Wake park cleans up after holiday wipeout
Gold Coast Wake Park should have had the two busiest weeks of its year, instead extreme weather has sent equipment, food and profits to a watery grave.
The Oxenford-based tourism hot spot sits on the Coomera River and bore the brunt of devastating flash-flooding earlier in the week.
“It’s terrible. It’s the worst we’ve ever seen,” owner and three-time ProWake world champion Daniel Watkins said.
“I’m struggling for words, I’m just gutted and pretty heartbroken.”
Mr Watkins said the park had been shut since Christmas when freak cyclonic-like storm winds wrought havoc, leaving it with no power for a week, before floods ripped through on Tuesday.
“We lost everything,” he said.
“We were supposed to be open for Christmas and New Year. We had all the staff trained and the park looking great and we had all this food ready to go.
“This should have been our busiest weeks of the year — we would have been absolutely bursting.”
Mr Watkins said the crew returned to the park earlier in the week to find spoiled food “running out the door of the freezer” after their back-up generators failed.
“We lost tens of thousands of dollars worth of food – we just had to put it in the bin,” he said.
Floodwaters have washed out cables and equipment, causing further damage to infrastructure.
“We’re out on the jetskis trying to pull all the debris out of the lake now,” Mr Watkins said.
“We have heavy machinery to move the big logs and sticks off the shoreline and we’re trying to get a plan ready to start the rebuild. But I have no idea (the full cost) of the damage.
“Once I start looking at the numbers – it’s not going to be pretty.”
Mr Watkins said he estimated that the combined losses from Christmas storms and New Year floods would continue to impact them for the rest of the financial year.
“It’s not something that’s going to go away in just 10 minutes. We’re going to see the effects of this in September and October and that’s the devastating part,” he said.
However, the former athlete said in the days since the storm he’s been inundated with messages from the community, many offering to help with clean up for free.
“The best thing people can do is get around us when we do reopen,” Mr Watkins added.
“We do so much good stuff for the community out here daily, so some good news next week would be fantastic.”
Gold Coast Wake Park is expected to reopen by Saturday, January 6.
“We lost tens of thousands of dollars worth of food – we just had to put it in the bin Daniel Watkins Wake Park owner