Daintree River Flooding                

The Daintree River is no stranger to flooding. As early as 1876, historian Susan Hands records there was flood damage to Hayes and Barclay’s timber mill about one kilometre from its mouth, and by September they had relocated their machinery to the Palmer River. There was also flooding in March 1883. 

The Sydney Daily Telegraph on 26 April 1894 wrote:

The Daintree River rose nearly 60ft. last week— 12ft. higher than ever known before. Great damage has been done to property, and many selectors have lost their all.

 The most tragic flood occurred in April 1895 when the Geraldton Advocate reported the loss of six lives out of a population of 40.

Queenslander Saturday 27 April 1895:

Friday 5th April 1895 will long be remembered by the residents of the Daintree River.  On the night of that date a south-easterly gale of almost hurricane force, accompanied by a perfect deluge of rain, swept across the district. The river rose to a height far above any hitherto known and began to subside next day, leaving death and devastation in its path.

The river rose 15ft higher than the 1883 flood. It was reported that after this flood, no Chinese people would live on the Daintree. Their entire rice crop was ruined.

Mrs Bridget Reynolds, her 12 year old daughter Marie Gertrude and grandson Henry Leslie Fischer drowned when their cottage in Upper Daintree was completely washed away across a cleared paddock. Their bodies were found in debris further down the river. They were buried on a hillside behind the Fischer home at Alexandra View.

Baby John King is also buried there. His father was away from the house which was down river from the Fischer’s. His mother knocked the gable end off the house and lifted her five children one by one onto the roof. One child said he was drowning and while she attended to him, the baby slipped from her arms into the rising flood waters and drowned.

The Masterton’s home near the mouth of Martin Creek was surrounded by floodwaters as the river rose very quickly. Mr Masterton pushed a sheet of iron off with his head and took his family onto the roof.

Geraldton Advocate and Johnstone River Guardian Wed 24 April 1895 reported:

At daylight the flood had reached its highest and the house gave way. Mr Masterton strapped his youngest child to his back and gave each of the other occupants of the roof, Mrs Masterton, Charles Masterton aged 9, and Gogo, a black gin, a strap wherewith to lash themselves to a tree should they be fortunate enough to reach such a haven.

When nearing the Post office, distant about two miles from the starting point, two branches of the Daintree junction and it is a dangerous spot even in the dry season, owing to the rapidity with which the current rushes around Allanton and against the opposite bank.  Here the house circled in a whirlpool for a minute and then shot like lightning into the scrub where it was dashed to atoms. When the house struck, those on it fell through and Charley Masterton jnr who had acted with sublime courage all through and had never raised a murmur, was killed by falling timber, and Mr Masterton had his thigh broken, while Gogo was drowned.

Mr Masterton believed from her silence that the little girl Florrie aged 3 must have been killed as no sound escaped from her, and holding on with one hand he worked her round in front when the child kissed him without a word. The bodily suffering of this trio during the next 24 hours was indescribable

On Sunday morning the flood subsided sufficiently to allow Mr, Mrs and Florrie Masterton to remove from their perilous situation and the terrible work of seeing and burying the dead began. It was not until Tuesday night that the last body was discovered and interred being that of Leslie Fischer. The profoundest sympathy is felt for Mrs Fischer who in one night lost a mother, sister and son, each of whom was idolised by her, and one cannot form any conception of the agony of such an irreparable loss. The loss of property caused by the flood was very great and acres and acres of dense scrub have been levelled by the waters, and several families are rendered homeless and everything they possessed swept away.  (Mareeba Express)

Cairns Post June 21, 1939:

Masterton suffered stoically in the '95 flood when with a broken leg he floated for two days before being found. Mrs. King, a heroic lady, climbed upon a table; next put a chair on the table, and still the waters rose. At last the flood lapped the rafters of the roof. She beat out the gable end and climbed out on to the roof. Alas, in the upsetting of a lamp and in the darkness she lost her baby. Her husband was flood-bound miles away.

 William and Mary Reynolds’ farm was totally wiped out and they were taken in by Aborigines, said grandson Bill Reynolds in the Port Douglas and Mossman Gazette 1988.

In 1901, the river’s height was reported at 12.1 metres, although it is not confirmed where the reading took place.

There was also flooding in 1920 as recorded in the obituary of a well-known local lady:

Cairns Post  April 16, 1946:

OBITUARY MRS ESTHER ADELAIDE MAUND.  MOSSMAN. APRIL 12

The death occurred in Mossman on Tuesday last, April 9, of Mrs. Esther Adelaide Maund, another of those fine old pioneer women. The late Mrs. Maund came to the Mossman district in 1910 from Thornborough, and most residents recall the tragic death of her husband in the great Daintree cyclone and flood of February 1920

Toowoomba Chronicle February 10, 1920:

THE BIG CYCLONE.   MAN CAUGHT BY WATERSPOUT      CAIRNS, Monday.         

A report reached here last night that a well-known resident of the Mossman and Herberton districts, named Jack Maund, was drowned in the Daintree River during the cyclone. Meagre details to hand show that Maund and a comrade were caught by a waterspout.

 Another cyclone was recorded in 1927.

 Cairns Post 19 February 1927:         

THE CYCLONE

On Wednesday, the 9th inst. telephone message came through advising of approaching cyclone. All farmers on hearing the news rushed home and immediately drove all of their stock up into their hill paddocks and luckily they did so.

At about 8 o'clock the wind began to blow hard, and continued to do so with increasing velocity, until about midnight when came a lull, but only for a short time, when it again came with what seemed a greater force than before. This was kept up until 3.30 a.m., when it eased off, but still blew hard until 8 a.m.

Very little damage was done to house property but several milking sheds and other outhouses received severe handling, and were cither unroofed or partially so. At about midnight the creeks commenced to rise (although very little local rain) and continued to do so until 3 a.m., at which hour on some farms, the rivers had reached a flood height of 30ft. doing damage to fences on nearly all farms.

One man had just completed forty chains of fencing and now all his fence is gone, and his cattle roaming the country.

A few dead beasts were noticed among the floating debris and there are still quite a number of stock unaccounted for, presumed drowned.

Mr. Surveyer Phillips and his gang had about the roughest experience of anyone and can tell a very harrowing tale of their night on the ranges. They were camped at about fourteen miles up the Stewart Creek from the factory …. When it commenced to blow they were forced to abandon camp and seek shelter behind a log. They report all tents demolished, trees limbless and leafless, and to make matters worse, the tucker box was empty (but Gundagai dog cannot be blamed this time). Upon their descent of the range next day they were unable to cross the creek owing to the high flood waters, but after a period of waiting, managed to get across and and were able to replenish the tucker box.

The track from Mossman to Daintree is in a fearful state, being almost impassable, owing to fallen timbers. Mr. N. H. Willard has gone to Port Douglas by boat to report on this, and to try and get it reopened at once. Likewise the telephone line is very severely damaged and out of order, and investigations reveal at least a fortnight's labor before the phone will be working again.

Cairns Post  7 May 1927:

It was proposed to ask the Shire Council if it is possible for them to build a wharf at Daintree township. Until recent floods, a private wharf of the Development Company did duty for all but unfortunately this was swept away by flood waters, and the company do not desire to rebuild. Messrs. Osborne Bros. have offered £10 towards the cost, if the Council will build.

Cairns Post 1 October 1928:

Contractors have arrived who are to build the bridge across Barrett's Creek. This bridge is to be a very substantial one, and will require some engineering to complete, for it has to withstand the tempestuous floodwaters in the wet season, and as Bar-rett's Creek is a fairly lengthy one, and also tidal, there is a large volume of water when the creek is in flood. When the bridge is completed and one is able to use this portion of road, the journey to Mossman will already have been shortened by three or four miles, as by present route one travels up Barrett's Creek for a distance of about three miles before the stoney crossing is reached, and then one doubles back on the other side, before reaching the straight ahead track to Mossman.

The Barratt Creek bridge opened in 1929.

In a cyclone on 12 March 1934, Daintree was severely affected and all lines between Mossman, Daintree and other townships including Miallo were out of action. It was reported that half the residences in Daintree were demolished to the ground and heavy damage was done to cane and tobacco crops.

 Courier Mail  Thurs 15 March 1934:      

DAMAGE NEARLY £40,000.       

The damage in the Daintree area is estimated as follows: Buildings. £7000; and cane crops, £30,000.  Farmers in the Saltwater and Whyanbeel areas estimate a loss of 50 per cent of their total crops. In addition there is heavy damage to telephone and telegraph lines, and furniture and personal effects in the damaged houses. The Mossman River nearly reached the level of the floods which followed the 1911 cyclone.

 A lugger from Thursday Island, the ‘Mildred’, overturned and sank between Snapper Island and Cape Tribulation and ten lives were lost. Survivors had to swim half a mile to shore.

 In Daintree Village the butter factory manager’s house was turned into a hospital and the school was blown askew on its stumps but there was no loss of life.  8 inches of rain fell in 4 hours.

 Massive flooding was recorded in 1939. It seems present day problems are not unique.

 Cairns Post March 31 1939:

March 29 – Torrential rains which fell for the five days caused the highest floods for 20 years in the Daintree river last week and the highest level since the establishment of the dairying industry in Daintree.  44 inches of rain fell during the week and at one period on Wednesday night over two inches fell in 20 minutes.  Flood waters which caused a complete cessation of traffic between Daintree and Mossman also fouled the telephone line, cutting Daintree off completely from communications with the outside world.

 The first heavy downpours of rain occurred on Monday night March 20 and on Tuesday morning at 5 o'clock a very slight rise was noticeable in the Daintree river. By 9 o'clock the water was 18 inches over Barratt Creek Bridge and rising so rapidly that at 9.30 the Daintree bus was unable to leave for Mossman with weekend mails. Towards 3 o'clock the river had already begun to break its banks and during the night swiftly to cover all the grass flats along its course. Farmers who had mustered cattle onto high paddocks were compelled to evacuate them to the hills and many had to move swiftly.

 In the early hours of Tuesday March 21 flood waters entered the dwelling of Mr Jack Nelson of Daintree, he escaped by boat and a few hours later his small home on the bank of the river was seen to topple over and collapse under the pressure of the oncoming rush of water.

 When Mr A Hayden and son were attempting to return home across the river the force of water swept them into trees. Their boat instantly went under and the two men clung to trees. A daughter who was watching the crossing quickly sprang into a boat to go to the rescue but she too was unable to fight the torrent and losing control, lost her boat but likewise was able to clutch a tree.

 Another boat manned by Mr James Cobb and Dick Fischer was taken to the rescue.  Skilful piloting brought the boat through waves of rushing water three feet high. Rescue operations took over half an hour and they managed to row into the lee of some cottonwoods and arrived back safely.

 Mr John Martin, Mr W Baumann and Mr T Lloyd also had narrow escapes when their boats became entangled in drift wood and they were swept half a mile downstream.

 A launch was used on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday to transport cream to the butter factory from the Stewart’s Creek section of supplies. The force of the current which taxed the power of the launch to the utmost so delayed the operations that churning was not possible until Thursday night when two full days has been spent in obtaining the majority of the cream which is usually collected in under two hours.

 Cairns Post 13 April 1939:

DAINTREE NOTES.   FURTHER FLOODS.

When over seven inches of rain fell on Sunday night further floods occurred in the Daintree area, Stewart's Creek bridge being under water and Barratt's Creek bridge being unapproachable owing to water flowing over the approaches. Traffic between Daintree and Mossman was blocked in the morning, but cars were able to get through late in the afternoon.

STEWART'S CREEK ROAD Sections of Stewart's Creek road were eight feet under water and cream supplies had to be brought to the factory by launch. As Stewarts Creek bridge was barely awash with water, great difficulty was experienced in hauling the launch over the structure and supplies did not arrive back at the factory until late in the afternoon. Farmers who had just repaired fences from the last flood disconsolately watched their work being destroyed again.

FLOOD DAMAGE FOR MARCH.  An inspection of flood damage carried out just prior to Sunday's rain revealed heavy losses sustained by the settlers in the Daintree area generally by the extensive damage to grass, from decay and treading down by cattle on soggy ground. In some cases the cream supply has dropped 75 per cent, while farmers without extensive hill paddocks find their plight desperate. In the upper river sections, whole paddocks are being eaten out by caterpillars hatched from eggs laid in the river silt deposited over miles of country by flood waters.

PADDOCKS FILLED WITH SAND.  Heavy losses were sustained by the farmers along the Daintree River valley when whole paddocks became inundated with sand. Where panicum grass once flourished one farmer now has 30 acres of sand in places to a depth of 20ft as the result of continued overflowing of the river. The last flood doubled the area of sand piled on this farm, meanwhile scoring a channel through the heart of it which will soon become the bed of the river, leaving half of the area an island in the middle.

LAND WASHED AWAY. Settlers on the Upper Daintree lost considerable areas of land by erosion when fast-moving driftwood smashed down protecting lines of trees and swirling flood waters scooped away chains of earth to be dumped on farms lower down or to be carried out to sea. Unless measures are taken to plant herbage of a solid and well-rooted nature along the banks of the river, farmers who lose five and six acres of country will soon find themselves with no farms.at all, while others will be possessed of nought else but gravel pits.

GOVERNMENT EXPERIMENTAL PLOT. An experimental plot on the property of Mr. J. G. Martin which had been freshly sown with a large variety of grasses etc, by members of the Department of Agriculture, was swept by the fury of flood waters and only a small section remains. As great interest has been extended, the venture by farmer seeking more suitable grasses for the area it is to be hoped that steps will be taken to re-establish the experiment.

MAIN RIVER ROAD.  Extensive work is being carried out on the main river road, which has been impassable to motor traffic for a number-of weeks owing to flood damage to the crossing at Martin's Creek, piles of driftwood resting across the surface and a large landslide which covers the road with rock to the edge of the . water. Ruts several feet deep have been scored in the surface of Fischer's Hill and these will have to be filled in to make the road at all passable. Sand and silt dumped on the road for hundreds of yards along the property of F. Fischer, Cobb Bros., and K. Grey will necessitate a huge amount of work. Douglas Creek road is also impassable to motor traffic as yet.

Cairns Post June 21 1939:

The year 1939 gave a record flood to the Daintree, but settlers were more prepared than during a wet season's course some years ago. This year's flood deposited a vast quantity of sand and mud on the lower lands but it did nothing like what it did before. It is a story that is told in Daintree. The flood waters carried a dairy herd, portion of it, seven miles down to the sea and the wash of the Pacific tide caught up the animals and threw them all high, dry and safe on the beaches.

On March 28 1957, flood waters reached 27 ft above the decking of Stewart Creek Bridge. Harold Osborne in an oral history recorded with Pam, said his father thought it was the biggest flood. The one in 1996 was 1 metre less. 

 At a meeting in Daintree Village in March 2019, local resident Lex Mealing said The ’57 flood was a metre higher than 2019. The 1895 flood from what my grandmother said would be 3-4 metres higher than recently. In 1895 there was nothing cleared. The media said it was the highest since 1901. That was garbage.”

Paul Hoye from Douglas Shire Council replied  For all those events the measurements have been taken from a different point. Water behaves differently with feed-ins, bends in rivers and things.

Lex:      They reckon in the ‘57 flood, 50 inches of rain fell in 24 hours but in Stewart's Creek, the river was flowing backwards.

 In early March 1996 there was 52 inches of rain. Statistics gathered at the time recorded 606 millimetres (23.9 in) of rain falling in 24 hours.

The Daintree River was 2 kms wide and the Village was cut off for days.  Dean Clapp had leased the Trading Post from Billie Lloyd at the Daintree River ferry crossing in 1989.  He renamed it the Big Croc Café. It flooded to its roofline but reopened about 8 weeks later. The lease was not renewed by DSC in 2001 and it was advertised for sale. It was moved to Cooya Beach as a private house. (Gill Savage Oral history recorded  Feb 2017) 

Harold Osborne told Pam this flood was one metre lower than the 1957 flood.

Dean Clapp also owned Crocodile Express Daintree River Cruises and operated the Daintree Butterfly Farm, and with his son he released birds, butterflies, emus, kangaroos and a pig and put them on a boat, except the pig who slept in the luxury Eco Lodge. Reportedly an 8 ft croc escaped from its cage. The Butterfly Farm never reopened. There were reports the Daintree River was up to 4 kms wide in some places. (Gazette 17 Mar 2016)

Sue Dennis who was born in Daintree wrote in 2016:  The 1996 flooding covered all river flats, pastures and destroyed tree growth along the creeks and the main river, leaving a trail of destruction similar to the big floods of 1937, 1940, 1957, 1973-74 and 1979. Although the town and local homesteads were spared any damage, it and the surrounding farms were isolated for days. The flood caused massive damage to creek and river beds and flat pasture land from the force of the water and the length of time it covered the country. The flood scoured a massive hole where the car park is at the wharf.

The Daintree ferry, the only vehicular connection for residents on the northern side of the river, broke its cables and was out of action for days.  Huge banks of sand built up on the southern side, washed down from upriver.  The Big Croc café’s freezers were washed away, still full of frozen barramundi and chicken. Locals joked that the crocodiles would have had a feast. Gas bottles floated, creating fountains with their pressure.

 But nobody was drowned, and nobody was injured. The clean-up took weeks.

 Cyclone Ita was a powerful storm which made landfall as a Category 4 on the night of 12 April 2014 near Cape Flattery. It brought more record-breaking rain to the Daintree.

 Cairns Post 20 April 2014:

The damage bill for the Douglas Shire is tipped to be in the millions after cyclone Ita swept through the region on Saturday, causing widespread flooding, power outages and road closures.

 Mayor Julia Leu said council’s focus was on gaining access to isolated communities north of the Daintree River and Daintree Village, clearing roadways and resuming ferry services.

“We’re hoping the ferry will be able to resume operations on Monday afternoon but we can’t be certain,” she said.

“We’re very relieved. We believe like everyone we did dodge a bullet, although there is still damage to council infrastructure and unfortunately our agricultural industry has suffered.”

More than 3500 properties in the Douglas Shire were left without power after Ita passed through and 1000 remained in the dark last night, although supply was restored to Mossman. The remaining homes were expected to be reconnected by today. Transfer stations at Daintree, Newell Beach and Killaloe have been opened to residents for free green waste disposal.

 Cr Leu said the region was still open for business and ready to welcome visitors over the Easter long weekend.

 From the Bureau of Meteorology:

http://www.bom.gov.au/qld/flood/brochures/daintree/daintree.shtml

 The Daintree River catchment is located about 100 kilometres northwest of Cairns in far north tropical Queensland and drains an area of 2,125 square kilometres. The river rises in the Great Dividing Range, approximately 20 kilometres southwest of Daintree, the largest town within the catchment. It initially flows in a northerly direction, before turning southeast passing Daintree and finally entering the Coral Sea. Floods may develop quickly and with little warning from high rainfalls on the 1000 metre high mountain ranges around the catchment and are often caused by cyclonic influences in the adjacent Coral Sea. 

The near record major flood of March 1996 caused widespread inundation of properties and roads throughout the lower reaches of the catchment. The rainfall station at Daintree Village recorded a total of 606 millimetres in the 24 hours to 9am 6th March.

 Previous flood information for the Daintree River catchment is limited, however, river height records are available from the automatic river height station at Bairds, with continuous records dating back to 1968. A new automatic reporting flood warning river height station has now been installed at Daintree Village. 

At Bairds

1958   almost 16m

1972 – almost 13m

1976  just above 12m

1996   almost 15

2014   almost 16  about equal to 1958

In the Village

1901 – over 12m

1958 – 12m

1996  - just under 12 m

2014 – about 11m

Flood Events

Daintree Village

1901

Bairds -

Daintree Village 12.40*

1956

Bairds 15.32

Daintree Village 12.00

Mar 1972

Bairds 13.09

Daintree Village -

Mar 1996

Bairds 14.62

Daintree Village 11.81

Mar 2004

Bairds 12.24

Daintree Village 8.50

Apr 2006

Bairds 10.12

Daintree Village 8.70

Mar 2008

Bairds 9.93

Daintree Village 7.20

Feb 2009

Bairds 8.41

Daintree Village 4.95

Feb 2011

Bairds 8.93

Daintree Village 6.50

Jan 2013

Bairds 7.22

v 4.30

Apr 2014

Bairds 15.23

Daintree Village 10.50

Mar 2018

Bairds 10.34

Daintree Village 7.35

All heights are in metres on flood gauges. 
[*] Height taken at an old gauge site and may not relate to flood levels from existing gauge sites

The Douglas Shire Council, in conjunction with the Bureau of Meteorology operate an automatic flood warning station for the Daintree River at Daintree Village. This station regularly forwards automatic rainfall and river height data via satellite communications to the Bureau's Flood Warning Centre in Brisbane. 

In addition to this station the automatic telephone telemetry station at Bairds (operated by the Queensland Department of Natural Resources and Mines), enables the Bureau's Flood Warning Centre to issue Flood Warnings and River Height Bulletins for the Daintree River during flood events.

Flood forecasts are issued when river levels are likely to exceed the minor flood level at Daintree Village with an aim to provide a warning lead time of 6 hours for major flood levels.

Radio stations, particularly the local ABC, and local commercial stations, broadcast Flood Warnings and River Height Bulletins soon after issue.

 Flood Warnings, River Height Bulletins and other weather related data is available on the Bureau's Web page at  http://www.bom.gov.au .

The Queensland Flood Warning Centre website  http://www.bom.gov.au/qld/flood/

Photos and the graph below relating to the 2019 flooding near Baird’s Alert were sent by Vince Manley, Principal Hydrographer, Water Services, North Region in November 2019.

 Paul Hoye of DSC said the new Alert was only installed in October 2019.

