‘Where have you been?’: PM receives mixed reception as Eugowra counts cost of inland ‘tsunami’
In flood-ravaged Eugowra, not long after Anthony Albanese’s whirlwind visit, local mechanic Greg Agustin is moving slowly around his ruined workshop, picking through the debris.
His livelihood is strewn across the yard.
The timber supports holding the building up have splintered from the sheer force of surging flood waters. On one end, the roof has collapsed on to the workshop’s metal hoist, which still props up an old Chrysler overhead.
The wall, on one side, has been ripped off.
“If [the flood] had just come normally, it would have been all right,” Agustin says.
“But it was a big wave, it came just like a tsunami.”
The scene here is surreal. Even after a week of clean-up, signs of the floods’ destructive force are everywhere.
Down the street from Agustin’s workshop, a footbridge lies by the side of the road.
It was ripped out of place by the flood waters.
Entire homes sit at random points throughout the town. The floods, such was their fury, lifted them up and dumped them hundreds of metres away.
Ruined cars litter the streets, left stranded as the water receded.
Agustin and Rod Heinzel, the owner of a nearby property, stood outside the workshop and watched as Albanese and the New South Wales premier, Dominic Perrottet, toured the disaster zone, a circus of media, security and minders in tow.
Agustin shook the prime minister’s hand.
“It’s a good thing,” Heinzel says of the visit. “It shows the town that there’s support there and makes everyone take notice.”
Others were less impressed. Eugowra resident Anthony Robinson asked the prime minister: “Where have you been the last week?”
Albanese told him he had been overseas, representing Australia, and had come as soon as he could. The pair shook hands.
Local residents say the town is quieter this week than it has been. People are trying to return to whatever semblance of normality and routine is available to them. Over the road from Agustin’s place, the rural transaction centre (RTC) – which acts as the town’s post office – has just reopened.
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When Albanese visits on Tuesday morning, RTC committee member Brendan Mansbridge told him of a miracle, of sorts.
In the days immediately after the disaster, a woman arrived looking for her wedding dress, which was mailed to her just before the floods hit.
She spotted it instantly, still wrapped in its parcel.
Somehow, the dress was undamaged. “Apparently the dress had come out, it was all right,” Mansbridge said. “But it was too big.”
Other memories are harder to process.
On the day the floods hit, Agustin, who is a local SES incident controller, was forced to take refuge in the upper levels of the local pub, along with 15 others. He’s been with the SES for 33 years. Asked if he’s ever experienced a disaster on this scale, he says: “Not floods like this.”
At one stage, they had to pull a woman through the window of an emergency services vehicle, wading through chest-high flood water. The door had locked up in the water.
They were trapped at the pub all day, from about 11.30am to 5.45pm.
“There was no beer, all the beer was downstairs,” he says, laughing.
Like many here, Agustin is still weighing up what comes next. He reckons he could be cleaning up until Christmas.
He has no insurance for floods. The obscene cost here has proved prohibitive for many.
“You can insure it for floods but one lady down the road got quoted $25,000 per year,” he says, shaking his head.
Albanese said the government was working to address the issues around flood insurance.
“It’s one of the things that we heard again today about, that so many people have not been able to get insurance because of the high premiums which are there,” he said during his press conference. “It’s something that the government is attempting to deal with over a period of time. We’ll continue to engage with the insurance industry.”
Agustin’s ability to reopen is now dependent largely on support from the state and federal governments. While in town, Albanese and Perrottet announced $50,000 grants for local businesses, half of which would be available immediately, without the need for receipts.
Agustin isn’t just dealing with a ruined workshop. Not far from here, he lost an entire crop to the floods, though thankfully his 1,500 sheep survived.
The town, he says, will survive too. “They’ll need a lot of help later on,” he says. “A lot of mental health support, that type of thing. Especially a lot of younger people. The older people can handle it better than the younger people.”