.

This time it was too quick, too powerful, and the ineffective wall was useless against winds so forceful that coral now covers the sheds’ roofs.

Mr Songoro and others have moved back into their battered homes to start removing shovel-loads of coral from their kitchens and bedrooms.

It will not be possible for Banasi Gimini and wife Basana, whose home was destroyed.

Mr Gimini fought back tears as he considered what the future held for his five children and five grandchildren.

“Every year it comes in the house and when the tide goes down we start cleaning and it’s back to normal,” he said.

“I was thinking it would happen the same. It didn’t.”

None of the tin shed families wanted to leave the area, but they urged authorities to build a seawall that worked.

Even if they wanted to, there is no alternative housing.

Emergency Services Minister Craig Crawford and Cook MP Cynthia Lui, who was raised on Yam Island, assessed the damage yesterday. Federal and state governments have opened disaster funding that Mr Crawford said could build a seawall if the council made a successful pitch.

“Whether people are believers in climate change or not, sea levels are rising,” he said.

Ms Lui said flooding was a challenge of remote living, but one that should not be accepted as an inevitability.

“Whatever your circumstances, everyone is entitled to safe, stable housing,” she said.