 Technology is improving all the time. There are more mobile phones. A new tower was erected in Daintree village in 1999, says Paul Hoye.

Barratt Creek camera and river level gauge was installed in September 2017, hopefully to be included onto the BoM site.

 Paul said the flood camera and river level gauge were installed at the Barratt Creek crossing in September 2017 to warn of the river’s rise over the small bridge connecting Mossman to Daintree Village.

 Rainfall totals from January to March 2019 according to BoM

Whyanbeel Valley                   2369.6mm

Daintree Village                      2261.5mm

Mossman South                     2059.4mm

Port Douglas                           1551mm

Low Isles Lighthouse            1451.6mm

On Saturday 26 January, Australia Day, 2019, a monsoon trough brought continuous heavy rain. Grey clouds hung over the low mountains and visibility was reduced. People cancelled the BBQs and the Douglas Shire Council postponed Australia Day celebrations.In the morning, the small Crees Creek near the turn off to Port Douglas rose to wash over the Captain Cook highway but subsided within an hour. Rain continued all day. Newspapers reported the flood levels broke a 118 year old record.

 The Guardian online:

The Daintree River is receding after breaking a 118-year floodwater record, but some far-north Queensland residents remain cut off.

 An emergency alert was issued for Daintree Village after a monsoon trough brought up to 425mm of rain in less than 24 hours from Saturday morning.

 The river peaked at 12.6m close to midnight on Saturday, eclipsing the previous record of 12.4m in 1901 and higher than 10.5m at the last major flooding event in 2014.

 The river at Daintree Village was 8.5m by Sunday afternoon after the heavy rainfall ceased, with forecasters predicting it would fall below six metres on Monday.

 A moderate flood warning remained as residents of the town, north of Cairns, were unreachable by road and phone, while the local ferry service remained closed due to inaccessibility.

Power outages were also recorded.

 Paul Hoye wrote to Pam on October 28, 2019 that ‘the Daintree Ferry went out of service on 26/01/19 early evening and resumed to the public at 5pm on 29/1/19’.

 Here are some personal stories of the Australia Day flood.

THE NIGHT OF THE FLOOD  Saturday, 26th January 2019

 Tony Duffy and Alicia Smith and their three young children, Ryder 6, Indiana 4, and Willow 2 had arrived from Magnetic Island on December 7, 2018 to be caretakers of Tranquility Lodge in the Upper Daintree.  They spoke to Pam on 2 May 2019.

Tony remembers:  On Australia Day it was absolutely torrential rain. We’d had two floods prior to Australia Day in our six weeks here, so we had an indication of how heavy it can be and what happens with the rivers around us. It was a quick, steep learning curve. So when the rain started on Australia Day we were comparing it to a reasonably large flood which I believe was the fourth highest flood in the region in a long time, that we’d had a few weeks earlier. When the water got to about the level that it did for that particular flood and the rain wasn’t abating, we knew potentially we were in a bit of strife because it was getting heavier and heavier and paddocks had all disappeared and we knew we had to evacuate.

 We were staying in the managers’ residence and approximately five metres higher up and 200 metres away is the holiday lodge.

 At about 6pm we realised that we had to get moving and get out of the managers’ residence because the water was coming up very quickly and we were pretty certain that it was going to go under. Between the managers’ residence and the Lodge is a causeway, a sort of floodway, and we knew we had to get across that before it became uncrossable.

 I decided to take the generator up to the Lodge in case we lost power. In that 3-4 minute trip the water was coming up literally before your eyes. It was rising inches in minutes.

 I came flying back down to grab the family. We had thought we probably still had an hour. We all jumped in the car and we literally grabbed the dog, the kids, and we just made it across the floodway. The water was halfway up the doors. And it started to move the vehicle off the road which was quite scary, but we did across and up to the Lodge.

At about 7 o'clock there was a huge explosion which we believe was the power lines and the transformers on the boxes, because by that time they were getting pretty close to being underwater. We lost all the power then and it just kept raining and raining. It was getting harder and harder.

 Alicia says:  We went to bed because the power went out.  That was probably about 8 o'clock. The dog kept going crazy on the balcony. She’s normally a very settled down, she doesn’t make a sound. We kept trying to calm her down and kept going back to bed

 And then about half past 11, the home line rang because we still had a land ine phone plugged in, and it was the sirens going off saying that it was about to exceed 2014 flood levels.  It was a recorded message warning from the council.

 Tony:   At 7, 8pm, we would have benefited a lot more from that messaging so we could’ve put our stuff up higher and potentially saved a lot. So to be honest it wasn’t handy for us. It was way too late. It’d basically peaked.

 Alicia:  We took a torch out and the water was lapping at the bottom of the balcony at the Lodge, like little waves. It got to about 18 metres at its peak.

That was when we had a little bit of a panic attack. Because of the level it was at the Lodge, we knew it had gone straight through the managers’ residence. I got a brand new load of furniture three days prior that cost $5000 to be delivered here. It was about the first time in our lives we’d ever bought new furniture. All gone.

 Tony had been refused Contents Insurance three days before Australia Day:

They don’t insure for flood because of the proximity of the Daintree and being in the rainforest, so we were knocked back, which was probably a wise move by them.

 Alicia:   We had a car written off. The water went about halfway up the engine bay.

It was parked somewhere where people that have been here forever have told us the water wouldn’t go. it was pretty high ground.

 Tony:   It took something extraordinary to get to that level. We didn’t expect it, no one did. It wasn’t even really forecast so I think it caught a lot of people out, not just the newbies in the Daintree like us.

 Alicia:  I was looking in the bookshelf with a torch, thinking I might sit in bed and read a book. I put my hands in to grab a book and grabbed a little snake. And there was one at the bottom of the stairs and I stepped on it. I got the torch out and here was this snake with its head up at me

Tony:   It was like Noah’s Ark. The noise was deafening. Crickets, birds. The amount of wildlife that had come up to this little dry island. Frogs and toads, you nearly had to put your fingers in your ears, that’s how loud it was

It was still pouring. A metal roof. You'd think that’d be the dominant sound but it was the wildlife and everything was trying to get in. it was crazy. So we knew the flood was pretty high.

 Alicia:  We were worried about landslides. The Lodge is built into the hill, so I was having internal panic attacks about the house sliding down, because the water’s never been up that high here, ever

So we had the kids’ gumboots lined up at the front door, ready to grab them and go up the cattle trail to the water tank through torrential rain

We put the generator on to see if we could get the news channel. We have satellite here so as soon as you have heavy rain, you can’t get anything anyway.

 Jaki Turner had an extraordinary experience on Australia Day and had to be rescued from her home. She told Pam about it on 28 February 2019 in Daintree Village:

Jaki:  I've lived in the Daintree off and on for about 45 years and I live in the home that my husband and I physically built 35 years ago that’s on Barratt Creek. It's a pole house, very high poles and it's a couple of storeys high so it's well and truly way above the river. 

 We had one of those monster floods on 26th of January, Australia Day. The water often comes up when we have heavy rain as part of the wet season and it comes over the lawn i have between the creek and the house. A few times each year it will go under the house and it's of no consequence to me because it’s all built up high. Doesn’t cause me any problem and Saturday morning, the creek was running quite fast. The Barrett Creek Bridge which is at the end of my block, it wasn’t covered with water at all. When the creek runs fast, it's usually a good sign for me because the water’s moving out. It's when it starts to back up and doesn’t run, I know there’s going to be a little bit of a flood. During the day it rose a bit. I did the usual thing of driving my car up to the nearest hill where it was well and truly way above the river. Walked back. And just proceeded to go about my business.

 6.30 at night the water suddenly started more than creeping up. It broached the lower floor and then I could just see it rising, which is really weird to be coming in at that rate. By the time it got to waist deep in the main area of the house, I was beginning to get very anxious. I still had a loft that I could’ve gone up to which is another few metres above, but I thought, oh I'm not comfortable with this. The phones were still on and the power was still on, the lights were but my power points had all gone out by then but the lights worked. I phoned town to see if there was somebody with a tinny who could come and get me. Town meaning the village here, Daintree village. Eventually I got on to a guy called Ian Hooper and he rustled up a mate Paul Snelgrove and they said they were on their way but it took a long time of course to get to me because they couldn’t actually identify the opening to my property, the driveway, because the water was so high up in the trees.  They kept going up and down, they could see lights on at the Eco Lodge but then finding my driveway was something else. 

And also by this stage they weren’t far below the powerlines which is terribly dangerous for them. By then the water was up to my chest in the main area. I had to put the dog up on the kitchen bench and hold her up, she was freaking out of course. The lights were still on, that was the crazy part and that was comforting because if you're in the dark and all this was happening, even though I had a torch, it could be quite freaky.

Anyway I could hear the guys coming up. There’s quite a long timber walkway between my carpark and the house. The carpark is lower than the house and they brought this tinny up the walkway to about 20 feet from the front door and they couldn’t get any further.  I threw the dog into the tinny, threw my very small bag of clothes into the tinny and then jumped up on the handrails of the walkway and climbed into the tinny myself. And then by that stage, going out, we really had to duck the powerlines. I pointed out how they could find my drive for next time because there was a transformer at the front.

 We had a fair bit of current which is unusual for that area to battle against with the boat, and Ian who was manoeuvring it did a really good job. Then we had to cross the creek and on the other side of the creek it was higher and another man Dave Patterson was waiting there with his car lights on and torches and we piled into the cars and up to the village where I tried to dry out. The power went off the minute I got here and then by next morning the phones had gone off because apparently the telecom tower has a battery that only lasts a certain number of hours which is useless in these situations and so the whole village was without any communication, cut off from the road and no power for a day or two, three days was it. Anything could have happened here and we’d have to send smoke signals or something to the rest of the world.

I can’t help emphasise how quickly the water came up. That’s why I felt the panic which I wouldn’t normally have. I would have survived because I would’ve sat on a table in the loft and my head would be above water. Mind you I might have to hold the dog up. But you don’t know when it’s going to stop rising, that’s the problem.

 I’d have to swim to get out on the roof. I’d just slash the flywire, I had a knife upstairs in case I needed to do that, it wasn’t for crocodiles.

 Ergon were good. As soon as they had access they were right on to things.

 It was a wee bit concerning when I was walking between the front door and the boat because I’m in the creek then, but you’d have to be extremely unlucky to meet a crocodile waiting at the front door.

 There is a large crocodile that patrols up and down in that creek. We call him Barrett after the creek of course. He’s four and a half metres conservatively and I do see him. We had a mini flood which didn’t really affect anybody just before Christmas. Some of the people in the village had to get out for various reasons. Work. A lot of people here work in the mines and have to get out to do their shifts. Ian Hooper was taking one of the locals in the tinny to my side of Barrett Creek and this great big crocodile was curled up on the banks there near the road. So that freaked everybody out a bit. There are big crocodiles in the Daintree and they go into all the tributaries.

I don’t know how floods affect the crocodiles. Whether they get out of the water or whether they seek a backwater, I’ve no idea.

 Ian Hooper was one of Jaki’s rescuers:

I live in the Daintree Village here, 3 years I’ve been here. We got a call that Jaki was in trouble so we organised a boat and two other guys. One stayed with the car when we put the boat in. The water was quite high so the power lines were probably maybe 6 or 8 feet above the water, and so we had to go under the power lines. When we got to the other side, we couldn’t find Jaki’s driveway because we were up in the heads of the trees, so we couldn’t see the gap, so we had a couple of goes of trying to find it. Eventually found a slight area where it could have been, so we went in and seen a light on in there. So go in and take the boat right into the top level of her house. Up the ramp, halfway up the door.

It was my mate Paul’s boat, it was a little bit smaller than my boat so it was probably better for the job, wouldn’t have been able to come up the walkway if it was bigger

 We trailered it down to where the water was at the level on the road. It was a fair way up the road. And so then we grabbed Jaki, and we just got home and the power went off. It was later we lost phones, so it was fortunate that she was able to get a call out.

 We had torch, we didn’t have radios, radios would have been good. If we’d got into trouble no one would know if we’d ended up down the river. You couldn’t define anything because you're above everything, it's so high up so you couldn’t see actually where the river was for all the trees and the current was flowing pretty quick. Once we got in around the trees it wasn’t too bad, and we had to turn the boat around in there.

 Across the road from Jaki’s house is the Daintree Tea House, the longest established restaurant in Daintree. Richard Seivers and Peter Ryan have operated the restaurant for 32 years.  Pam recorded their story on 5 March 2019:

 Peter:  On Saturday 26th of January we had a tour come in, it was only a small group of a dozen people and when the driver came in, one of our driveways was starting to go underwater. And I said to the driver ‘If the water looks like it's going to start encroaching on the second driveway, the one closer to Mossman, get your people out of here, otherwise you’ll never get out’. Anyway that was OK, they had their lunch, and they were on their merry way to go across to Cape Tribulation.

 Richard and I decided we’d better start packing stuff up because it looked like it was going to get nasty. We started to bring the outdoor furniture in and locking it up in the toilets. Then we started getting equipment out and by this time it was round about 3 o'clock and our car was parked up the side of the kitchen in its carport and I had intended getting the car out, but then I looked out and the water was already halfway up the second driveway so we had no hope of getting the car out. And we couldn’t move the car to higher ground. It was as high as it could go.

It was precipitating at great preponderance. We shifted fridges and freezers out of the restaurant. Took them up to the house because our house is much higher. Put our generator up there because we knew the power could go out, to run these things off generators, save what produce we could. About 10.30 that night we noticed spotlights on the road and a boat on the road and they were bouncing off the water. And they'd been called out to rescue one of our neighbours from the house, Jaki Turner. We then got a phone call saying, the power hadn’t gone off then, we were going to be subject to flooding and to evacuate to higher ground. but by that stage if you hadn’t done anything it was a waste of time you wouldn’t have got out. It came from the Shire I think.

 Then the power went off, and so we finished up working by candlelight to try and rescue some more stuff and about 11 o'clock the water was coming in the front door and it was up to calf level. So we knocked off and went up to the house. I was coming down to the restaurant every hour watching the water rise and rise and rise. And about half past two in the morning, I came down here and the water had come in, it was about a metre deep through the restaurant and it was half way up to our house which is another 30 metres up a hill. The car by this time was underwater. And the water wasn’t just water. It was mud. Thick horrible mud. So at half past 3 I came back down and the water was gone.

It was an enormously strong current which we don’t normally get. When there’s any flooding out on the roadway here, which usually happens a couple of times a year, the water rises very slowly and goes down very slowly and there’s no current. But this would’ve just about knocked you over, the current was that strong flowing through.

 The Daintree Eco Lodge is also opposite Jaki’s.  Jody Westbrook, the manager, spoke to Pam on 28 February 2019

 I was formerly a McPaul so I've lived in Daintree my whole life, born and bred here so I've been through a few floods in my lifetime

It was probably like any other wet season, it was raining and the flood waters came up to a certain point and I guess we all thought they'd go back down again If it stopped raining as it does up here. But then it rained a lot more and it just kept coming up. So the last 5 or 6 hours it rose really really quickly and got quite high.

 I was stuck at home because my kids were going to school on the Monday and I was having a weekend at home with them. I had my assistant manager here. So I was on the phone relaying what the water was doing because I actually live at the top of the Douglas Creek. So I knew what was happening with the water, whether it was rising or falling right from the top. And it was looking fine until about 5 o'clock in the afternoon, it didn’t stop rising from that point onwards and by then it was getting close to dark and it was getting serious. So the water came up really quickly.

 I had never actually been stuck at home. In 1996 when the previous flood of a similar height came through the area I was still living at home with my parents, I was still in primary school, that’s actually the biggest flood I’ve seen. I know they're saying in the Daintree Village it was recorded a lot higher than ’96 but everything I saw in ’96 was a higher flood and it stayed up a lot longer. So this flood came up and obviously peaked higher in the village than what ’96 did, but by daylight, it had dropped I would say a good 3 metres where I was in Douglas Creek. Whereas in ’96 it stayed up for a week, 4 to 5 days at that extreme level.

In 1996 from the records of the previous owners, it came to the bottom foot of the crocodile on the wall in there, and this flood just a few weeks ago came to basically the tops of the window sills, so very similar maybe just fractionally lower. Inside this building (the restaurant) it’s a couple of metres. Two metres, maybe 3.  So a lot of water.

In ’96 we never lost phones, but during this flood about 4 to 5 hours after we lost electricity, we lost all phone connection to the outside world which was probably the scariest thing to be honest in a flood. I guess living up here we all know there's a wet season and there's floods and you prepare to lose electricity, you’ve got a little generator, that sort of thing. But when you can’t contact emergency services or even just family to say Hey I am safe where I am, it’s all good don’t worry. I think that’s the most uneasy thing about these kinds of situations because I rang my Dad at about 10.30 at night going Hey we’ve lost power, I’m not going to be able to contact you in the morning, and it’s level with my verandah flood boards now and I've never seen this. So I was at the point where I was going to put my kids into a boat, tie them to the back of the house and just sit and float. I was essentially on an island. Settle the kids to bed, put them to sleep, they go to sleep soundly and then you watch the water eagerly to figure out what you're going to do because, we live right on the edge of the Douglas Creek and that had risen. If the rain didn’t stop when it did, our house would have been inundated with water.

 I had staff here and guests here. We did full dinner service that evening because 3 or 4 weeks before, over the Christmas period, we had the exact kind of rain and the exact kind of levels of flooding during the day. I kept watching it and it would drop down and then it would come back up a little bit, and then it would drop down. So rain stops. It's fine, it's no big deal, it’s just your normal flood. But the rain didn’t stop. And we had a substantial flood out of it. We looked after the guests, catered for them for as long as we could down here in the restaurant and then got them all upstairs into their rooms. And then we lost power.

They were fine where they were. Daintree Village would’ve been in trouble before they were in trouble.

Peter and Sally Maher have property on the Upper Daintree Road and also operate Riverview Caravan Park in Daintree Village. Interviewed by Pam on 28 February 2019.

 Peter:  I’m a 20 year resident of the Daintree area. This flood is the biggest my wife Sally and I have seen. But the locals say there was probably a bigger one, or similar size to the ’96 flood. So there was varying reports that it was higher and some said it wasn’t as high so it was different action from different catchments. But it was a massive rain event.  We’d had a lot of rain prior to this event.

 So everything was saturated. The water had nowhere to go. We've got a rural property on the junction of Stewart Creek and Daintree River so we’re right in the catchment of two valleys as well as the Douglas Creek valley, so flooding’s a normal thing for this area. The river floods the cattle paddocks and you just take it, you expect floods quite regularly but one of this proportion was a bit out of the ordinary. It took most people by surprise. Ourselves, our machinery shed was filled with water to 1.3 metres so we had damage of equipment and electrical stuff and a few things floated away. But nothing that we can’t recover from there. Everything’s back to normal now pretty well.

 We had moved our vehicles up to higher ground out of the shed on the night of the flood and we had a caretaker on our farm. We had to evacuate him and his caravan also up to higher ground. So we just sat it out. It peaked overnight so you couldn’t see really what was happening. The next day it went down reasonably quickly.

 We’re also the proprietors of the caravan park in town for the last 10 years and the lower level of the park was subject to a lot of damage with the raging river. It annihilated all our boundary fences, our camp shelter and all the furnishings and a lot of erosion damage, gauging out from the river at the place as well. Electricity points underwater were replaced. It’s a known thing that happens. You know you're living close to the river so you're eventually going to get a flood situation. It was the biggest we've seen. It has happened before and I guess it’ll happen again but this one took everybody by surprise and I think one of the main things that caused the trouble was the loss of communication unnecessarily. That would’ve helped a lot of people in a lot of situations.

 Sally:    And I think the difference with this one to the others we've seen is the speed of it. From 6 o'clock we were down with our dogs, it was just a normal flood and it was quite OK and then by 9 o'clock everything was pear shaped, it had just come up in that time, in those three hours. You were watching it rise, and when it gets to that level, that’s enormous volume of water when it’s over the 10 metres.

It was raining extremely hard, it was that loud that we couldn’t talk to each other unless you were yelling in their ears.

 Peter:  On the Saturday a gentleman in the park measured 600 mils for the day and then it kept raining that night. We had two campers in the lower level of the park who were evacuated about 11 o'clock that night. We weren’t on site in the van park but some local residents came along and helped those people to higher ground.

We had a farm tractor down on the lower level of the park and it was somersaulted upside down about 20 metres.

Laurie Taylor lives alone on her property at the top of Stewart's Creek Road.  She spoke to Pam in Daintree Village on 12 March 2019:

 The heavy rain was really on Friday afternoon just before dark, the water was down towards my causeway. I could see big waves and logs, trees going over the causeway. I live a fair way away from it. It’s hard to see

Then it didn’t stop. It just kept going. I was sitting there and I was thinking It can’t get any heaver. And then it got heavier. It didn’t lay off until about midnight so I was thinking, the creek was up that high at 6 o'clock where’s it going to be now? I did go out about 9 o'clock with a torch because I've got a little creek running behind my house, and it was the highest I’ve ever seen it, that little creek. It was right up over the roots of one of the trees on my driveway at the back. And I went Wow. And that was 9 o'clock. I mean the rain was so heavy you'd just go out there and get soaking wet anyway.

And then all the snakes started to appear. I had a snake on the back verandah, I had a snake on the front verandah and they were just getting out of the water. All the water was running past because I live on a bit of a rise. The water was coming off the hill and running past my house. None of it came into my house because it’s built that way that it won’t.

I went out on the back verandah and there was this big python and he was there till about midnight. And then later on the power went off, and I thought oh crikey it might be just my place, it mightn't be everywhere. Maybe something shorted out here. So I better go out and check the power box.

Anyway I walked out on the front verandah and there’s this little snake, a python, coming along the front verandah, heading towards my umbrella which I’d just thrown down on the floor and I thought 5 minutes and he would’ve been inside the umbrella. I'd have gone out to check the box and had this little python on my head. But they were both gone the next morning, so that was OK. They were just getting out of all the water. There was water everywhere.

My biggest worry was I couldn’t find out what was happening, didn’t know why the power was off, how long was it going to be off. Because we had no phone, I had no landline and I've got no mobile signal up there either. No radio because the ABC can’t get any radio up there. I’m only 10 kms from the Village. Daintree’s got probably radio reception most of the time. The only way I get radio is if I have my internet on and I get onto a radio station app and get radio that way. Which I couldn’t do because there was no power.

Gaye Scott and her husband Graham live at 91 Upper Daintree Road in a house that overlooks the river and the pasture beyond. They used to manage Tranquillity.  Gaye works as Community Liaison for Douglas Shire Council.  Her interview with Pam was recorded on 26 February 2019.

 Gaye: We’ve got survival guilt. Because the new managers who took over on 7th December, I think their first flood was the 10th. And then they had another flood at Christmas where they had guests in because it’s a holiday house, so they had guests staying for an extra two nights that were unexpected. And then the farmhouse that they live in, that we had just vacated 6 weeks ago, got inundated in the Australia Day floods. We moved out at the right time really.

 Tranquility on the Daintree was built by the Japanese as a cattle property and I think they bought it in ’92, and they built Tranquility which is a 10 bed, 5 bedroom holiday home. They used it for their corporate visitors, and they had it for about 4 or 5 years and then the Pocock family purchased it and they created Tranquility on the Daintree and changed it into a holiday home. The current owner, Roger Allan bought it in I think 2008, 2007 and he lives in Port Douglas and Sydney but he has managers in. We went in there in August of 2014.

 It is quite a remote property and in the 2014 flood which was Cyclone Ita the water came up to about a metre away from the farmhouse but didn’t go through. We understand that it may have gone through in the ’96 flood but we’re not sure. In 2014 when Graham and I were there, we actually went up to Tranquility which we call the Lodge, in case it flooded, which it didn’t. We were lucky. So we were quite concerned and had spoken to Tony and Alicia in the afternoon of Australia Day to say ‘We think you need to move up to there’. When it got to about 12 metres up there at Bairds, it’s just a river plain, just expands. It’s the Daintree River flooding that gets there.

 By way of a welcome to Tranquility we had organised an Australia Day BBQ and we had most of the people in the village coming. The owners and us discussed it and thought it was probably not a good idea so we cancelled it on the Thursday. There were all sorts of people coming to meet Tony and Alicia. The funny thing about it was the owners saying ‘Imagine if there were 22 of us up there stuck’. Good call.

 t was Saturday it started to flood. Like everybody has in the flood, we had certain trees that we look at. And we had some cassias, there’s a little line of them that are out a bit so they're in the water but on a little bank. It got the top of them.

The farm that is owned by Jim Noli has several layers of land and so we just watched it reach up, it didn’t go up to the top, it’s like a wedding cake, so we just watched it get higher and higher. And we were concerned about the cattle. And he did lose 130 head which he retrieved from I think Osborne’s farm and McPauls. He eventually got them back.

They obviously did swim. I’ve heard the story that, because they have four stomachs, what they can do is blow up a stomach so they look quite funny when they’re going along because they’re at a funny angle. They have their own inbuilt lifejackets. And when they reach the land, they deflate the stomach. It’s still quite stressful because they take in water. I think the ones that got out to Wonga beach, they would’ve got into the salt water and that causes some difficulties.

But if they only go for a couple of kilometres they’re possibly alright. But I know that Serena and Maurice Mealing, Maurice used to own the farm that Noli bought, three owners ago, and he had said ‘You need to put the cattle up, Jim’, and he didn’t. So they were quite angry that he hadn’t done that, because he’d done it the flood before, the Christmas Day one, he’d moved the cattle up on the hill.                                                                  

 The water came across the road in front of our house but we are 30 metres off the road. Just probably got 6 inches up the side. So we weren’t actually concerned about the flooding because we were so far up. We were concerned about other people but not about ourselves. I think it peaked at midnight. I got up about 1 o'clock and could see the water was over the road but it's a bit hard to see in the dark. We had a cow in our yard about 1 o'clock in the morning. It was a big black one. Would’ve been basically water logged around it, but the dogs chased it and I don’t know where it ended up going.

There’s two families got properties on the way in, there’s Barbara and Alan Sheather, and she wasn’t there but Alan was there and he was sending her half hourly updates. Their house doesn’t get flooded but they become an island and they can’t get to the road. So they decided after the last flood they would tie the canoe to the verandah because the last time they had to wade through water to get to the canoe. So he’s giving updates every half hour. ‘Right, I’ve tied the canoe to the verandah’ but all of a sudden they stopped. He’d kept giving updates right throughout the night and when Barbara woke up in the morning, there was 13, but they all stopped at 2.30. So she’s got all these messages that all of a sudden stopped and that would’ve been because the Telstra tower had gone. So that was a funny thing.

And the guy further up, he had water coming from Barratts Creek up to the back of his house and I think they had a lounge suite out there that got inundated but not into the house, just the back verandah.                                                                           

Paul Hoye is the Manager of Environment and Planning at the Douglas Shire Council and also the Local Disaster Coordinator.

 Obviously we knew that there was potentially heavy rain forecast. I get special information from the BoM. We decided to cancel the Australia Day presentation that was going to be held in Mowbray Street because Mowbray Street, Mudlo Street are lower streets in Port Douglas. There was some concern that people attending the ceremony might not be able to get home. Eventually the Mossman River went over, we continued to get rain and then we got into the evening. There’d been a lot of rain in the Daintree catchment, certainly on the radar but the BoM rang me late in the afternoon and they made a prediction on the river level of it reading, certainly moderate, and just touching on the major flood level.

Then they released the 6 o'clock flood warning for the Daintree River and I was comfortable with the figure but I had concerns that there was a lot of rain falling. We started to message people that lived beside the Mossman and Daintree rivers to get ready to move if they had to. And anyone living on any of the creeks because certainly the radar was showing there was a lot of rain falling.

Later on that night, because I was monitoring the weather, I saw an email between Wujal Wujal and the BoM hydrologist in relation to the Bloomfield River, and it was based on the cubic metre discharges of the Bloomfield, and what the data showed was that the Bloomfield River was nearly at the 1996 discharge record levels. So that rang some alarm bells from me, and I hadn’t heard from the BoM up to that point and that was getting just past 9 o'clock. And then the BoM rang, and it appeared that about 300 millimetres had fallen at the Bairds Alert in about 6 hours and this information hadn’t come through to the BoM when it was supposed to. So a lot more rain had fallen in the catchment than was anticipated by the hydrologist.

I had to make some decisions quickly then because the river was rising really really fast and certainly my concern was, if it exceeded the 10.5 metre level of Cyclone Ita, I knew if it reached 10.5, it would cause some trouble at the ferry and things, but there wouldn’t be any threat to housing as such. But if it exceeded 10.5 it was starting to get into some ugly territory.

But in between just talking to the hydrologist via email, the river continued to climb. Then I decided to issue an Emergency Alert. An Emergency Alert is an alert that goes for convoluted approval period to get signed off from the District Disaster Management Group and then the State down in Brisbane. But we’d already pre-prepared, you have a polygon for the landlines and mobiles that it will reach within an area, so we had a polygon for all of the Daintree River and we had a message, so some time after 9 o'clock, to issue this Emergency Alert. So that process was put in place. I got the figures back for who it reached. I’m hoping it did help some people. I suspect it did save potentially one life.

At this stage power had gone out In Daintree and the phones were still working but soon after that Emergency Alert went out, the phones stopped working. The BoM had sent me an email saying ‘Can the river exceed this? I’ve got a 12.4 record level here’. And, looking at the way the river was rising and I said ‘Well it looks like it can exceed that level’. And it certainly did.

 Where the river gauge is, there’s a little bit of work to be done to establish the river level right along the Daintree. Certainly in Upper Daintree we know it went above the power poles. And Ergon sent me pictures of that the next day from their helicopter. We know Stewart's Creek had possibly record flood. We've got the river gauge level at Daintree township but we do know that downstream it was probably we think a metre less than the 1996 flood so it's a bit variable along the length of the river. But certainly Upper Daintree had a major flood.

 I did hear of one rescue when I got up into Daintree Village and that was a lady at the Butterfly House [Jaki]. A couple of the Rural Fire Brigade people managed to launch a boat down at Barratts Creek.  They left the person in the car to launch the boat. They told me Barratts Creek was rising that fast that they had to move the car four times while they searched for the lady. They did eventually find her. She was neck deep in water and the story that was told to me was that when the tinny found her, she sort of came out of the water like a salmon jumping and landed in the middle of the boat and they were able to get out.

There’s some photos of our flood camera at Barratts Creek which went underwater. I think it's on a 9 metre mast. It shows just how high the river got there, and how quickly it was going. And it too was above the power lines.

The only evacuation was a family in Upper Daintree who’ve recently only moved into the caretaker cottage at Tranquility and we had a major flood level at Christmas and they were impacted then and we’d been talking to them through our Disaster Management arrangements about they'd have contaminated bore water and food issues, they’ve got young children. And then this time they'd had to flee the caretakers’ premises and run up to the Lodge that’s on the property to get to higher ground. The next morning we actually gave the Rescue 510 helicopter permission to go and evacuate them from Tranquility. It definitely destroyed all of their new furniture. And I think they lost their food too so that was part of the reason that we did evacuate them.

The phones were out for some time and a couple of people contacted me and one was a fisherman in Western Australia whose wife lived down towards Barratts Creek and he hadn’t heard from her. One really distressing call was from a young fellow from Cairns who had got onto me through the After Hours service. His parents had rung him in the night but he’d missed the call and of course he could not get any contact back with them. and so we tried and tried, we couldn’t get our own helicopters in to Daintree because of the weather conditions. They weren’t allowed out of the airport in Cairns.

Clint Reynolds lives near the ferry turnoff and rents his other house nearby to Enrico. Clint is the Rural Fire Brigade chief for Dagmar. Interviewed by Pam on 6 March 2019.

Down at our end of the river near the Crossroads café it wasn’t quite as big as ’96. In ’96 we had a lot higher tides. In 2019 because the tides had actually changed to be a neap tide, the water got a chance to get away at our end.

However up the river was a lot higher than ’96 and the cut-off point was around Greggie Jack’s place. He was half a metre higher than ’96. But at one of our farmhouses, we measured it at 400mm below ’96. At the ferry it was a good metre below ’96 and at Brie Brie shed which is on Prins Road it was 400 below ’96. We had more rain than ’96 but it got a chance to get away down our end. Simply because of the tides. But the same thing as ’96, we were putting our boats in at the ferry turn-off up near the Crossroads Café, It was flood water but it was still water, it wasn’t flowing. It was just backed-up water round where the information bay is and it was over the headlights in a Cruiser there.

 2.30 in the morning there was a massive storm. I’d got a phone call from a fellow that lived in Brie Brie’s house. I'd been down there earlier in the night. We’ve got a fellow renting it, and we’re telling him to ‘Get your gear out, Get stuff out that you could’, because I was watching the water level up the top and it was just coming up really fast and it’s got to go somewhere, and downstream’s the only place for it. So I said ‘It’s coming and it’s going to be a ‘96er ‘.

 Saturday night at McDowell’s Swamp, which is the end of Prins Rd, the water had come up to meet the bitumen there at about half past 10. I had one beer with Steiny at half past 10, so that would be about 15 minutes because it was a quick beer and in 15 minutes it’d gone from just beside the bitumen to 100 mill over the whole lot of the bitumen.

 I straight away turned around and went back and said ‘I think you should get out. She’s coming up pretty quick. At the moment you can drive out.’ He said ‘No, no, no it’ll fill up’. There’s a big low area behind the Brie Brie house and most floods will just fill that area up and that’s the end of the rising. In ’96, in 2014 and now this one, they’ve kept going after they’ve filled that back section up. But every other flood in between, it’s filled that up and then that’s it. It expands out and the rain stops and then you get away with it

 At that time it wasn’t raining that much down our end but it was still raining up the top.

So 2 in the morning, phone call from him ‘I’m in water.’ He’d swung his legs out of bed and put them into water. He had his son there with his two grandkids and his missus So I organised a couple of other fellahs because I thought ‘Well, if he’s got water in his place, McDowells will have water in their place. Lo Gip he’ll have water in his place’. Mick Crimmins, he came down and he brought his boat as well and Gary McKay. I done the numbers on it. Oh shit if I go in the boat with them, that’ll be one less person that we can bring back out. So they went over, one in each boat, done the rounds, and all of Steiny’s crowd loaded in and then they went and saw McDowells and they didn’t want to go, which is fair enough because, two elderly people, they didn’t want to go getting into boats. Old Bill, you’ve got to lift him everywhere. They were right. We went and saw Lo Gip ‘No, I’m good, I’m right.’ I left my ute back on the other side of that deep water because I thought if it comes up, we won’t get back across and we’ll all have to walk up to my place, so bugger that. But there was a big storm while we were out mucking around, Jesus Christ there was some lightning.

 When we were coming out with boats, there’s people driving into the water. Are you kidding me, right? You’re overtaking a boat?  just the mentality of some people. there’s a boat in the water in front of you and you think you can drive there? The driver was trying to get down to the ferry and this is up on the main road. Oh what he was thinking.

 So Steiny and his grandkids and young fellow and his wife, they all stayed at my place for the night. Not much sleep happened. The kids slept on the loungeroom floor.

Enrico Frattin rented Clint’s house at the ferry turn-off opposite the Crossroads Café

Recorded on 30 March 2019

It was Australia Day and we were anticipating that there was rain coming, but not that much, and it was about 10 o'clock at night when I realised, there was no water inside the house yet, but I  realised it was going to come in, there was nothing to do. The house, it’s on the ground. The water started coming in about 1 o'clock at night and within 15 minutes it was 2 feet high and within an hour it was well over a metre.

I managed to save just basics, passports, documents, saved the washing machine. I put the fridge and the freezer and other appliances up high on the tables but it was not enough. The fridge was on a stack of three milk crates and it still managed to lift and fall off. The freezer went fully underwater and I recorded the level of the water inside the house at 1 metre and 98 centimetres. It would’ve been another half a metre to the ceiling. So in ’96 it went to the ceiling, but ’96 it was a king tide so there was more rain on this Australia Day than in ’96, but ’96 was backed up by a king tide.

‘96 there was a lady that moved in, it flooded, she stayed until 2014 when it re-flooded. She moved out then and I moved in, but 2014 was during Cyclone Ita and it was about a metre of water in the house, where this time it was 2 metres, and ’96 it would’ve been two metres and a half I'd say.

 There’s a big swamp right there in the middle of the cane. Once it fills up, once the swamp can’t take any more, it breaks the bank, and once it breaks the bank it just rushes in and fills up the lower level cane paddocks. Last time it start to come in at 1 o'clock and then 5 o'clock in the morning, four hours later, I had my boat in the backyard.

 I put my boat in right at the turnoff and I went around my house first obviously and then I went up the headlands and then I was trying to go to the river because my idea was, I was trying to cross the bitumen and go to the river and go upstream but I got lost and then we got the phone call to go and check on the neighbours and the water by then it was going down a bit too fast. Like from 2 metres going to 1.7 you lose a foot. When you're at the headlands, that’s a lot so I didn’t want to get stuck 4 ks into the headlands. I came back.

I was driving my boat around the house. I've got a tree house at the back, it's about 2 metres and a half high and I tied up my boat on the tree house and I jumped off and took a few pictures. It was crazy. I lost 11 ducks. Saved my chooks. I just put them in a cage. Chooks don’t float, ducks do so I saved the chooks first. Apparently someone saw a big swarm of white ducks down the road a week after but we never found them. Dingoes could’ve got them. Heaps of dingoes at the back. If they didn’t get washed out themselves.

I remember just when it started flooded in, I was still trying to move everything out. Me and my brother was helping me. It’s a pretty high car, it was dark, the dog she came swimming from the door, swum on the yard and the water was just level with the door. So the dog just swum and walked into the car straight away. More than half a metre off the ground, that door.

And it was in 15, 20 minutes, all the water coming in, it was freaky. It was weird to see all your bowls floating. You see stuff floating, your mattress starts shifting. OK I've got to get out of here.

 David White operates Solar Whisper Wildlife Cruises on the Daintree River. His ticket office is on the river bank near the ferry.  The business has been going for 17 years. David spoke to Pam on 1 May 2019.

 We’ve had a very wet year this year. At the beginning of the wet season last year the Weather Bureau said it was going to be a less than average wet season. They couldn’t have been more wrong. it's probably the wettest year for 30 years. I've been up here for 30 years from Sydney originally.

In December we had a flood and it was forecast to be a major flood so we packed up our ticket office and took everything home just in case, because it did come up through our ticket office in 2014, the last time it went up through the car park there. We took everything home, big job, but it didn’t go through the car park, it didn’t come up nearly as far as we expected it would.

On January 26th through the day it was raining a lot and the roads were blocked and the Weather Bureau said it was going to be a moderate flood, so we didn’t take it too seriously, because the major flood forecast in December didn’t go through the car park. But it was absolutely pouring. The river was flowing very quickly but we did one cruise and then we packed up and went home like we normally would. We kept on checking with the Weather Bureau and it kept on saying moderate flood not a major flood, so we weren’t too worried about the ticket office.

Then we thought we’d better go and have a look because it was pouring so much. We drove up about 5.30 and you could hardly see the road, it was very difficult to drive it and it was such heavy rain. And the river was just starting to lap into the carpark, which was higher than it was in December. We thought we’d better pack everything up and take everything home so we started putting things in the car in the pouring rain and about 20 minutes later we hadn’t finished and we looked round the corner and the car park had come up about a metre in just 20 minutes. It must've broken the bank and filled up the whole low area of the car park. It was like a breaking wave in front of the public toilets there in the carpark where we operated, what they called the Western Precinct about 400 metres before the car ferry. We’d better get out of here, we’re going to get stuck. We had to give up on the rest of the stuff that was in the ticket office, we didn’t have time to get it all out, and drove through some quite deep water that we wouldn’t normally drive through. It wasn’t fast flowing water but it was deep and luckily the car didn’t stop. Got out of there. When we come in there was no water on the road.

Got home safely. Felt a bit shaken off. Nearly got stuck down there. It would’ve been a very uncomfortable night sleeping on top of the pile of sand. There’s a big pile of sand where they dredged for the ferry. Would’ve been safe on top of that but very wet.

Packed up and went to bed and in the middle of the night my partner woke me up, about 3 o'clock in the morning and said ‘I’m worried about the boat’. I take my boat out of the water every night normally and I keep it on the corner, where you turn off the main highway to go down Cape Tribulation Road to the car ferry. I said ‘It should be alright there, it's a long way from the river.’ She said ‘We should go and check’.  So we drove up. She was right. The highway was blocked. The river had flooded in the night. The highway’s like 3 kms from the river and it blocked the highway. There was people evacuating houses there in their little tinnies going down the highway.

We worried about the boat, so we walked down with our little lights up to our thighs which is not very croc-wise behaviour. We looked round and there’s little boats going past so we didn’t feel too exposed, couldn’t see any eye shines looking at us, we could certainly see the reflectors on the roadside posts which were scaring us but no crocodiles and got to the boat and it was just starting to float on its trailer. I loosened the winch so it didn’t get dragged down by the trailer if the water came up any more. I've got a shed up there with stuff in it which I didn’t empty at all, so I lost a lot of stuff in there. It got wrecked, tools and battery charger and things like that. It all went underwater. Some of the houses around there went underwater as well. Loosened the boat and went back home and the water didn’t come any higher than that, so the boat was OK. It was a shock to see it that high.

And the official story from the weather bureau was it was the biggest flood we've ever had on record but the people there living in the houses reckoned it wasn’t as bad there as the ‘96 floods, there was a big flood in November 1996. That was more localised rain so there was more rain coming down from the hills and flooding through their houses at the turnoff to Cape Tribulation Road. And this rain was heavy but it must've been more up in the hills and was coming down the river, so the river was coming up and flooding the highway rather than local flooding. Every flood’s different. Where it's measured by the Weather Bureau could be different to what you get downstream.

The Clean Up              

The Day After – Sunday 27 January 2019 

Clint (interviewed on 6 March 2019):

Next morning I got up, surveyed the damage a bit. It was still quite high so you couldn’t really get around. I had my boat still hooked up ready to go and I got a phone call from Drew Watson and he’s married to McDowell’s daughter, Annette Watson. So he goes, ‘Oh old Mrs McDowell, she’s not going real well, can I get you to wait there because they’ve grounded the chopper. I’ve got the ambulance coming. Can you take the ambulance officers over?’

 Me and Steiny went over there and as we were leaving the turnoff, the chopper turned up. So I said ‘Oh well we haven’t got to worry about looking out for the ambulance now anyway.’

I couldn’t quite get there by boat because the water had actually gone down and just as I was running over towards the chopper, there was this white bullock standing or not far off the chopper and slowly walking towards it. So I’ve gone over and pushed him back up the road a bit. Anyway I was standing by the chopper, because I could hear them inside the house, there was plenty of them in there, they didn’t need anyone else crowding the place out. The pilot walked out, he goes ‘Where did you come from?’ and I said ‘My boat, and I just walked over.’ and I said ‘See that bullock over there? Well he was heading to your chopper and they’ve got a bad habit of rubbing up against things, or licking stuff and plus you polish this chopper. They're used to molasses so it smells sweet so he’ll try to lick it and he’ll break something off here and then you won’t be able to fly this thing out of here.’

 The paramedics were awesome. Couldn’t fault them at all. Mrs McDowell ended up dying, she just had trouble breathing. But she’d been crook for a bit.

So we had to get Bill out of the house and we had to walk through mud half way up to your knees. We were carrying him in the wheelchair.  They were going to take Bill to the hospital, come back and pick up Mrs McDowell, ‘It’s not good to carry dead people with their husband.’  I said ‘He’s been married to her for a long time. I’m sure he’s not going to mind. Just ask him because you fellahs only just got going in the air, You’re going to have a backlog of stuff. No good coming back and picking up someone’s that dead when you could be helping someone to live.’ But it’s just their protocol, they’ve got to do that sort of thing.

The phones were going, the land lines were working. The mobile phones, they don’t work there anyway. Apparently shortly we’re getting a new tower, so we should have service, which will be good because there’s a million vehicles apparently traverse that Mossman-Daintree road a year.

Any of the time I was in the water it was always on the edge, not in the main river. Normally it is just calm water, but out of nowhere an eddy will form, it's like a whirlpool. It’ll pull your boat into it. They're quite dangerous actually. It throws you around a fair bit and this time there were really big trees coming down the river, bigger than ’96.

Steiny’s house only had 3 inches of water through it. It peaked about 2.30, 2.45 in the morning and it held at that level till just after daylight. Then it started going down really fast. It got away really quickly.

 Mud and water. Lots of mud. Women get the mud packs on their face for their complexion, well I must've had the sexiest feet around because they were in mud for a good week after that. You couldn’t wear boots, you just walk around barefoot all the time and you’re getting crap in your feet like glass. Every night I’d sit down in the lounge chair and my daughter and missus would be picking things out of my feet like splinters and glass and stuff.

 After lunch Wes Pashen and I went down to Chris Norris’s place at the ferry and gave him a bit of a hand, get a couple of trees off the side of the ferry. Just used the excavator and chain saw because they were poking into those life rafts. Just to make it easier for getting it ready the next day. We did that, had a couple of beers there too because the fridges were off, so can’t let them go off.

We actually got the ferry going by the arvie on, was it Tuesday? In the morning it was all but going, like the water was still roaring down the river so it was still unsafe to go across with the ferry as such. Got a couple of big trees out of the middle of the river that were on the rope. Chris’s excavator pushed them over the side. And then we started on the house, washing it out with our fire tanker. It’s common occurrence to go down there and wash his place out.

One ticket box got washed against the fence. They're owned by the Council and they were designed by the Council so that they're not bolted to the ground, they're just sitting there. The original design had them with a 15 amp plug plugged into the power box so that if the rain was coming, or water was coming down, then you just unplug it, put it on the back of the tow truck and take them away. But someone in their wisdom decided apparently that was unsafe. So they hardwired them, so we couldn’t take them away. Pretty hard to get an electrician in the middle of a flood, so there was nothing we could to about them. You couldn’t cut the wires, you’d get sparked yourself, so it’s kind of a pointless project. I went down in the boat, there’s one ticket box up against the fence and there’s the other one dangling on the end of the cord.

Then that afternoon, we got it all pretty much cleaned up. The council was there too, giving them a bit of a hand with the water truck and backhoes and that. And I think we packed up at about 6 o'clock that night.

 And then started the next day on our own place up at the ferry turnoff, cleaning that out. That was ripe by then. It was pretty hard on the guts. Just the force of the water with the trash behind it. Blew out one end of the shed. And then the trash that was in the shed was about a metre deep. We couldn’t get in there with the tractor because you couldn’t move. It was that slippery, and boggy and mud. Wes Pashen’s got a mini excavator and he pulled all the implements out of the shed. And then he put the mud bucket on and took a few truck loads away and then stacked everything back in there again. Gave it all a wash. Took us about three days to clean out. It was just atrocious. I think that’ll be the last flood for that house. it went through ’74, it went through ’96, went through 2014 and then again in ’19. So four floods is enough. I’ll knock her down on the next one I reckon and just build a high one there.

 The floods are getting closer to each other. When you talk to a lot of the old fellows they say it's nothing different to how it used to be years ago. In fact that dry spell that we just had has been the driest spell that I’ve ever seen, but in 1915 there was an even drier spell, they got 700 mils for the year in Mossman. Now Mossman averages about 2.8 metres of rain I think it is. Daintree averages 3.2, 3.4. We’re at 3m already for this year and it’s only March.

We only had 4 days in January that didn’t have any rain. The cane has suffered for it because there’s three things that cane needs and one of them is sun. and if you’ve got rain, you haven’t got much sun. January’s your growth spurt for cane. It sets you up for the season.

 1915 was 715 or something mil. that was before they had town water. They only had tanks. They didn’t have flush dunnies. It was all thunder boxes. So, how would the town cope with 700 mil again for one year. It's not going to. The reserves aren’t there.

I think Daintree got 1.6 metres of rain just for December, so that lifted the yearly average but there was a big gap between December and July. July it stopped raining virtually because we started planting on 1st August, that was the first that we could get into the paddock. It was wet up until August and then from August to December we had nothing. There was nothing at all.

Rico didn’t shift a lot of stuff even though I told him in the afternoon to shift.  Still had six hours of time that he could get stuff out. I got there at 10 o'clock at night. I said ‘What about your fridge, get that out of here.’  Most fridges this day and age, if it's a new fridge, just give it as wash especially where the plug plugs in, the motors are sealed, everything’s sealed in a fridge. And you just let it sit for a couple of weeks, turn it on. Nine times out of ten, it’ll go.

 In 2014, Chris Norris had one fridge wash away from under his place, and we picked it up in the mangroves, brought it back, washed it out, it went. Then it washed away this time, same fridge, I picked it up out the backyard, it was all covered in mud, gave it a bit of a wash off and it’s going again. They’ll all sealed inside, most of the time. It made me cringe seeing all those fridges on the footpath down in Townsville. Those fridges, they’re chucking away stuff that still could go. Just give it a wash with a bit of disinfectant.

That next morning we had a bit of a storm. Thunder. Big lightning strike out the front of the house and that knocked the power out for a bit. It only took the power out at the house.

We didn’t lose power, didn’t lose phone.

We have ways and means of getting messages out normally anyway. We all keep in contact with UHF radio. It’s cheaper than mobile and it’s more reliable. Our area is called Dagmar, so my jurisdiction goes from the barra farm to Barratts Creek. I didn’t have time to get to up to Barratts Creek, we were that flat out down our end. But I’d already heard that the Daintree Fire Brigade was looking after a couple of places up there. Thank Christ for that. Didn’t have enough hours in the day to look after what we were looking after down our end. If there’s something going on, you’ll let someone else know. It’s only a small community, probably 100 people if that.

There’s six of us in the Fire Brigade. Some of them are there for numbers, keep it going, they're old fellows. Maybe sandwich makers. There’s only really three of us that get in and get stuff done.

This time the top end of the river was definitely bigger than ‘96 and the bottom was definitely smaller than ’96. Not by a lot but 400 mils still 400 mil. We got pretty close to 600 mil for the night. That was at the shed. I was going out, tipping it out through the night, it was pretty close, 595 or something for the night.

I heard over at Frankie Coulthard’s just before Saltwater Bridge, it went through his house. I think he’s got his house back to normal now because he had to rip up all of his tiles and everything, I’m pretty sure that he measured 700 mil for the night. It went over the new bridge at Saltwater. I think it went about a metre through his shed. So they had to go pick up welders and that out of the paddock because when it breaks its bank up higher, the river changes its course. The main flow then comes through there and where your normal river is, becomes a backwater because most of the water starts, whoosh, going down that way. So it’s full flow. Straight through.

There was a couple of close escapes but people who have been here all the time know water. Some of our paddocks are below sea level so you farm to get the water out and keep it out. And from that knowledge you then you have respect for flood water. Most people up here do and that’s why there isn’t fatalities because we’re used to it. My Dad said to me years ago when I was a kid, I bogged a tractor twice in the same spot and he said ‘Only a fool does the same thing twice wrong’.  You’ve got people moving in, and they come from places where, like an inch of rain is big rain. That’s in a heavy dew in Daintree.

 It took us about two weeks to get back any sort of normality after that.

 Tony Duffy and Alicia   (interviewed 2 May 2019):

The next day I was able to get across the floodway on foot which was probably a bit dangerous because of crocs. They come out of the Daintree. They just float up with the water level. They end up everywhere. I had to check out our house and our stuff and saw that it was all gone, trashed, fridges over, freezers over, food everywhere, everything that wasn’t bolted down had floated up. Everything out of the shed had floated. It either wedged in the corner of the shed or floated off. We’d been prepared from the other floods and we’d put everything in those big plastic tubs. The kids’ shoes, our clothes, all of them washed away. So if it wasn’t in a drawer, and being the drawer they all got ruined, but every pair of boots we had, shoes, all in the plastic tubs, just gone. We actually found a plastic tub in a tree last week with one of my $200 boots with no sole. But most of it's probably ended up out in the ocean, but it was all gone. I came up and told Alicia that our fears were confirmed. We lost all our stuff.

We turned on the generator in the hope that, because the rain had backed off, we thought maybe we’ll get some satellite. For 40 minutes we had nothing, just a red light on the internet, no internet and all of a sudden it went green.  In that split second we grabbed the phone, we rang our boss and the owner of the property, Roger Allen. He was in Port Douglas at the time which was unusual because he’s not up here very often. He lives in Manly but he works a lot overseas. No one had any idea in Port Douglas what was going on from what we could gather. They were shocked at how bad it was up here. An hour and a half up the road if that. So he got onto the police there.

Alicia   He couldn’t get in contact with the SES. He ended up contacting a friend of his who runs Nautilus and he was trying to get a charter to get us out of here because he was worried about the kids obviously. We didn’t have much food left because all of it had flipped out of the freezers and fridges. We’d been trapped in here prior to that for a week and a half with the Boxing Day floods, so we were pretty well prepared and well stocked because we knew there was another flood coming, but we didn’t obviously expect anything like that.

Tony    Roger was having breakfast at the time with the local radio station owner, manager. And so apparently it all spiralled from there. With the assistance of the radio station, they tried to get people up here help. We had the internet for about two minutes to actually make that call. We would’ve had no other way of contacting anyone for god knows how long. The whole of Telstra, all their mobile services, not that we get mobile here anyway, in the whole village got wiped out. So no one had any mobile reception. So when we were in the chopper, it was flying over every other property in the valley surveying if there was anyone in distress.

Someone had got in contact with them and they knew we were here but we were told they couldn’t come and get us because of the weather that was coming. Apparently they stopped, because we had the Hill for them to land on I think they said, there was a safe spot for them to actually land and then when they came down and they knew that we had internet, we were trying to get the internet up so they could check the radar.

Tony    They were really concerned about even flying out of here at that stage, so they were desperately trying to get onto our internet to see what was coming. How they actually found out we’re not sure. Whether it was from the radio station or the police.

Alicia   We got a text message at some point where the internet must've popped back on and I think it was just saying We’re aware you are there, but we’re unable to get there.

Tony    And then the internet disappeared again so that’s all we had, so we thought ‘Oh well they're not coming’, and then about an hour or so later the chopper’s hovering above the house and we weren’t prepared for them. It was about lunchtime the day after Australia Day.

Tony    When the property was built about 1993 by a Japanese corporation, they put a chopper pad in to fly their executives from Cairns airport to this retreat. Occasionally some chopper flights come up from Cairns for people to visit the waterfall. We haven’t had that experience. We haven’t had anyone since we’ve been here in December.

The waterfall tracks are decimated at the moment due to the floods and the amount of timber that has come over Tranquility Falls. It's just on the to do list. The falls were open to the public for a small fee to spend a day and have a picnic up there but since Australia Day we’ve had to shut them down because it’s just not safe up there at the moment. But hopefully once it dries out a bit, in conjunction with the CFA we’ll do a burn up there and reclaim the tracks a bit. A lot of people have been turning up thinking it's still open. A bit disappointed when they see it’s not. People are still ignoring signs which is not good, public liability, it is dangerous up there at the moment so they shouldn’t be doing it.

Alicia   We’ve gone down to the farmhouse and we’re trying to get pastas out of the top of the pantry that haven’t got washed away and setting up generators thinking that we’re going to be here for days before anybody got to us.

Tony    We were surprised that the chopper was there and he said he had sent another message that they were on their way and I said we didn’t get it. It came days later when we got coverage back. So we felt, I did, a little bit embarrassed. Like we were just not prepared. If we knew they were coming we would’ve had everyone at the helipad ready to go but they had to land, and they had to walk around and come up to the house and as we said, tried to look at the internet but it was gone. I was going to stay with the dog but I didn’t believe they would take the dog which would be understandable. They said they would have a better idea when they got in the air, but they said When you see how much water there is, you won’t be getting out of here for weeks.

We didn’t have anywhere enough fuel and no food, the water was contaminated. They were great. Luckily they did get us out, we didn’t get back for two weeks.

Alicia     That monsoon that had gone to Townsville, they were predicting it was going to come back up so when Tony was saying ‘No I’ll stay with the dog’, it was really the chopper pilot that said ‘No you need to come because if that tuns around, you're going to be in here for weeks. If you don’t come now, we can’t come back to get you’. So they talked us into going. They were absolutely lovely. They were amazing.

Tony      It was early arvo when we landed at the hospital and then Roger and Maggie, the owners of here, drove out and picked us up from the hospital and kindly put us up in their shack down at Port Douglas, I'm being sarcastic, an amazing property which we felt very out of place in.

Alicia     With our filthy mud-covered dog.

Tony    it was a big chopper. I couldn’t tell you how big it was, but it could fit all us. So they took us to Mossman hospital because they had to because they had to grab a satellite phone I think and if the weather was OK they were going to head back up and see if anyone else needed help. By no means were we like life or death. We weren’t choppered out in the middle of the night, sitting on the roof of the house or anything like that. We were glad and lucky we were choppered out because as I said we were very low on supplies.

Alicia   We would’ve survived on plain rice and pasta and Tony found a whole bunch of plastic tubs in one of the sheds that we’d grabbed for the toys and he emptied them out and we collected rain water out the front, we would’ve survived. We would’ve had a good story of roughing it but we were more than happy to have gotten out of here, we were very lucky.

On Australia Day we were supposed to have our welcome BBQ, that was one of the reasons that the boss was here. They’d organised a BBQ with all the local people to farewell the old managers Gaye and Graham and welcome us to the property and show everyone around again because they hadn’t been up for years apparently.

 We were In Port Douglas for two weeks. Ryder started at the Daintree school but we still couldn’t get home so we ended up commuting from Port Douglas for a week, taking him to and from school, before we could even get home

Tony    All the roads were just a write off. There were landslides everywhere.

Alicia   Our causeway was so high for weeks and weeks after. It’s only just gone down now to no water at all over it in the last two weeks. It’s had water over it since Boxing Day,

 Tony    There’s been a lot of water coming off the mountains. We've got Niau Creek (pronounced ‘nee ow’) which feeds Tranquillity Falls. Obviously we’ve got the big one which is the Daintree, and running right through the property is Ellis Creek. So we’ve got three water sources that feed right into Tranquility. Tranquility is the first property in the Daintree to flood we’ve been told, and the last property to clear. It’s a very damp location especially at that time of year. They all feed down into the Daintree and that’s pretty much at the front gate there. They all break their banks.

 We had 237 cattle here at the time and we did not lose one. Not a single cow. So I guess the beauty of this property is there’s some very steep slopes that head up to the rainforest and the cattle must've learnt from the Boxing Day floods. Because during the Boxing Day floods when it got to about 14 and a half metres, there were cattle in all sorts of awkward positions on the property and stranded and swimming through water, but we did not see any of the cattle until we took off in the chopper and they were all up high. And they were starting to come down. So they’d all gone right to the top. Didn’t lose one.

So considering some other people on the road here, Upper Daintree Road definitely lost cattle and there were cattle washed up everywhere as you would’ve heard, we were good. So that was a good thing.

 Alicia   It's a natural disaster and people around here are used to floods so as we said we were very prepared for a flood. We knew we were going to flood in. We’d had Boxing Day which was 14 and a half metres and one before that as well, so we prepped up to be stuck in for a week. We had enough food, the freezers were full, because the Boxing Day one. We didn’t even lose power. We had a little bit of fuel that would’ve got us through for a few days.

Tony    We weren’t total novices to natural disasters. We’d been right in the middle of Cyclone Debbie down at Cannonvale, Airlie Beach, a year or so prior.

Alicia   We’ve been in bushfires in Victoria.

Tony    We had learnt quickly from the two floods we’d had since we’d got here and we’d picked the brains of pretty much everyone that we could, especially our neighbours Keith and Michelle Reynolds, who’ve lived here pretty much their whole lives. When people like that say there’s not much you can do, you’ve just got to ride it out, all you can do is be as prepared as you can, and we were. We survived.

 The clean up’s been never ending because we’ve had two floods. The ground’s so wet, we’ve had 100mm of rain, the causeway goes over, paddocks go underwater, everything is just so wet, it can only rise, it doesn’t drain away. It’s been a very long process.

Alicia   It’s been a tough process, it’s two steps forward, one step back. This is a brand new cupboard that I cleaned four days ago. I went down to grab something out of the box this morning and it’s covered in mould. The last few days the humidity’s come up again. The lounge is just wrecked, we’re just waiting for the wet season to finish to we can get rid of it. The mould’s up the walls, everything is just continuous. We use vinegar, water. We had mould issues on Magnetic Island in our house and we had professionals come in and tell us not to use anything but vinegar. They said ‘Don’t use bleach, it just changes the colour of it and feeds the mould spoors’. So that’s why I smell like a bottle of vinegar just now because I just vinegared the BBQ for the fifth time this season. It's exhausting.

Tony    In the managers’ residence the water was about half a metre high towards the front of the house and about three quarters at the back.

Alicia   The kids’ rooms were the highest because there was no drainage. There was still water in them two or three days later. There was a foot of water that we were trudging through.

Tony    It wasn’t just water unfortunately. Septics and all that. I had that quick look just before we were evacuated, I was hoping, because it had only been 8 hours, that the food would be fine, but because everything had flipped over, the food wasn’t fine. And in the process of staring at all that, wondering what I was going to do, the chopper started hovering over the house, so we had to get out. Coming back two weeks later to the house full of septics that had overflowed and the smell of the food was horrendous. It was horrible, really was. I've never smelt anything like it. Don’t want to smell it again. Because we’d stocked up freezers, really big shopping trips. Spent a lot of money to be prepared.

Alicia   We’ve lost a lot of money since we’ve been here.

 Tony    We got a grant of about $1000, I can’t remember under what title, and then we got one about four thousand that was for people that didn’t have contents insurance. Not even the owner of the property who has a lot of stuff here, even he couldn’t get it, even with brokers. All he could get was $20,000 for contents but no flood cover, so he didn’t get it obviously. There’s no insurance. We had full insurance on the car so we did get that back eventually. It took them forever because of the roads. It hasn’t been that long ago that finally the car got dragged away.

Alicia   They couldn’t get into the property to get it. We had to drag the car out with our other ute and tow it across the overflowing causeway. That was another heart attack in itself.

 But we still love living here. We’ve never felt more at home. The kids love the school.

Tony    Apparently they were taking bets after the flood that the new family will be leaving. The old manager Graham made a joke and he said ‘There’s no way known they’ll be leaving.’

Alicia   He said ‘I saw the truck that they arrived with, there’s no way they’ll be packing that again’. Then after this flood he said ‘It’d be the cheapest time ever to move. They wouldn’t have a truck to pack’. It’s been a very big roller coaster. A lot of emotion. Been very very hard but at the same time, we have no desire to leave yet. it’s just all lessons, isn’t it.

For 9 months of the year it's the perfect paradise to live in. Everywhere you live, there’s a bad season. You just have to try and learn a lesson from all of it and prepare ourselves.

Tony    We were just unlucky that a month after we move here, we get the biggest flood on record and lose all our stuff. One of the few properties that actually did go under.

 Tony    We’re 893 metres to the front gate from Daintree Village. We’re the last property on the south side of the Daintree river. CREB track’s just across the river there.

 Tony    We lose internet here If it’s heavy rain. And the television.

Alicia   Because you can’t get anything but satellite being this far out. It’s a new government funded NBN satellite for rural properties. I don’t think they even had internet out here prior to that. We can’t get mobile so the internet is very very handy because they have all these wonderful apps now where you do internet calling, so that was the only way we got in contact with people. It was on WhatsApp, an internet call, which is the only form of external interaction we had. So that was great. All the phone lines up here get a bit soggy because as soon as we get too much rain, in every flood they’ve taken a few days to dry out.

 Alicia   There’s been a lot of tears and a lot of tantrums. The two younger kids, the two girls seem to be more affected, they bring up the flood quite often. ‘We had this, we had this and then it flooded’. They lost their toys, DVDs, all their books were gone.

Tony    They had a great library of books and they lost everything from Christmas being so close. The community centre in Port Douglas were really good to us, the ladies there.,

Alicia   They gave the kids a big box of toys that they had left over from the Christmas drive so they had plenty to play with while we were in Port Douglas.

 Tony    We had the Red Cross and the State government representatives come out here just after we got back into the house. They'd actually been here before. There was a sign posted on the door to give them a call when we got back in. I think they'd been here the day before in 4WDs and they got in. That’s after the Australia Day flood, the big flood, two weeks after. And we called them and they were in the region obviously checking out if everyone was OK

And they came here and sat here at the table and we told them what’s happened and they did a list of all the stuff we’ve lost, beds, linen, clothes, shoes, everything. They were very thorough, they were here for a couple of hours. They said ‘We’ll definitely be able to help you out.’

We hadn’t heard from them since until a few weeks ago in April. Someone ended up ringing me and said ‘Where’s the Daintree?’, had no idea where the Daintree was, said that they were looking after Townsville flood victims and didn’t know why they were passed our details. Asked me to explain the story which I did again and then said ‘Where have you been living since this happened if you’ve lost anything?’. And I explained that we were living in our actual work place which is the holiday lodge. They said ‘We’re taking you off the care list, you're basically OK’. Which technically I guess is correct but it was pretty disappointing.

 Alicia   We’re very lucky that our employer is putting us up when he’s not making any income off the property so if the time came tomorrow when he said I’m really sorry I can’t afford to do this anymore, we would literally have nothing.

Tony    I was not very happy with the way all that was handled. I think given that Townsville got hit by the flood a week after us, that took priority and that was big news, just because of the volume of people. Army helping people out, people getting skip bins out the front of their house. We got no assistance, no one helped us clean anything out.

Alicia   We couldn’t throw things out just because they got mould on them. We had to scrub and try and save as much as we could.

Tony    There were certain things we potentially could’ve saved but we thought because of health, we’ll get rid of it because Red Cross are going to help us get some of this stuff back. They'd taken lists from us including kids’ beds.

Alicia   And they told us we can’t keep any of that stuff because it’s contaminated.

Tony    It was Red Cross on behalf of a program called Give-It. In our case they won’t Give It.

Alicia   I think there was a group of different companies that they dealt with. We were told there was a program that they had seconds stuff like fridges, so when stuff like this happens, they just got shipped to the people that needed it. What happened with all of that I have no idea. Maybe it all got lost.

Tony    When she finally worked out, and this was a manager, where the Daintree was, she said ‘Oh no, we only deliver as far as Cairns so you'd have to come and get it anyway, so it’s doing you a favour’. I was nearly speechless to her. We did not seek any assistance, we did not ring anyone for help but when people are here offering assistance, it felt good. We've given to charities over the years. It felt good that when the time has come, there is a thing that you’ve always seen on the news and never pictured being in, we thought it’s nice that we’re going to get that help. Humbling a bit that people are going to donate stuff to you. But then to be told the exact opposite six weeks later, it was like a bit of a kick in the guts.

 I did send off an email to Council in regards to clean up here and they offered to send a truck up with some guys to assist with it. It’s just too much for us to get to the tiny little tip in Daintree that’s open 8 hours a week.

Alicia   Wednesday afternoon for a few hours and Saturday morning for a few hours and for the most of this wet season, we haven’t been able to get out of the property.

Tony    We can’t get across the causeway so it's just been contaminated stuff here.

Alicia   That was the only thing we requested. We asked because we were cleaning out an entire house, if we could have a skip delivered to help us get it out. And it took ages for them to get back to us and then we were told all the skips were sent down to Townsville. They gave us 40 free tip passes. It was an estimate

Tony    The lady at council has been good. They’ve tried their best. There’s been limitations logistically. Even if they did have a skip, getting it here, so we would’ve had to wait quite a while anyway. It's a hard enough thing to go through and just to be promised all this help. And then to be told weeks afterwards, you're not just forgotten but you’re off the list, it's like ‘What did we do wrong?’ We totally understand, strictly speaking we are not in dire need. We have a roof over our heads.

Alicia   We like living out here because we don’t like a stir. As much as you would love to, you don’t. I was sitting here when they were doing their list thinking ‘I’m sure there’s people that are worse off’ and it took her looking at me saying ‘It’s not, you’ve lost everything you have.’

Tony    The lady was in tears because when we were explaining all the kids’ stuff and the kids were sitting there in their undies and didn’t have any shoes, she was literally in tears. She said ‘No, no we are going to help you’. There probably is more people down in Townsville that didn’t have the luxury if you want to call it that, of having somewhere else to go. But I think most people there would have the ability to get insurance. And would probably be getting everything back and probably in the meantime they're getting all this stuff from these charities.

It’s a hard one, it was disappointing, but then you look at the practicality side of it and if they said ‘We’ll get you a fridge’, well there’s a fridge here so we’d be taking if from someone else.

The lady did say on the phone if you lose your employment then you’ll get back on the list.

We got through, the kids are all good and that’s all that matters, we’re OK. It’s just stuff.

Leon Bush is one of the helicopter pilots for QG Air Rescue in Queensland. He often flies with Alaine Keniger, who is a rescue officer. She manages the back seat of the aircraft. She is also the person who is winched out of the aircraft.  She ‘rides the wire’ down to the ground.  Leon and Laine told their stories to Pam on 8 September 2019.

Leon remembers : We were tasked to the Daintree area on 27th January for the purpose initially a medical retrieval. We ended up transporting those personnel at that property to hospital in Mossman following a short time on the ground there. The details of gaining access to that patient were quite difficult for ground staff which was an added reason for our engagement on that day. Due to the floods a lot of the roads around that property were cut off. At the time that we were actually on site we had a neighbouring resident arrive by boat through the cane fields to offer assistance as well, to illustrate how inaccessible the area was. 

We get tasked by RSQ, Retrieval Services Queensland, they view all the Triple O calls coming through, and they’re the ones that task us.

 The initial call for that primary task was 9.28 in the morning, we were on scene before 11 o'clock by the time we had done an aerial recce of the property and finding a suitable landing spot in the paddock next to the house. Otherwise we still would have got access via a winch or landing further away and trying to utilise that boat that came up to us.

 Laine:  When we landed on that particular area, previously the water had been a lot higher even on that spot. it had receded a bit by the time we actually came in. It was amazing that the landline still worked.

 Leon:   I recall there was no mobile phone reception on the ground on that day. Any communications we had back to RSQ was via that landline.

 We dropped the patients off at the Mossman hospital and at some point during that process we were re-tasked back to the Daintree for a retrieval of a family in a remote location. That family were isolated due to flood waters and had no method of getting out of their residence.

Knowing it was a relocation, we left the medical staff at Mossman hospital and we continued out as QG Air crew only, which allowed us the flexibility to have more fuel to get up and have a look around the area and search for that property. There was a little ambiguity on how the family established communications, which was quite unique but very fortunate they had alternative methods of doing that.

My understanding of it was they had no telephone communications but they still had a satellite set up engaged for data purposes for their internet. And with that they were able to make I believe a WhatsApp call, through an application.

Laine   It was made through to the boss because they were caretaking the premises.

Leon    Then that was transferred through to Triple 0 I believe.

 So we left Mossman hospital, we refuelled (in Port Douglas) and then continued up into the Daintree valley as such to go and try and locate this family. During that time there was some pretty horrendous weather going up that valley and we were able to make it as far as Daintree itself and then the weather inhibited us from travelling further up the river. So we landed on the cricket pitch in the middle of Daintree, which turned out to be a blessing for Daintree itself. It was an unintentional stopover there, but the flow-on effect was critical for all of Daintree township to be able to manage future events.

Laine   When we landed on the oval, we walked over to talk to the people that were standing there and they were like ‘We’re so glad to see you’. And we were a bit taken aback because they obviously assumed that we were tasked to come and see them. But we only landed because we had to, temporarily, because of the weather. So it was fortuitous for them.

Leon    The people we were engaged with were part of the Rural Brigade.

Laine   It would’ve been around 12.30, 1 o'clock by the time we landed on the oval and they had no phones, no power.

Obviously they were concerned in that community that they didn’t have any comms so I guess that central point of the sports ground was where people had been coming to, to get information, but they also mentioned that they’d been door knocking people to welfare check on older residents as well. They seemed like a close community, knowing who was there and who needed to have somebody go and knock on the door or whether they’d come to the oval for information.

In other wet seasons we've certainly done welfare checks on specific properties where a neighbour or relative has called through. They can’t gain contact with them. So come the wet season we do a fair amount of that, but not to the Daintree.  Talking to the residents when we landed on the oval, they said they’d not seen this before.

 Leon    There was some comment about the community hall in that they didn’t have a key to get in but we discussed that with them and if it was needed to utilise his rights as a Fire Brigade Officer to gain access if needed.

 Leon    We had a satellite phone with us, so Darrin Evans our Air Crew Officer engaged with another branch of emergency services to alert the fact that Daintree had no communications. And then we were subsequently tasked to retrieve a satellite phone from State Emergency Services personnel and to deliver that to the people of Daintree.

Laine   We were probably on the ground for half an hour. It was raining as we landed and you could see it coming in a bit more.

 Leon    It was pushing up the valley up towards to the west by the time we took off and assessed that to be clear enough to continue on the search.   So then we pushed up the river and located the property that we were looking for and then subsequently the family and retrieved them. We had a little bit of difficulty with the position that we had due to the difficulty with communications. I recall flying over it and then coming back around to locate the property, but only over-flew it for a minute, 30 seconds, something like that. And then when there was nothing at the location that we had, then we had to find a property that met that their description which we did. We were greeted by a lovely family that wanted a lift out of the property, so we helped out where we could.

I’m pretty sure we had a GPS location but with a lot of situations with searches it's not necessarily a very accurate location depending where it's sourced from. But often to get us in a general area, we might get issued a lat/long that would be within 10 miles, or 5 miles to that location.

Laine   I think we were given a little information about the property itself as well, that it was a guest house and there was a main house. And that’s how we eventually determined the location that we needed to be at, from the description of the property that was given. We followed the road and you could see where the road was flooded multiple times and the causeway, you could see that that was well and truly underwater. There was definitely no chance of them coming out by road. we’d recce’d that on the way in and we obviously knew what properties were cut off further up.

Leon    They had a helipad. Quite convenient. Made our job a little bit easier for sure.

They had a generator because I asked to use their internet, and they had to start the generator again.

After we picked up this family, because of the low cloud, we had to transit down the valley and out to the coast and back in towards Mossman. So during that process we over-flew any man-made establishment or vehicle just to see if anyone was in distress while we were in the area and give them the assurance that we are here if they needed, they could signal us or try and make contact with us and if we did see people, we gave them adequate time to signal us if required.  Everybody else seems quite stable. There were people that were still definitely stranded due to the waters. But there was no evidence that they required any extraction at the time. There was another helicopter up there doing some Ergon work at the time which was operated by GBR Helicopters.

 We took the family back to Mossman hospital and when we arrived there we got the call that the sat phone was available. So the SES greeted us at the hospital to deliver that.

There was definitely a delivery of the sat phone back to the Daintree oval where we’d landed previously. And there was a period of receiving another task to go and retrieve some more personnel from another property. We located that property and we ended up winching Laine down because it was quite inaccessible, there were no landing areas nearby, so we put Laine on the ground and she investigated.

Laine   From where I got winched in it was a couple of hundred of metres down the road from the property we needed to investigate. I walked up the road, calling out for people but everyone had actually been evacuated just prior to our arrival. The water had retreated just enough, so there was nobody there. I spoke to the aircraft again and they came back and winched me back again. There was another house where the water was well and truly up and there were people there who were OK, and you could see boats coming in to get people as well.

The water at that time had dropped quite quickly in the last couple of hours, although there was cloud around that hindered some of our movements at times, the rain had eased a lot,  there were still showers coming through as I recall on that day, but not intense rain and certainly by the afternoon I remember it drying up a bit more, so the river had obviously dropped, the water was right up near the road though, there wasn’t much real estate left between the road and the water, but the road itself was dry.

 Leon    The helicopter is an Augusta AW139. It's one of the more common helicopters utilised for emergency services. It's got a winch on the right-hand side, giving us the capability of winch extractions in confined areas.

Laine   There’s 290 feet of usable cable and it’s rated for 249 kilos. So two people and equipment. It’s a twin-engine machine so we can get ourselves out of most sticky situations if we need to. On standard tasking we’ll take a doctor and paramedic and we have one spare seat which we can transport people in. On this particular day we did not have medical crew with us because it was a SAR (Search and Rescue) tasking and they were not required

 Leon    We landed back in Cairns just short of 5 o'clock in the evening so it was essentially a full day up there. I don’t believe there were any other taskings up there the next day because the water was receding, I guess everybody was OK.

Laine   And comms had been established then as well. Telstra could drive in.

It was an amazing experience. I've not seen an aerial view like that, that was a first for me.

Paul Hoye  (interviewed 26 February 2019):

Part of the reason I asked for the family at Tranquility to be evacuated was that I wanted the Rescue 510 to give us a little bit of intelligence about what was happening in Daintree Village and they'd said that they wouldn’t land, but what did happen was that the weather conditions forced them to land on the oval in Daintree and they were grounded for a while. A fellow up there who’s quick thinking, Barry (Costain) managed to talk to them and then when they evacuated the family back to here, I was able to give them my satellite phone from here to take up to the Village so at least we had someone with a contact point who we could talk to.

I rang my own satellite phone later that night to talk to Barry and I was trying to find out where this fellow from Cairns’ parents were.  Barry said he had seen this man at a little gathering in Daintree and I relayed this message to the fellow and he thought that sounded like his father, so at least he had some hope that they were OK. At this stage no one had been down to some of those.

The next day I rang the fellow again and I said that Barratts Creek was down, that he could get in. He said he tried all night till 4 o'clock and he'd just driven all the way back to Cairns.  but he drove back up and he certainly did find his parents. So that was quite relieving because it was quite stressful about a person who didn’t know what had happened to his family just because he'd missed a call in the night.

 We also did land the helicopter at Eco Lodge but at that stage the people, I think there were about six staff but they had managed to get out by the time the helicopter got there. So that was OK.

By this stage we’d started to hear of cattle being washed up. We’re still trying to ascertain the numbers but certainly when I was up at Daintree Village there was a property across the river that had 150 head and I think there were 28 left at that stage. 

I did listen to a good story on ABC Radio from a fellow in Daintree just on how the cattle blow themselves up and float down the river and certainly we had cattle on the islands in Daintree River and Cape Kimberley beach and Wonga Beach and on Snapper Island. People rescuing cattle from out at sea. Dragging them back to land with their tinnies but there’s been a group of cattle handlers chasing up the stray cattle. They're in all sorts of place. Mangroves, islands and all that, they did get 13 I think in one day two weeks ago [early February].  It’s probably a story in itself.

So Ergon were actually great if you'd seen what had happened to the power lines upstream there. They helicoptered in crews and equipment and within a couple of days they had everyone bar one customer who had a generator, back on.  When you saw the flood, power lines with the debris hanging in them, I thought that perhaps power was going to be out for weeks. But they were able to get it back on within days which was quite incredible. Because originally when they sent me the pictures I thought they were sending me pictures of a cattle fence with some debris but when I realised it was power lines, I got some appreciation of just how high it was. And of course it blew out off the conductors on the power lines because they'd all been submerged, a bit like our flood camera.

There were some crazy heights in the river although I will say it did go down quite quickly. Sometimes it takes a long long time for that river to go down, I think ‘96 it took a quite long time for that river to go down and the rain, it continued. Whereas fortunately for us the monsoon moved south, unfortunately for Townsville, it then got stuck on them. But incredible rainfall and river heights.

 We did a flood study in 2014 of Daintree township, so I was trying to read that about 12 o'clock that night. We’d taken it down the Barratts Creek, the floods went from Daintree Village to Barratts Creek and certainly the Village is quite resilient to flooding. I'd say historically people have built above flood levels. Barratts Creek, there's a few properties that aren’t so. The Daintree Tea House got flooded. The Eco Lodge got flooded and the Butterfly home where the lady lives certainly had flood water to its eaves I think. So some significant flooding there.

We also learned that we’d had some major landslips quite quickly the next day. Certainly we’d had a landslip on Alex Range around Christmas, then we had another slip which was on the down side, so this time we lost part of the road rather than just have mud coming down onto the road. So that’s the subject of a big repair at the moment. Quite complicated and involves lots of drilling, pins into rock to support a future road in that spot and we’re continuing to find that more work has to happen, but we hoping to get that road ready for Easter 2019 in some form. It’s open to one lane at the moment. We've been fortunate that the drillers managed to keep operating. We had to wait and see what the conditions were going to be like for them to do their drilling but they’ve been working long hours and I think yesterday they had 75 of these big nails into the rock and I think there’s about another 75 to go yet, and then a another whole geotechnical exercise to build up a road around. I'm sure it’ll be better than it ever was but at this stage it's expensive work in progress.

 here was a lot of landslips around the place, from private property too. Certainly they could’ve been worse. The ones I've seen haven’t threatened houses directly. Large amounts of earth have moved and there’s one where the people have been there for 60 years and they haven’t had those sort of slips before. So there was definitely some torrential rain in some areas. That one was out Mowbray way. There's been some slips down Oak Beach way and certainly out Whyanbeel way too.

 And the Bloomfield River was an eye opener to us. When I'd seen that flood level for 1996 from the data that had been sent through from the BoM, I didn’t have much of an understanding what that meant. We know that the new bridge there has certainly gone under twice since it was built. Once was during construction and once since, and certainly went over again there.

But we had five houses in Degarra with quite substantial flooding and utes drowned and people have lost a lot of stuff up there. Billy Dunn is a commercial fisherman, he’s well known in Douglas Shire. He is one of our points of contact to find out what was happening in Degarra. So next morning I was in the council office at 6 o'clock, we were trying to ring Billy but we couldn’t get hold of him, and unfortunately Billy’s house had a metre and a half of water through it. Billy has a good story about his dog that was washed off the verandah during the flooding and returned two days later. Billy thinks it went whooshing down the Bloomfield, then had to swim back across the Bloomfield and then made its way home.

So unfortunately the Degarra people had a big hit. We’d just finished doing some disaster management work, some storm tide work which had never been done, but we definitely need to now get some good modelling on that Degarra area for flooding.  I don’t think there's a lot known about the Bloomfield river. Certainly I don’t think the BoM hydrologists have had much to do with it.

It’s just stories and there’s never been any real flood records done. There was some flood data work done for the building of the bridge to determine what level of immunity they would build it to. Well it cost $12 million dollars, but it's nowhere near immune to flooding, probably one in five year intervals, you'd expect it to go underwater.

It's interesting to understand that relationship between the Bloomfield River and the Upper Daintree River, where it seems certainly that Upper Daintree catchment gets a very similar figure of water. Bloomfield itself also had the 300 millimeters in six hours. And we’ll get some of that data from the BoM down the track.

What we rely on a lot for the Daintree in predicting what’s going to happen is the Bairds Alert. I took a photo of the Bairds Alert at a level, but from what I can remember the Bairds Alert was certainly at about its record level but then it got washed away.

it's a river level gauge upstream in the Daintree and it's also got a rainfall gauge that’s supposed to transmit, and this is where there was an issue. I don’t believe it transmitted the rainfall data back to BoM. Something for us to look at but it was certainly transmitting the river level height and it gives you a few hours’ notice of what’s going to come down to Daintree Village from that catchment.

Daintree itself gets a bit complicated because it's also got Stewart's Creek catchment feeding into the Daintree just above the Village and we knew that the Mossman River could flood. It certainly flooded underneath a number of houses in Mossman Street which, and you’ll see why those houses are all built up high. So we knew there was a lot of water in that catchment and that Stewarts Creek catchment backs on to the Mossman catchment so you get that water coming in from there and you get the water coming in from the Upper Daintree and somewhere around that, the river height comes to Daintree Village and downstream.

But certainly the Bairds Alert is really important to us. There’s equipment that would be somewhere around the 15 metre height and after that the Dept of Natural Resources did put a temporary monitor up there for us because that damn monsoon was still sitting on Townsville with a chance it was going to heading back this way, It's always a bit nerve wracking when you can’t see what’s happening on the ground.

Unfortunately that’s the third flood in the Daintree in the last about 8 weeks. So council dredged it after the Christmas flooding to allow the ferry to operate and now it’s full of sand again so it’ll have to be dredged again. Hopefully there’s not too much sand left to come down the river if we get any more flooding this year. I'm hoping that we don’t.

The ferry itself was only really out of action for two days but that night unfortunately for the ferry contractors Chris and Charmaine (Norris) they were overseas, I'd been trying to get in contact with Charmaine and then the lady who was in charge of the ferry (Kath Lester) contacted me when she was tying up the ferry. Unfortunately for her she was staying in the ferry house, so later that night she called, luckily the ferry house is built up, double storey too but she had water lapping at her floor boards. There wasn’t anything we could do at this stage. It was dark. It was late at night. There was certainly no way to fly any helicopters or anything like that. Fortunately the river stayed at a height. I know the ferry contractors lost a lot of equipment from underneath the house, and their office. The ferry booths where they do the charging, one of those washed away. That was significant damage up there but the contractor and council crew did a great job in getting that ferry back in the water. Basically it was only out that night, the next day and part of the next day. I think in 1996 it was out for something like up to five days. So that was good. I think it was more to do with how much silt and stuff was dumped. Certainly the velocity of the water coming down makes a big difference. I don’t know whether the flooding at Christmas has helped the water, in that there's a channel there and there's less influence on what the river’s doing, and so it was able to get itself out to the mouth quicker and drop quicker, or just the way the rain fell meant it was like a flash in that sense.

I have heard stories it came through in a bit of a wave. The river certainly rose really quickly. And it's a different ferry to ’96 too. A much bigger ferry. Certainly the height was bigger in Cyclone Ita but in Ita a lot more damage was done to the ferry and the ferry infrastructure. Broke off concrete poles and all sorts of things, so I'd say the water’s behaved a bit differently to Ita. Ita might’ve been even more of a flash flood. That cyclone just came around the back and dumped a whole heap of water and then moved on. It was all a little bit different to these events.

This was a monsoonal trough, not a cyclone, so was ’96. I think monsoons can do whatever they want. It just depends on where the two winds collide and if you're in one of those areas where the south’s meeting the north. a lot of rain can fall.

A cyclone’s just its own weather pattern so it's a spiralling mass of wind and water and energy, whereas the monsoon’s a strong westerly wind, if it’s strong and if you’ve got that southern wind coming into it, where the two meet you get a squeezing of the winds and you get the rain dropping out, and that’s what happened with Townsville. The monsoon trough sat just north of Townsville and the southerly winds fed into it. Normally the monsoon comes down and goes back up and everyone gets a belt of heavy rain but this time, we got a really good belt of heavy rain and luckily for us it moved on but then it got stuck, and caused all that tragedy in the western part of Queensland, with all that rain which has now made its way down to even Birdsville. So Birdsville’s isolated by floodwater now but I think they're quite happy about it. They're got no rain but they’ve got a lot of water and they’ll get a lot of feed out of it. It's about the only good news about that monsoon. And maybe Tinaroo getting full. 

Barratts Creek bridge, Stewarts and even Foxton, they all got inundated, well and truly underwater. Lots and lots of small bridges around the place. The new Diggers Bridge at Mowbray went underwater and there was damage done to the road approaches. I think Crees’ went over at Port Douglas which it rarely does. Tin Creek I noticed down at Wangetti went over on the highway there too so there wouldn’t be too many bridges that didn’t go underwater that day. Mowbray might be the exception.

Certainly Barratt’s, that’s a spectacular photo where the flood camera is, we knew that we’d lost the flood camera. Because it transmits by Telstra we thought that was the cause, but it was actually the fact that it had got drowned. It started to emit these strange pictures because it was underwater. A better colour blue than the actual colour of the water.

Crocodiles certainly seem to want to get out of the road. I don’t think they like being in flood waters like anyone else. It’d be cold to them. I actually did hear one a good crocodile story. I understand the barramundi farm at Wonga beach was like one huge lake but I did hear that one of the workers there went down to check on things and went into the shed, and I think there were two crocodiles in the shed. And I remember in Port Douglas a few years ago when the lake was quite high towards Ferndale, a fellow found a crocodile in his garage. So they obviously want to get up and out of the road of those flood waters. Who wouldn’t I suppose.

I know one property that got flooded at Forest Creek, there’s some out towards Miallo, I think there's one up towards Noahs Creek, Upper Daintree. Degarra and certainly Barratts, Stewart's Creek are the main places that copped flooding.

There were a few people that hadn’t been heard from for a few days. I do know one place, people were worried about Jane and the police went and checked on her. She got a bit of a surprise, that was over Forest Creek way, the other side of the river. But those Daintree people and Degarra people are a resilient bunch and they seem to just get on with it.

 There's a group of people who live up at China Camp. There’s CJ Fischer and PJ and the Cassars and they get isolated by Bairds Creek and Lucu (?) river and all these other creeks and we ring them when we can just to check how they're going, but they’ve always got food and their medicines. We rang CJ because they couldn’t get out, they were still stuck there and his thing was that he’d had to swim down to check on his brother Lionel and take him down some medicine. But CJ said to us that he’s getting too old for this and next year he might live in Wonga. What he really wanted to do was get down to Smithfield and walk around that shopping centre. He’d had enough.

I think the biggest problem with the Daintree being flooded was loss of communications and not knowing what was happening. It was a power issue. Telstra tower I think was just relying on some battery back-up which only lasted a few hours. So we were able to get Telstra to come to the party after that. They flew in a generator and now someone up there was given a key and was able, and had permission, to refuel it if something similar happened, which seems pretty logical when you look at it in hindsight, but it wasn’t how it was and it did cause a lot of drama. I can understand why the power went off after what we saw in those floods with the power lines. But like I said Ergon did a terrific job and were very quick to come here and meet with us in our local disaster co-ordination centre.

 Underground power lines are just too cost prohibitive, it's such a long distance. Even at Christmas the power had been lost to Daintree Village again. That was trees coming down. They’ve routed the power through some other way to get power back on to the Village and they’ve gone back and fixed that up.

 There’s still some phone issues I think north of the Daintree river which we’ve started to raise with the District Disaster Management Group because our focus now is to get business and the economics up and running, particularly for Easter, and people need their phones to make bookings and things like that. Although this is a quiet time of the year, there seems to be quite a hit on advance bookings and cancellations and those sorts of things. I think even the Daintree River itself and some of these other streams in Mossman, just the plume of water that went out into the ocean, I heard there were no tour trips to Low Isles for nine days because there was no visibility.

 We have been fortunate. Through the Queensland Reconstruction Authority we were able to get lots of activation for grant funding for businesses and individuals and for relief and even help. There was money allocated for the tourism message going out and those sorts of things. So that’s good.

And then of course there’s the repair to our central assets, so that’s mainly our road network that’s been damaged, been a bit of damage around some of the boat ramps. The pontoon at Daintree has washed away yet again, at least the third time since it was installed. This time it didn’t get jammed up under the ferry which was good.

 I think we were activated for three disaster events in the last little bit. Once you go above a certain amount of damage you apply to the State to be activated to get funding to restore roads and bridges and all those sorts of things. I think we had (Cyclone) Owen and Penny and what became cyclone Oma, a monsoonal low. It's only February

 We’ve probably at something like fifteen million dollars’ worth of damage and quite possibly we’ll get into the twenty million dollars’ worth, It does take a little while to see where the road damage is and that’s because the roads get inundated and it's not for a while that the damage becomes apparent.

 And that’s on top of March 2018 rainfall in Port Douglas and you’ve probably all seen [the landslip in] Murphy Street which is a large amount of damage and certainly was a threat to a number of properties. It's held up pretty well from how I understand it. Before Christmas, they were able to scrape a lot of stuff back to the rock and reinstall the concrete toes.

And Flagstaff Hill walking track is still damaged but hopefully that will be back on line in the near future. Then hopefully things settle down for a bit, but there certainly does seem to be apparent switch of climate influence. Certainly rainfall seems to be more intense. As a result, it does more damage and causes flooding and even the lows this year, to have all that crazy heat before Christmas. We've had these persistent lows which just go back and forth across the Gulf lasting for weeks and weeks at a time whereas once upon a time you got a low, it might last a couple of weeks and it was gone.

I think Oma since it started as a low in the monsoon had been mucking around for six weeks, ended up all the way down nearly off Byron Bay. Now it’s back at Vanuatu. Good riddance. But certainly there seems to be a swing. I think ’95 we had some really hot weather before the ’96 floods in December and this year we had that really strange hot weather in November. Council goes to level 3 water restrictions and five days later we get belted with the first flood and then the second flood, then the third flood, then we just got hit with 40 degree days again. It’s not the typical tropical weather pattern we've seen in the past. I think unfortunately it's going to be more frequent.

 There's a lot of good modelling out there. As disaster managers we rely on the BoM as the source of truth but you can go to a number of other products that run models. Got to be a little bit careful that you don’t just concentrate on what you’ve been shown in one model. Windy weather will give you two models but there's tens of models out there that then do numerous runs. If you ever see the runs that the BoM will put out at certain stages of a cyclone’s development, sometimes it's like a loop of spaghetti and they pick the averages and get rid of the outliers and they're run from a whole lot of different models. Cyclone Chasers do a really good job of explaining what’s going on with the models but even they’ll say the European model or whatever, that  is normally a good track record, but they did really poorly with the monsoonal low, and another model, the Access Model that the BoM runs actually did a pretty good job. But overall they did predict that there was going to be cataclysmic rain along that east coast somewhere, and probably around that Townsville region.

 So there is a lot of product, whereas in 1996 my experience was there was a massive crack of thunder and I saw what’s called ball lighting, it's lightning that travels through the air. I've never seen it since, never seen it before, and then it basically rained for three days. Those were the days when you tried to track a cyclone on a piece of paper that you’ve got out of the phone book and really didn’t have much idea of what’s going on, whereas these days there's satellites and models and tracking. There's a lot of stuff out there.

 We run our own Disaster Dashboard which I hope people are using, where we've got three flood cameras now for the Mossman, Barratts Creek and Anichs bridge. We've got automatic road closures on Anichs and Mossman-Daintree road now for flooding. And all these other products are designed to give people the information to make good and sensible decisions. We’ve got the Emergency Alerts which is the first time I've had to activate one. There's an ability to set up alert messaging through a different system to send messaging out and warnings. So all that stuff is all new.

 I did see the government has released some money for disaster resilience today so we’ll have to get some applications in probably for some more rain gauges up in the Daintree catchment that work a bit better, so we know what’s happening up in the catchment itself.

 David White  (interviewed 1 May 2019):

The next day in the afternoon we came with a little rowing boat and the water had gone down but the level was halfway down from the highway to the car ferry to where our ticket office is. So we were wondering if our ticket office was still going to be there, so we launched the boat and rowed there. The water was still through our ticket office to about knee deep. You could see where it had come, dirty mark on the wall, about 2.2 metres deep through the ticket office. And there was a coconut balanced on the roof of the toilets there where it had floated. Right on the very tip of the roof, skillion roof. So the whole toilet block had gone underwater.

The ticket office was still standing which was very relieving to see but it was a bit mess. There was a big gauge through the middle of it, fast flowing water. We had 24 plastic chairs chained together but not chained to a post, and we couldn’t find them. We’d lost them.

Everything we left in the cupboard got wrecked. And some other containers of water that wouldn’t have floated but must've floated a little bit, but the water was flowing fast so we lost them as well. We went looking for them in the mangroves on the other side of the road but could not find the chairs or the containers. We found lots of other people’s stuff, but not ours.

 We spent all the rest of the day shovelling knee-deep mud out of the ticket office and bringing sand in which had been scooped out from under the ferry. They'd been dredging the ferry, put some sand in there to make it all dry and pleasant again. And it was a big job. Very very messy. The whole carpark was full of slimy, smelly mud.

Over the next few weeks the council came and did some jobs but they need to do more. It’s still not back to how it was before. It's still a big mess there. It was a lot of work and not expected. Caught a lot of people by surprise. The people that have the Daintree Tea house restaurant have been operating for 33 years and they were caught by surprise. They lost their car. They weren’t expecting it to be as big as it was.

When we rowed down the next day, we saw a couple of cows lost on the side of the road and one was standing still in the water in the carpark up to its belly in the water looking a bit lost.

We tried to get the cow to move but we couldn’t, tried to get him to get out of the water but it just stayed there. We didn’t want to go too close to it in the rowing boat in case he jumped in.

We saw a little crocodile swimming round the carpark, about 1 metre long. There may have been a bigger one in there during the night, who knows. He took off when he saw us.

It came up quickly and it went down quickly. It was quite a quick flood compared to other floods we've had, which haven’t been as big but lasted longer. The river calmed down much quicker.

Later on we started doing cruises again, we found a couple of cows on an island. We call it Pig Island because there's some wild pigs on it that swim out. But haven’t seen cows on it before. So we let the farmers know and they came and rescued them. They had a barge and they were bringing cows up from Cape Kimberley, they’ve been down there since the January floods till now, late April, and they’ve managed to round them all up and get them on this barge. Back then when it happened there were fishermen out in the ocean that found cows floating around off Cow Bay. Which I think is named after the sea cows but there were moo cows floating out in the ocean and the fishermen tied ropes around their horns and towed them back into the beach and the farmers came and collected them later on. We went for a walk on Wonga beach and saw two dead cows unfortunately a couple of days after.

We have regular small crocodiles, one is only one year old so it’s less than a foot long, he was in exactly the same place as he was before the flood. Came back to the same place. Even though there was six metres of water over its normal spot and the water would’ve been flowing very quickly, but the little guy must've found a spot out of the current away from he normally hangs out and then made his way back to the normal spot. So I was surprised by that.

 There’s one adult though that we haven’t seen since the flood. We have names for our crocodiles so we can recognise them. This once called Erica. We used to call it Eric but we realised we had it wrong. Erica hasn’t come back since the flood but she may have a nest somewhere. We thought all the nests would’ve gone underwater and drowned. The eggs can’t sustain being underwater for too long but I went back and looked at my textbooks and saw that if eggs are only under for less than 12 hours they can survive. We saw a few days ago our first hatchlings, only two of them, that’s all we've found but we’re surprised. We didn’t think there were going to be any.

It was such a quick flood. If the crocodile had made a nest reasonably high to start with, it could’ve survived if the water wasn’t flowing fast, just an inundation for less than 12 hours. The little ones can hold their breath as long as they're less than 30 days old which they would’ve been. It adds up. The eggs had been laid 30 days before. If the eggs are over 30 days old they can’t handle it, they run out of oxygen. It's a porous egg and they breathe through the shallow of the egg.  We have seen two little babies which is exciting for us, excited seeing brand new ones with their mums. Those ones that have drifted away from their mums, they're on their own. It’s not a very good survival rate, they lay 50 eggs, less than one percent make it through to being an adult. They could be alright if they have their parents, they might be with their Mum. Maybe Erica is up in the swamp looking after her babies and these little ones have drifted away from her. They're very curious and they start heading off on their own after a couple of months

 Any dead cows in the river the crocodiles will scavenge. They'll come from a long way away attracted by a bad smell. We've seen that before after floods. It's not a common thing for crocodiles to grab live cows, but when there's a flood, the cows get isolated and float off their paddocks and whenever we see a cow, we've seen them in the river floating around a few times, we always ring up the farmer and let him know and try and help him rescue cows, because we don’t want crocodiles getting the blame for the cow going missing. But if he’s already dead, we don’t necessary tell him, just enjoy the spectacle.

 Crocs, I call them energy efficient, people call them lazy. They go for the easier option if there’s a choice and scavenging is the easy option and bad smell will attract them. I've seen plenty of dead cows being eaten by crocodiles over the years. And pigs. But never actually seen one get taken by a crocodile.

 In the 2014 floods they found some cows on Snapper Island. Managed to float out there. I don’t know if they blow themselves up. They just float for a while. Because we've got the mountains so close to the sea here, it all rushes away quickly once it's stopped raining.

Doing the tours since then, the river’s a mess, all the trees are flattened, all the leaves were ripped off them, they're growing back now and there's a lot of erosion. A lot of exposed banks, unfortunately exposed sugar cane. When sugar cane farmers first cleared their land, they would’ve left a buffer between the fields and the river but rivers meander, they move from side to side. There’s parts where the river is heading towards sugar cane and they're running out of trees, and from the river you can see the sugar cane and the eroded bank. And sooner or later the sugar cane’s going to start falling in the river, so the government really need to address this.

Just up from our wharf they’ve spent millions of dollars trying to stop the erosion. There’s a little tiny lane called McDowell Lane and it's fallen in the river after the 2014 floods and they’ve spent over a million dollars putting rocks in to try and stop the road falling in the river. Now there’s a whole lot more erosion. It's a road that services two houses and the sugar cane fields, the trucks go up and down there harvesting the sugar and it's a lot of money to maintain a road that’s servicing two houses, it just doesn’t add up. I think the money was federal money from cyclone relief. Need to let the river go where it wants to go and just maintain the vegetation on the banks. It looks much better from the river and it's habitat for the riparian animals, frogs, snakes, birds, crocodiles. There’s a rule I’m sure that that you're supposed to maintain the buffer zone between the sugar cane and the high tide mark. Its a marine park and it needs to be addressed, but it’s not.

It wasn’t a cyclone, it was from Cyclone Trevor, it was affecting our weather here, concentrated the south easterly winds bringing in the moist air from the sea, making the monsoonal trough much more active than it normally is. Just a huge amount of rain. That same rain,  after it got us, went down to Townsville and flooded them out and then went inland and drowned all those cows in the dry cattle grazing country that was without rain for 7 years, then the rain came and it was too  much and they lost 500,000 cows or something.  Same rain, all part of the monsoon, a particularly active monsoonal trough

In 2014 they sent out a text message which was really good. This one, because they underestimated it, we got the text message about 11 o'clock at night. By that time the ticket office would’ve been over head height in water, so too late. That’s why a lot of people got caught by surprise. The 2014 one they had plenty of time to pack up and get everything out but this time, too late.

Because there have been other floods since then. It's been a very wet year. December we had to stop operating for that flood that we thought was going into the carpark but didn’t. then we had the January 26th one, and then we had two others since where we've had to stop operating because the river was flowing too fast. It was flooded at Foxton.

 And those times, after learning about that website, I looked at that in real time, it updates every few hours, you can look at the graph and see what the water level’s doing upstream. It gives you a good idea of what you need to do to look after yourself and your property.

They have warnings they put out but the warnings are not as frequent as the thing is updated. The flood actual levels are updated more often, it's a good thing to look at.

 The Council’s got a flood warning site with cameras, although the Barratt Creek ones weren’t working before the flood. But the ones at Foxton were, which is very handy to know whether your passengers can get to you or not. You look on the website and see if the road’s underwater from the park at Foxton. The cameras are really handy. The Council should have a link directly to that Daintree Bairds Crossing automatic flood measurer. That would be much easier than to go through the BoM site. They’ve got a link to the BoM site I think but it's really hard to find, so that would be good.

 The SES came down after the flood and the wharf had broken, the pontoon, the launching ramp had broken and they came down and tied it up to the mangroves so it didn’t wash away. That’s all I saw of them. Probably couldn’t get there because the Foxton was flooding. Pretty much normal there. That’s alright. You know it's not going to last too long

There's a Rural Fire Brigade at Wonga but that’s for fires. There's an SES in Mossman, I think that’s the only one. Don’t think there's anything in Daintree Village. But they wouldn’t have been able to get down our end anyway. Barratts Creek was flooded.  Anyone in Daintree Village was isolated there too.

Enrico    (interviewed 30 March 2019):

The day after we went for a boat ride and everything was flooded. Unfortunately my neighbour passed away as well. Mrs McDowell. She was an old lady and it was me and a friend, we were just going to check the floods and we got a phone call to check on McDowells and just 40 seconds before I reached the house, the helicopter arrived. We went to have a very quick chat with the paramedics and unfortunately the lady was passed away already. Sad. She no healthy. I think the flood, distress, they had water in the house as well so I think the stress made it quicker.

It flooded at 1 o'clock at night, it stayed up all the day after, Sunday. I think the first time we went inside the house was Monday, midday roughly. It was a mess. First of all opening the door was really hard because all the wood was swollen. Stuck all the doors. Had to get through the louvres of the window and once inside, couch was everywhere.

 The government’s been awesome, been really on to it and helpful. I didn’t go and see them, they came and knocked on my door and gave me money, like wow. Couldn’t be better. They gave me x amount, then they gave me a bigger sum for the appliances and everything. Some people came and done the assessment and realised they could prove I lost everything, so I got a bit out of it and on top of it, my Mum with GoFundMe, I didn’t even know it existed before, and she said ‘No, I’ll organise everything’ and set it up. And I got a bit out of it as well. Lots of locals, they helped me. After all that I was happy. I lost quite a bit but sometimes it's good to change.

As soon as the water went down and we were able to reach the house, lots of friends and locals came and helped with cleaning. We had fire tankers from the local fire brigade, gurney, other locals brought trailers. In two days we had the house clean nearly. The major things like all the walls washed down and squeezed the floors and slowly all the rest I done it by myself slowly. The locals have been awesome, and even the other day Steiny, which is one of my neighbours, he put a party because he was flooded, and he had five relatives there and how funny that his son hasn’t been up here for ten years and he’s coming here with the family, and they got to be rescued in the middle of the night from the biggest flood in history. We put the boat in at 3 o'clock at night because he gave us a phone call saying water’s coming into the house. Two boats went down and picked him up, rescues him. Just two weeks ago he put on a party and we all got pretty messed up from him just to say thank you that we’re helping him. Even when they were cleaning my house, make sure there was plenty of beer there for everyone. They come and clean all your crap.

The outside of my house is 100mm bricks. The structure is wood then outside is really old bricks, it's one of the older houses in the area and I think it started off as a little shack for cane cutters and from there it kept evolving. It's got two roofs. It kept getting built up. It's a unique place. It's owned by Reynolds. Clint. Technically Johnny but I deal with Clint.

I’m still renting the house but it's mainly because I’m storing, I own too many things. Really I lost most of my stuff has gone but I've still got car and another project car that went fully underwater and I’m throwing away anyway but I've still got a few things there and at the moment I don’t really have a permanent place yet. I'm still camping here and there, so I’m still renting that place. Still good to do washing machine there, I've got electricity and it's still cheap rent, it's a good location.

 It should be knocked down and do a high rise and they're planning to do it and I’ve got a feeling they will do it this time.  Just knock it down and do a frame underneath.

Can’t really do anything else, not at the level when the water comes 2 metres, need a six foot wall with sandbags otherwise it’s going to fill up.

Early the day after I went with my brother and we put the boat in right where the Eco Lodge entrance is, and went down where Barratts bridge is, and then we went upstream Barratts into the Daintree and we went to the Village and then we went to check also on Jaki because I know Jaki’s one of the first, her house goes underwater. In ’96 she had it really bad, and we went check and I can’t remember how much water but plenty inside the house and we were yelling, calling, but no one was there then we went to the Village and they told us people went to rescue Jaki in the middle of the night and she was stuck. Wow. The first crocodile attack was on her jetty. I would not like to be there, not on that specific spot anyway. Yeah Jaki she put up with it many times before, I don’t know how. But even the house where I am, it seems like every time it floods, somebody moves in and they stay until the next flood.

I lost my bees. I bought a hive but I didn’t have any bees. I planted borage and the day it flowered, a swarm of bees came. European bees. But they didn’t use the hive, they made a hive in a sofa I had by my door. They lived there happily for three years in the sofa but I didn’t get any honey.  I think they came from Steve Gray’s, a passionfruit farmer nearby, I do a bit of work for him. He bought three swarms and one disappeared.

 I went back into the house when it was flooding and the only bit of the sofa showing above the water was the back of it, and the bees were there. They can’t see at night so when I shone my head torch on them, they thought ‘ah daylight’ and flew towards me but then it was dark and they got frightened and stung me on my back.

 The next day I saw the sofa had been flooded and moved by the water and there were no bees. They’d probably drowned. There was just a little bit of honeycomb stuck to the wall behind where the sofa had been. The cell wasn’t broken so I put a teaspoon in and broke it and got the tiniest bit of honey on the tip of the spoon. That was the only honey I tasted from them. Bees are clever. When the sun hit the sofa, they would line up and beat their wings to keep the hive cool and if you stood behind them, it was like a fan.

My baby was safe, that’s all I cared. it was 11 days because we got stuck and everyone was flooded. She was fine on a safe property and I stayed in the house. We just got stuck for nine days last week in the same spot. North of Daintree Village, so you pass the Village, nearly at the end there. Stewart's Creek, beautiful property but we are the very first one to get flooded in and the very last to get out. No reception. Just get stuck. As long as you’ve got food, we had plenty.

 [On the ferry road] Steiny got flooded the first, then there was Gippy, Lo Gip, but I don’t know the level, how much water they got but I know they did get water in. McDowell. And another one that got really bad was Chris Norris, the ferry house went underwater. Kath Lester, she was minding the house. She was minding the same house in ’96, and it went under as well, but she lost her car on this flood. I think she lives in Forest Creek but because somebody gotta stay at the ferry 24/7 in case an emergency, so there’s always somebody at the house I guess and she was rostered to be at the house because Chris was away. So she was at the ferry house and her car went underwater, if you drive up north and look at Reynolds shed, her car is parked there for the last three weeks with the bonnet open.

The ferry was out a good three-four days I think something like that. And the ferry shut for a few days before the flood as well because it flooded once this wet season and it nearly flooded three times, pretty bad, even last week it went not far from it and it was 3.3 metre tides. And before that we got 10 point something metres in the river. So it got close a few times this year and even locals up in the Stewart Creek valley, there’s one bloke that’s lived there for ten years and the longest he’s been stuck there was for five days one year. He gets stuck once every few years for a few days and the longest was in ’96 for 5 days. We got stuck 11 days once on Australia Day and people got stuck 11 days and 9 days the other day. So people up there got really stuck for over 20 days collectively.

The wet season is here. It’s actually good to see a good wet season coming because I’ve been in Daintree for over 8 years now and I got a couple of wet seasons but nothing like what you hear the locals talk about 20 years ago. Back there it rains every day finally this year we got a proper good wet season. Done lots of damage to properties but I guess it does lots of good to the environment and we needed it. There’s always other side to the story. It's good to see everything green. It's good to see all the creeks flowing because just before the big flood we had the major drought when we hit 42 deg. We had mature durian trees dying from heat. Mangosteens 30 years old dying from heat. 70 years old locals never felt any heat like that and a few months after, they’ve never seen any flood like that.

This one was bigger than ’96 in the Daintree Village. 1901 it was 12.5 and this year was 12.6 so it was a little bigger and ’96 It was 11.8 something like that so we nearly got a metre more in the Village but down the mouth of the river it flooded with low tide, which is incredible. So in ’96 there was one metre less rain in the village but there was over one metre more tide. ‘96 was a high tide. That’s the reason why down the mouth was higher in ’96 than Australia Day, but in the Village it was a lot higher this year than ’96. We were lucky because a few hours later it was 2.8 so if we were to get the rain 12 hours later it would’ve been a helluva mess. Would’ve been way bigger than ’96 even in the Village. So in one way we’ve been sort of lucky. The Crossroads could’ve had over a foot of water in, could’ve if it was a king tide, it would’ve been catastrophe for a lot more people.

The water went just level with the top of the highway. It would have had to go another foot probably to reach the front of the Crossroad, then another 10 cm to go in. So in ’96 it was just level with the front door of the Crossroads.

I moved in just after the flood of 2014 and I knew it flooded in 1974, in ’96, and in 2014 so I calculated it flooded every 14, 15 years so I took my chances. It lasted five.  It was an experience. When I moved into the house, I was cleaning the mud from the walls, so it's not something that came by surprise. I knew there was the risk that it floods, but gosh I was hoping that it took a bit longer, I was hoping for a bit more mercy. Shit happens.

My daughter was safe, my chooks were safe, my dog was safe, my ducks been seen afterwards, ducks float, they’ll be fine. Lost a lot of plants but I’ve got lots of plants at home and I had a good two feet of good mud. Johnny Mackay slashed a cane paddock three days earlier because it was really bad cane.  It was a paddock that didn’t bear good cane this year so it's cheaper to slash it than going through fertilise and paying someone to harvest it. He slashed it so there was bits of cane this long and trashed that was right upstream from where the current came and the current moved all the trash into my place and I had a good two feet of cane trash all piled up and it clogged all my fence and I had all copper [Koppers] logs fence with mesh wire and that’s all got knocked down and there’s cane trash everywhere, but not just leaves, there’s actually cane, that usually you expect just the leaves. I've got cane growing all in the yard and all around the drains. It's crap cane as well. It's funny. Johnny was there cleaning my house but. He done a big mess but come and cleaned it. Clint came and helped a lot coz it’s his house and Johnny worked for him. Clint is the rural fire brigade so we were pretty fine. The electricity got hooked up shortly after and it’s all back to normal.

 I saved the water pump just before the water came in, and I switched the electricity main switch off at the fuse box just before the water went into the power plugs. So the electrician was happy about that because it didn’t block the fuse on the power line so it was only an electricians job. It wasn’t an electrician and Ergon. Even though all the switches, power points and fan switches, they’ve all been replaced. They had to and the guy was blown away how much mud was in there. Got to be done every time it floods, just standard procedure.

 I was flooded in up in the valley so I couldn’t go and pick up all my stuff in the house, so if the house would’ve gone under water I would’ve lost what I saved last time. I’m getting ready and moving everything to the safest place. I’m in the hills now. There’s creeks that flood but they just flood you in, they don’t flood your house.

I choose a flood any day over a fire. At least in a flood, lots of valuable things that didn’t get damaged by the water, all I had to do was close the doors and the house turned into a washing machine then once the water goes down, I went there and I found that thing. Whereas if you get a fire you lose everything. Maybe you keep the cutlery if you're lucky.

 Jody Westbrook    (interviewed 28 Feb 2019):

 The next morning we got our guests out like with the help of the SES because they were trapped here. Just around the corner here the river comes up so high it actually cuts the road off. It's all calm, still water but they couldn’t get out. I had some guests that had international flights.

We had evacuated most of our guests and I think we had 8 guests here. They had the option to leave, like that day and the day before but the 8 guests that stayed said ‘No no it’s fine we’re not too worried. It's just a bit of rain’. So we had our 8 guests and then this tour group turned up at 5 or 6 o'clock in the afternoon said ‘We've been in Cape Tribulation all day, Mossman River’s over, can’t really go, and Barratt’s Creek is over so there’s not too many places in between, do you think you can look after them. Give them dinner.’ And they were still thinking that the water was going to go down, and they'd come back and take them off after dinner. But the driver got trapped out, leaving his tour group guests here which we accommodated and looked after them with our guests. So we then doubled our guest numbers and our responsibility, but you're never going to turn people away in that situation.

 So it was actually lucky that they had to come back to get their guests and we put a few guests on their bus. I think it was Billy Tea or something like that, tour group. They got in to around the corner here and then they had just a little inflatable dinghy thing. It was literally still water, just across the road here, so it wasn’t dangerous or swift or anything like that. But transferred guests and luggage and it was only probably 10 metres at the most, going backwards and forwards.

It was probably the adventure of a lifetime for our guests. We would never have done anything that would have been too risky for them. They were safe here. They weren’t going to be harmed or anything like that. Because they had international flights and because it was safe enough to get them out with those guys, we set them off on their way. They left their hire cars here so we helped get them back to their hire car companies. At the end of the day the best thing was for them to get off the property and continue their holiday.

 Because I've grown up here my whole life, I know floods and flooded waters. Helped Dad shift cattle in floods. It's not something that I'm not accustomed to. When we lost power it was essential for me to call him to say ‘If you can get here, if it’s safe enough for you to get here and come and get me in the morning, I really need to get down to the Lodge’. And when I woke up in the morning and the water had dropped so much I was actually worried we wouldn’t be able to get there because it's sometimes more dangerous when the water drops a bit. When the water’s really high, it's often a lot safer because it's not as swift, it's less risk to hit things with the boat.

By the morning we didn’t have phones so I was just hoping that he would come and get me. And he did. So I got down here just after those guests had been taken out and then we still had two other guests and the remaining staff that were here the night before and yeah, they were relieved to see me because none of our staff had been through a flood before and I’m always here when that happens, but having that phone connection and being able to talk them through everything during the night was essential. But then when we lost the power and no phones

 I actually had two attempts at getting out of the boat because I got out first on the corner round here at Humbug Ridge and climbed up the bank and looked up the road and realised there was still a good metre or so of  water over the road this way in the dip where the guests had to get paddled out. So then I had to get back in the boat and come up Barratts Creek and come through the trees and climbed out up the bank again and walked around the corner. I didn’t realise the water was still as high as it was. When I walked around the corner the river was level with the front driveway here so I actually could have gone in the boat up Barratts Creek, driven the boat up the road, and jumped out there at the front door but I didn’t know that at the time.

When I came down in the boat it was actually sunny. Ii remember it being hot, going ‘My goodness’. But then It did start raining again not long after I got here and it was on and off. In actual fact there was a big storm and thunder while I was here before the water had dropped to get out, but the torrential non-stop rain had ceased. Just big showers would come over and then it would stop again.

There were helicopters coming across checking power lines and things like that. We didn’t get a helicopter here to the property but there was one point in the morning when a helicopter went over and we’re all like ‘We’re here’ but they were checking power lines. I was monitoring the water back down here and every half hour I'd go down and check it and it would’ve dropped. It was dropping really really fast by the morning so I knew it would only be a couple of hours and we could drive out. So we held tight and it was not long after lunchtime that we actually drove all the way through to Mossman. That was on the Sunday.

We’ve had to take all the furniture and all of the kitchen equipment out because the whole restaurant went under water to the tops of the windows. There wasn’t any equipment that we could save. It was just some of this solid timber furniture that lasted but there was probably a good inch or couple of inches of mud through the whole of the restaurant. Furniture that floated and upended everywhere. Staff all had a day or so off just to get over it and let the water completely drop because we couldn’t get into the Village until the following day. Barratts Creek was still underwater till Monday.

And then we came in and just got a whole heap of skip bins and removed all the furniture and equipment that was ruined. And now a couple of weeks later we’ve got trades coming in to repair everything. It’ll be a couple of hundred thousand dollars’ worth of damage. Three of our rooms downstairs also had water through them so they need to be repaired as well.

I said to the staff a couple of days later, get our gloves on and our gumboots on and get in and get it done. Clean it up. Before we know it, it’ll just be a distant memory. At the end of the day we have to realise that we do live in the tropics and we do get these extreme floods every now and then.  I think they're going to know that more often. In 1996 my grandfather had seen one flood higher and not by much. There's a tree at home where I grew up with a watermark from ’96 and this tree was probably only a metre higher now, so it wasn’t that much higher.

 So ’96 was lower but my granddad had seen a flood slightly higher than ’96 in his lifetime and so now I’ve seen ’96 and this flood. And that’s 22 ish, 23 years, so it's not 100 years, it's not a lifetime. Hopefully I don’t see another one in my lifetime but the reality is who knows. It can happen. And this flood went from a normal flood to ’96 or one of these one in 100 year floods very quickly and you just don’t know if it’s going to do it. Just the staff, the team did the clean up, to keep them employed and keep them doing things. All up we’ve probably got close to 16 staff. Some of our casual staff did finish up but we have full time staff and you don’t lay them down because this is as much of a shock to the system to them as it is to the business, so being able to get them help, gurneying things off and cleaning things, is good. The team were really good, they wanted to get in and get it cleaned up.

 It’s all still water when it gets to this point. It’s the river backing up when it gets to here. The staff were sitting up in that room watching the water rise and rise and rise and probably the scary thing too was it happened at night time, so not knowing and not being able to see whether the water had stopped rising or what was happening, it can be a bit daunting.

The situation here at the Lodge and having guests stuck here for me is not ideal. But like I said only a few weeks before we had the exact same forecasts and the exact same type of rain and flooding levels and nothing happened. So do you get guests out and do you make those decisions before it actually happens and then nothing happens? Probably the answer is yes.

Predicting what may or may not have happened with the water, I don’t know. It's hard to tell. Mother Nature’s a funny thing. She can be a little unpredictable sometimes.

We’re hoping to re-open, our target is 1st April, which is a little ambitious probably but we will have been, from the effects of the flood, non-operational for a couple of months. Unfortunately the owner of the property chose to self-insure because flooding isn’t always covered with insurance companies and especially if it's associated with a cyclone. Commercially their coverage isn’t so good, so it’s all coming out of the business’s pocket. But yeah we will get going again, we’ll get there.

 Peter and Richard at the Daintree Tea House    (interviewed on 5 March 2019):

Peter   The next morning we started trying to see what damage had been done, what we could salvage, what had to be thrown out.

Richard    Anything below the level of the water was covered in mud. And tables, there were a lot which were chipboard, they were disintegrating. The carpet was sopping wet. And the kitchen, there were fridges, you couldn’t move them they were too heavy, underwater. One of the freezers, a big freezer was on its back. And then we just started working.

Peter   The freezer is an ad for Fisher and Paykel. We stood it up, we stripped the food out of it and threw it out, cleaned it up and let it sit for two days, plugged it in, turned it on and away it went. Another large fridge which is a three-door fridge in the kitchen, its motor is up high, it's on top of it, not down below. Another display fridge in the kitchen, all its electronics are down below, they were playing up but the motor was working fine.

Richard   Six and a half thousand dollars’ worth of dishwasher has gone. There's a bar fridge out here (in the restaurant) which has gone, that’s another two and a half thousand dollars.

The carpet was just under $7,000 to have replaced, and those people were excellent.

Peter   We rang them up, it's a family run business in Cairns, we tried several business and no one was really interested in coming up here to do it, they were all too busy. I spoke to his daughter, the guy who owned it. She manages the office. And she said ‘You're going have to lift the carpet to get the underfelt out from underneath, because that’s where the problem is. It acts like a sponge and holds the water and that’s what makes everything smell. And try and get the carpet dry’. So we did that using one of those wet and dry vacuum cleaners. We sucked out 120 litres of water out of the carpet.

They turned up with the carpet on the Friday. He took one look at the carpet and said ‘Give us a look, we’ll stretch it out and see if it's shrunk’. It hadn’t shrunk and the carpet was dirty. it was wet but it was good quality carpet still. He said ‘To be honest it's going to cost you around about ten thousand dollars, the carpet’s full of mud, it's still too wet, I can send up driers which you can put under the carpet to try and dry it out, then you're going to have to have it cleaned’. He said ‘We’ll get cut to pieces with gravel rash sliding around on the carpet with all that mud in it, trying to lay it’. And he said ‘By the time you do that and pay us to lay it you're looking at around $10,000. How about I sit down and work out a few options for you’. So that’s what he did. He sat down on the concrete over there in the corner, with a pen and paper, didn’t have a calculator and worked it out decided that the carpet tiles were the best option because if ever we flood again, all you have to do is hose it out and there's no underfelt to worry about it. And he said ‘We could do that option for you I’ve got them in stock’. He worked out how many he needed and he finished up bringing up four carpet tiles too many and you can see all the angles.

Richard    He and his son turned up on the Monday, worked all day and they left an excellent job, we’re so lucky. It cost six and a half thousand. The fee he charged for coming up on the Friday he cut in half. His name is John Chisolm. You'd recommend them to anybody.

The following morning we came down, the water was still up to car park level. We had no phone, no internet, no car, no power and we had the satellite, we could get the TV station, the radio station in Cairns but the trouble was, it was the weekend and we weren’t getting any local news about what had happened.

We had the generator going, we had fuel but when the road cleared, the gooseneck people were driving past looking at everything. We didn’t know what was happening, no one called in and we had no car to get anywhere. So I said ‘How much fuel have we got?’ He said ‘Oh we’re just running out, the generator will stop shortly. I’ll go and make a cup of coffee while I've still got some fuel’. So I took a jerry can, put a sign out ‘No car, no fuel, no power, no internet, can someone please help. We need fuel.’ And they kept on driving past.

And then a couple from the Village, the car stopped, they backed up, they drove in, they'd just been to Wonga to get two jerry cans of fuel because they didn’t have any power either. And they gave us those and they took our two jerry cans and were going to fill them up for us, and then as they were driving out, they backed up and said ‘Do you need the use of a car? We’ve got an old car, you can have it as long as you like.’ It was unbelievable. And if we didn’t have the use of a car it would’ve been impossible. Because we had to arrange with the insurance company for the car and of course no insurance for the damage to the building because you're not insured for rising flood water.

The car was written off. It was 12 years old. Excellent condition because we’ve kept it that way. We spent recently two and a half thousand dollars on new wheels and tyres. I filled it up with petrol on the Friday before because I knew if there was trouble with the rain, we would need the car full of petrol. Just paid the insurance.

Peter   Which was $2,000, just paid the registration which was $1000. And the pay out figure finished up at 5,200.  The car was a one-off car and every time we went in to be serviced at Irelands the staff commented on how it looked like it had just been driven out of the showroom. A Mitsubishi 380, they're rather special. Super charged.

The insurance company wasn’t the least bit interested in how it was, they just said a 12 year old car. And it still ran like a new car.

Richard      We’d kept it all together and we broke down as the car drove out on the back of the truck. The water was over the bonnet, all through the electronics.

We ended up with a Holden Commodore, a lift back, a new one, well it's only done 8.000 ks.

Peter   It was a demo model. It's still under new car warranty.

Richard      The trouble is you’ve got to pay for it, whereas we owned the other car.

The flood was the Saturday into the Sunday. Peter rang our clients, because we only do tour bookings and said we’ll be closed until, he was going to say Friday, I said it’s going to be Monday. It ended up being two weeks. Because in the end the health inspector had to come in and check that everything was OK. We had to get new tables. The carpet didn’t go down till the following Monday.

Peter   We had to replace all the doors because the original doors just disintegrated on the toilets and storeroom.

Richard       And we had to clean the walls. We had to gurney all the chairs to get the mud out. We had the help of two people. We had lots of offers but it just gets such a muddle. We’re better off working through it on our own. Inside the water came to window sill level. And you wonder where all the leaves came from.

Peter   Since the flood I’ve basically had two good night’s sleep. Last night and the night before. So hopefully it’s all turning.

The last biggest flood would’ve been just below table height. That was in ’96. Half, three quarters metre less

Richard            When we told Peter’s sister-in-law that we were getting a new car she text back and said ‘That’s something positive’, and I thought to myself ‘That’s the problem there’s nothing positive’. And you're thinking about all these expenses you’ve now got. And of course the rates are in, the power guys came during the clean-up. You’ve got all these things and you think ‘There’s nothing positive’. You can’t quite see that. Before we were OK, we knew what we were doing. We had plans for this year and all of a sudden it's all out the window and we've lost 5, 6 years.

Peter   It’s around 95 to 100 thousand dollars total when you add it all up.

Richard            You can’t expect people to understand, they’ve got no concept of what you’ve been through. You feel for the people who’ve been smashed in Townsville, and out in the drought. When you get to our age, this is the second flood where you should only have one flood in your lifetime, we had ’96 as well. And it was the 5th of March, today, ‘96

Pretty sure it was the 5th of March and that was a lower flood and again unexpected.

Peter   The funny part then, the water was clean water, it wasn’t mud.

Richard            It could’ve been the amount of rain we had before, whereas the ’96 flood was isolated to this area and also might depend whether was, like with Ita that was muddy water. The rain in that one was in the Daintree River catchment and probably not in Barratt Creek here, because normally the Daintree River will bank Barratt Creek up, like a dam wall. So this water here’s not running. But with Ita it just poured through, like this last one. The current was quite strong.

There’s lots of damage to the sides of the road in this one. It could’ve been the amount of rain we had before that loosened it all and the big flood just took it all.

Getting information’s difficult and even trying to get some help is a bit difficult. You want to get rid of the rubbish and you ring up Cleanaway and they wanted something like six or seven hundred dollars to put a skip in and we couldn’t afford that with all the problems. In the end we wrote to Julia the Mayor and she arranged for them to come out last week, a tip truck and back hoe and they took it away. I’d broken some of it up and put it in the rubbish.

They took away all the old carpet. We’ve still got the dishwasher to get rid out and we've got to replace that. How much is that worth?

Peter   Six and a half thousand.

Richard            And by the time you get someone in to work on it, you're looking at around ten. There’s a double door fridge in there which is about another six or seven thousand dollars. That’s got to go. That’s the second flood that’s been through and that’s the difference. Last flood Cec Martin came, sat down at each fridge, took it all apart, cleaned up all the connections, changed what he had to and got them all going again. They don’t do it any more. They test it and say No, it's no good. And with the dishwasher last time, the guy came, it cost two thousand dollars us in those days.

Peter   The service call was a thousand dollars to get him out from Cairns.

Richard            He took the motors out and had them rewound and put back in and he checked the electronic parts and that was OK then, but you can’t now. They just write the thing off.

You worry about your clients because they’ve gone somewhere else while you’ve been trying to get all this going, and then you hear rumours of what’s happening and you think We’re losing them. And if we lose them we haven’t got an income. So that goes through your mind as well, you’ve got all this playing on you, so trying to be positive is difficult.

Richard            it happened quickly. this will be the fifth time we’ve had to remove things. Second time we've had water in, but the fifth time we've started moving things in anticipation.

Peter   We were cut off for two days. And the phone came back on Sunday afternoon.

Richard            That was not the first time this has happened. It happened during Ita and it happened recently as well when the phone goes out. Apparently it's something to do with batteries and no one had the key to put the generator on, or the generators not there and it’s the season and they know, and you rely on it. And when we did get on the satellite to the local ABC in Cairns, the radio, they tell you to go online to check what’s happening. We’ll you can’t and you can’t ring anybody. And we don’t get radio here.

Peter   If someone had been hurt or taken seriously ill, there’s no way of getting them out because you can’t notify anyone

Richard            Radio doesn’t work here. in the car it might be OK. We don’t get radio in the house. We’re in a black spot. Once the phone came on, I rang Ergon, you get a recording of course, and they know now where you're ringing from because of the phone number. It was then I thought I don’t want to hear the recording, I want to know what’s happening so I pushed a few more numbers and eventually got someone and actually she was quite helpful. I said ‘We’re in trouble, I don’t want to listen to a recording. We’re cleaning up after being underwater. I'd just like to know what’s happening, I haven’t seen any Ergon trucks go past.’ Because we see everyone going into the Village from here. She told me they were having trouble getting vehicles into the areas where they had to and later on all the helicopters started flying around and trucks went through. But then she actually rang back when the power had come back on to make sure we had power. That was good. That was a change of tune for Ergon.

Peter   Our driveways have been washed out. We have to do something about that because the large coaches are having trouble getting in here. It’s down to clay now. And if the clay’s wet they just sit there and spin their wheels.

Richard            Did we have mould? and it keeps on coming back. It’s abated a bit but the panelling in the toilets is soft after water and it's all warped and it's going mouldy and has to be replaced, but that’ll have to wait. Try getting vinegar or ti-tree oil, you can’t get it. I think that’s what they use. We were just scrubbing, scrubbing. Some of the walls still have to be done again. We cleaned all these walls and we hosed the kitchen floor down.

Richard            We wrote a letter to the Shire to Julia, Federal member to Warren, to Anastasia the Premier and to Cynthia our State member and we mentioned about the phone being a problem. We haven’t heard of anyone tackling it. It's just not right. And apparently they flew in on, I don’t know what day it was, helicoptered to look at it but they couldn’t fix it because they didn’t have fuel or something, I don’t know what it was, so they flew out and we didn’t get it until next day. It’s incompetence really.

Richard            Once Townsville got hit then the local ABC was on all the time, so that’s OK but you can’t expect just for us, three people, that you're going to get local coverage on the ABC. They are good and even when we were cleaning up, we were hearing what’s going on in Townsville and you get some idea of what others are suffering.

Richard            The first people that came around were the people from the State government offering us $180 help each and a guy from Red Cross so that was nice to see someone and be able to offload a bit.

Peter   He was from Cairns and the two girls were from Brisbane.

Richard            So they were flown up by the government. From what I gathered they went into the Village and spoke to people there who were affected. They offered us $180 that was it. If you were a family $900. Where does that go? And then the Federal government was offering $1000 and we thought where are we with all this, because we had so many expenses. We were laying out money on tables, on carpet, fuel and trying to keep things going. So we applied and they said ‘You may not get it because you're not in Townsville’, but then we did get it in the end.

And then in regard to any financial assistance, that’s in the lap of the gods at the moment because Warren tells me that the Federal government allocate 75% of the funding but the State allocates it, so he was a bit reticent in getting too involved at this stage until Cynthia, see what she could do and what the Shire could do so we’re just waiting.

Peter   We had to get a car, just couldn’t live without it, so you have to go and put yourself into hock again. Fortunately we were able to do it, but it’s still a strain.

Richard            Life goes on, still smiling.

Richard            We probably lost about four or five thousand dollars worth of food. Go to Cairns and get more.

Peter   We get one major delivery but we do most of it ourselves.

Richard            I go to Rusty’s on a Friday and I didn’t go for two weeks, so when I was going, Peter said ‘They’ll all want to know what happened’. One of them, nice guy, Alf, everything was half price and some things for nothing. The others were sympathetic, they always put in a couple of extra anyway. But I knew what would happen.

We had plenty of offers of people to help but it just gets a bit difficult sometimes. You're grateful but we’re in such a muddle you just want to work through it yourself. And we were doing it from morning to night.

Peter   Getting the business going was number one. 

Richard            You have to. Especially when it's your own. You can’t afford to throw out all the fridges, you can’t afford to throw out all the tables, you’ve got to repair them, those up there had been repaired, they're OK, they're serviceable. These ones here we had no choice because they were falling apart, we had to do something. Commercial tables, forget it, too expensive, not big enough, and to get supply, they’ve probably got to come up from Brisbane and you’ve got to go and get them from Cairns. So we said ‘OK we’ll look at Bunnings’, and we worked out these ones would work. And so I rang Smithfield, yes they’ve got two and then I arranged to pay for them and I asked if there were any at the other Bunnings at Portsmith and she went online and said Yes they’ve got two and one on display. I rang first thing in the morning and I couldn’t get on to the trade desk and she said ‘I’ll send him an email’. I was waiting on the final call on these tables which I’d earmarked anyway but I was waiting on the other two because we needed at least four. The price was reasonable, waiting on this call, waiting on a call from the insurance and of course you're trying to clean up at the same time. You’ve got people ringing up wanting to know how you're going. Eventually he rings back about 2 o'clock and said ‘You’ll have to send me an email’. I said, ‘Listen mate, we’ve just been flooded, I've got the computer on, it's in the house. I haven’t got time. We’re trying to clean this place. Smithfield said you had these. Can I give you the number and can you check? He said ‘I don’t know what they're talking about, we haven’t got any’. I said ‘I rang early this morning’. And then I just lost it. I just blasted him. Then about half past 4, 5 o'clock a girl rang and said ‘We’ve got your two tables for you’.

There was a bit of lack of empathy. Off course he didn’t really know what we’ve been through but that makes it hard. Anyway we got them.

Richard            The ’96 flood stayed higher longer because in the morning, the local SES came in a boat, sailed up to where the car was, and they wanted to take Peter’s Mum away and she wouldn’t go. And they said ‘We’ve got to go in next door’ because there were people in the back there in the Barratt Creek area, and they said they'd call back and if the water had gone up we were going to get his Mum to go. But once they'd left we noticed the water started dropping and then it dropped to basically the car park level but I think it stayed flooded for a couple of days.

Peter   The village was cut off for a week because if you remember that was when Paul Keating was up here and he was flying around in a helicopter and the blades clipped a couple of trees and they had to land. And I rang the ABC and said ‘Is there any possibility of getting some fresh produce flown into the Village by helicopter?’ And I was told that that’s not the airforce, army whatever, that’s not their position, they don’t do that sort of thing. I said ‘What, they just carry Paul Keating around on a tree clearing exercise’. And the commentator said ‘You can’t say that’. And I said’ I just did’.

Richard            There's a picture of me out here in my red jocks going crook at one of the tour boats going up and down with politicians in.

Peter   Because it was causing a wake and pushing water back in here.

Richard            I’m sure this road was underwater for over two days that time. The Village was cut for a week so it was a lot longer duration.

Richard            This time the SES did nothing. No-one came near us. The only thing we got was that emergency call on the telephone and on my mobile, no-one knows about his mobile in the Shire, so he’s not there. That’s all we got. And a lot of people don’t know what we’ve been through. A friend of ours, she rang up, she had no idea, she lives at Pebbly Beach. Peter’s hairdresser’s in Port Douglas they’ve got no idea what happened. If they saw Channel 7 News, because they interviewed us, they'd probably know and then I spoke to the ABC early one morning, if they were listening to that they might know, but no-one knew.

Peter   As far as we know there was nothing in the papers. Very little, again because it was a long weekend so there were no journalists working, then by Tuesday it was all over.

Richard            We have a couple of photos but when it’s all happening you just don’t do it.

There was  mud all over the carpet where we've been walking, the mud’s gone underneath. When the water went down, there was the mud up the driveway. You can see the bricks we’ve put down to mark where the flood was. In ’96 it was all chipboard stuff in the kitchen, so you can imagine in ’96 you’re walking on broken doors and stuff. But the mud was worse.

Richard            The pressure pump, I knew I could get it out and disconnect it, but I forgot, so that got destroyed.

Peter   Because we’re on tank water, we have to have a pressure pump.

Richard            I just got the hose and it was just a small stream and that worked quite well because I didn’t have too much water and I could get it through the drains in the kitchen and it drained out, so the grease trap will be full of mud. (laughs)

Richard            We’ve been open for almost four weeks. It took two weeks to clean up. You have to. What else do you do? You walk away, you’ve got nothing.

 Jaki Turner with Peter and Sally Maher, and Ian Hooper    (interviewed 28 February 2019):

 I can’t remember what day it was, anyway the first day water went down sufficiently for Barratt Creek bridge to be navigable by car, I went down there to survey the damage. The water had reached to one metre below the highest point of my house, the roof. 

I can’t help emphasise how quickly the water came up. That’s why I felt the panic which I wouldn’t normally have. I would have survived because I would’ve sat on a table in the loft and my head would be above water. Mind you, I might have to hold the dog up. But you don’t know when it’s going to stop rising, that’s the problem. But you freak out.  Paul Snelgrove and Ian Hooper, whose boat it was and who was the main perpetrator. And David Paterson. They were my saviours. My heroes.                                                                           

It’s going to be a long time before I'm back in my house. The assessor came and had a look at it pretty quickly actually but then I didn’t hear from him for ages. I keep getting all these different people coming to assess the situation and whether they be the cleaners, the builder’s not come yet, one’s coming on Monday and the electrician had to come to re-establish the main line from the meter box to the house and they dug up most of my front garden doing that and left all that mess. In fact everything’s gone backwards in a way. But the house has now been cleaned where it looks very nice but it’s all flywire, there isn’t any glass in the place, and I know from experience the flywire has to be replaced because you can never get the mud out of it. The mud is what is extraordinary. Anyway the cleaners spent whatever amount of time cleaning all this flywire even though I told them it's going to be ripped out, so everything seems to be totally illogical, the way it's going.

They’ve all came from Cairns. The cleaners, the boss came from Brisbane, obviously had gone to Townsville on the way. And then his sub-manager came and then eventually the cleaners came, they were there for five and a half days. Five of them.

It wasn’t that big a job because as soon as the water had gone down over Barratt Creek, a whole bunch of locals went down with me. I'm gravity fed with water and that had blown out with the extreme rains and so there was no water there, so we took the fire truck to use the fire hose to get rid of the three inches or four inches of mud. Mud from a flood is like a yellowy clay and once it dries it's rock hard and it stays for years you can’t get it out. We got the fire hose in and got rid of the surface mud everywhere which was fantastic and, of course the fridge was upside down, the pantry, everything was all upside down. The furniture this time I had roped off to the timber poles in the house, so it didn’t do as much damage. My heavy bamboo furniture didn’t knock around the place which is great, which means the floor of the house which is quite beautiful, it’s inch and a quarter timber hardwood which we sourced from Ravenshoe 35 years ago, just impossible to buy now, so I was very keen that they remained undamaged.  But I don’t know what I would’ve done without the help. That was local community, that wasn’t anybody else.

That was three days later. We couldn’t get across the bridge before then and it's funny, as soon as the water was down, suddenly the helicopters flew in to set up the phone lines again, whatever they had to do with that, the battery. And SES came. This is all after the event. I was driving backwards and forwards to my house from the Village. I was going past the local cricket oval, I could see them there in front of the TV cameras, all these men in their spotless uniforms and they hadn’t done a thing for anybody. When we were all down at my place with the fire truck hosing out, the SES arrived, six of them, and they were astonished to see the water level and they wanted to know which SES crew had rescued me and somebody said ‘The Daintree SES crew.’ There’s no such thing. Nobody else was coming were they, because the roads were apparently closed from Mossman so they wouldn’t have been able to get to me anyway. It was just a silly scene with all these smartly dressed men. In fact when they arrived, one of the girls, Belinda, she said ‘Is it your birthday? Are you expecting one of those telegrams, a stripagram?’ because they were quite handsome. They were all embarrassed of course.

In my situation there was no point in me phoning Mossman, they weren’t going to help. If the phones had’ve gone out just that bit earlier, then I would’ve been still stuck there, being very wet and more crinkly with a very wet dog. All thanks to mainly Ian Hooper, I was alright. And then everybody knew of course, the whole of north Queensland, that I had to be rescued.

It gets to the point in my place where I can’t leave, because the road is a lot lower than my house and that’s why I take the car out early, because once it gets to a point, it can be dry in the car park but it's too deep to get onto the road so for me to get out earlier, I would’ve had to walk through water and that’s dangerous in itself.

The car’s fine. It’s a shame because I needed a new car. Would’ve been inconvenient but still.

 Peter   The next day it went down reasonably quickly.

We’re also the proprietors of the caravan park in town for the last 10 years and the lower level of the park was subject to a lot of damage with the raging river. It annihilated all our boundary fences, our camp shelter and all the furnishings and a lot of erosion damage, gauging out from the river at the place as well. Electricity points underwater were replaced. It’s a known thing that happens. You know you're living close to the river so you're eventually going to get a flood situation.                                           

It was the biggest we've seen. It has happened before and I guess it’ll happen again but this one took everybody by surprise and I think one of the main things that caused the trouble was the loss of communication unnecessarily. That would’ve helped a lot of people in a lot of situations.

Jaki      I must admit Ergon were good. As soon as they had access they were right on to things.

Peter   Yeah. Power was restored. A lot of credit to the Ergon crews.

Sally     And even before they could access here by road, Ergon helicopters were flying round checking.

 Peter   It was a public holiday Monday but we still had electrical contractors reinstating power to people.

 And the farmers further up the valleys in the catchment areas were subject to livestock losses. They were caught unaware. As a rule, the general farmer puts his livestock up onto higher ground at these times of the year. Last two or three years there’s been hardly a wet season so people have become a little bit more casual I presume. A particular farmer (Jim Noli) on low country opposite the village lost a significant number of cattle that were washed away down into other parts of the river, some out to sea, some out to Snapper Island, some drowned. There’s livestock losses from out of the Daintree River and the Stewart Creek also had cattle that were washed downstream and into other areas.

 That’s a little part of the game up here. You’ve got to be on hand and try and forecast how bad it might get, so you can safe-haven your stock and horses. In 20 years we’ve seen several floods. Five years ago was 10.5 metres, came along with Cyclone Ita. Nothing like the damage this one caused, this year in two nineteen. Everything gets back to normal, we’re in the recovery process.

The farmers in particular have to put their fences back up and that sort of thing. We’re reasonably short-term residents, 20 years here, it was the biggest event we’ve witnessed and been involved with, and it affected us in two different, on our farm, as well as our business in town, we had a lot of recovery to deal with and it's ongoing. But I think the main thing out of the whole event that there was no loss of life.

Jaki      It certainly affected business though because as you can see the weather’s brilliant at the moment and there’s just not a soul around and that’s not usual. Everybody’s just totally, one presumes, freaked out by these weather events here. There’s just nobody coming. I know Port Douglas is like that as well. Even when Townsville floods, it affects business here because people think, North Queensland, they keep saying North Queensland. I don’t think Townsville’s in North Queensland. We used to be Far North Queensland.

Peter   We still use that. I think the tourism bodies want to get away from it a bit, it seems. I think it’s very descriptive.

 At the start of our flooding, we were the focus and then when it moved down to Townsville, it proved a greater event because of the population in that area. Then it went north west, all the Gulf farmers in the north west and cattle people were hit hard as anything they’ve ever seen. It’s graduated from an event in our little environment which is reasonably normal to go to Townsville, and then to go to the greater area of north west Queensland, it became a bigger event and the focus went off us, down to Townsville and then went to other places and it's been a greater event that’s been documented now and were probably lucky. compared to a lot of other people.

Jaki      Speak for yourself!

Peter   Excepting Jaki of course. She had a great ordeal.

Jaki      The worst part for me now is there aren’t any tradesmen around locally because they’ve all disappeared to Townsville. That’s everybody’s excuse anyway.

Peter   Sure. Understandable. That’s our account of it. We know we’re in the flood area and it’s a calculated thing that can happen to you any year, any cyclone season. This was one that was a bit bigger than normal, it certainly leaves an impression. Makes you wonder how high it will go the next one, is this the record, how long can you live to find out.

Jaki      As well as the catchment areas, we don’t know what was going on there, so obviously there was a lot of rain in the catchment.

Sally          We were having enormous rain here, it was loud, just didn’t let up.

Peter   Like being under a waterfall.

On the Saturday a gentleman in the park measured 600 mils for the day and then it kept raining that night. We had two campers in the lower level of the park who were evacuated later that night about 11 o'clock. We weren’t on site in the van park but some local residents came along and helped those people to evacuate to higher ground also.

Jaki      A friend said to me, if you feel it's time to take the car out, you should stay in the car but if I did that, I'd be forever staying in the car of a night wouldn’t I.  As I said before, you do have a number of small floods that don’t hurt most people.

Ian       The flood before that, we had to take Barry Osborne across Barratt Creek, and on the way back, a four and a half metre croc was actually going into the paddock on this side of the bridge. It was swimming, it was in the water. Probably to get out of the fast water.

Jaki      Snakes are the least of your problems. The wildlife can swim, most can. They just go to the edge of the water and up the hills. When the water eventually went down, there were footprints around my deck area from all different critters like white tail rats.

Ian       My house was OK, the water never come into the town and I live right in the Village. The water went down pretty quick. I haven’t seen it that high.

Jaki      I haven’t either.

Ian       Rob come up and said it was just behind the toilets about midnight and that was higher than ’96 I think. I saw it when it had dropped a bit, so it's the highest recorded river rising since 1901.

Jaki      Peter Mantus said it was 13.1 on the post. The post is now on its side. Just behind the toilets there.

Ian       So the river is changed. You go down in the boats, you can see the trees smashed up into the banks.

Jaki      The council have been down shovelling sand out. There’s a lot of erosion and a lot of locals with their spades. Barry was down there shovelling sand one day, trying to put his boat in.

Ian       The little ferry wharf, the Crocodile Express departs from there, their staff cleared a lot of it.

Ian       it mainly come back in around the boat ramp. It filled that whole parking area up with sand. At least 2 metres of sand over it. It's a bit of a backwash there, you’ve got that big bank where that big tree is, it holds the water, so it swirls. there’s a lot of roots exposed of that big tree. I don’t know what they're going to do with that. Probably be a write off.

Peter   Oh I think refilled by the sound of it. It's a Council issue.

Ian       All the trees that are over, come back in six months, they’ll keep growing, they’ll regrow.

Sally     That happened in ’14 didn’t it, they got flattened and they came back up.

Jaki      This river has a large catchment area.           Big tree by boat pontoon  – water level was up to banana trees in bg – Anja FB

Ian       We heard on the news, oh the Daintree’s alright. They haven’t got power, they haven’t got phones but they should be able to use the internet.

Jaki      They haven’t got access.

Ian       We had no internet or nothing. I've actually got a satellite phone at home. I worked in Weipa for 25 years in the mines. I travelled up and down the road from Cairns so I’ve got a sat phone. And the rescue helicopter flew in and gave a sat phone to Barry.

Jaki      Everything happened when it was all over.

Ian       One of the first cars in here was a highway police patrol car.

Jaki      That’s right, actually booking people for non-registered vehicles. I was talking to Paul, we were actually watching them that morning, they were looking around the fire truck which he had parked in the middle here, looking for a number plate because fire trucks don’t have number plates and they were looking to see if it was unregistered.

Ian       They were Cairns, police command. There was a lot of mud on the road still down at Barratts Creek. But the car was filthy, I don’t know why they wanted to drive through it. It's a lawless town?

Jaki      They just sat in the middle here and the couple of cars which were parked around the place, by that stage there were a couple of sight-seekers that had come in. They were checking their number plates.

Ian       When you cross Barratts Creek, you know where Jaki’s driveway is? Well have a look at that power pole right at her driveway. You see two stays come out near the top and two wires come down. Well you couldn’t see those stays, they were underwater at the top of the pole, that’s how high up it was. And that camera at Barratts Creek was almost underwater.

Sally     It did later go underwater.

Jaki      But they are helpful, those cameras, up to a point, before it gets too high.

Ian       I’m not sure how up to date the photos are. You look and you go ‘Was that two hours ago?’

Jaki      No, they say at the bottom [of the screen], they’ve got a time. It's on the council dashboard.

Ian       But no good if they haven’t got internet. I’ve got power, I’ve got four generators. Townsville gets half a metre and they all whinge and cry down there. We get bloody 12 metres.

I suppose really it could’ve been serious. If the water was higher we wouldn’t have been able to get to Jaki because of the powerlines. We would’ve had to go down the river, or back up river.

Jaki      The rivers’s treacherous with the logs and the flow. Didn’t the road to Barratt Creek on the Village side flood afterwards?

Ian       It got right up to there, Langtrees.

Jaki      Just at the edge of the Village.

Ian       You’ve got a a dip and a bit of a high spot and there’s another dip, it got to there, just as you go round that corner, the house on the right, just past there.

You’ve got a couple of other houses. You’ve got Craig’s missus, lives opposite the tip, she can’t get out because there’s those two dips there. Craig sent me a text. I got through the first dip, I come over the bottom in me Landcruiser but the second one was too deep.

Jaki      Yeah, there are 3 or 5 properties along there but they’ve got hills behind them so they can always climb up, and they're higher once you get in, there's just a dip to get into their places.

Ian       I've got a snorkel, [on his car] I spent a lot of time in Weipa so I'm used to driving through creeks. It didn’t take long, only a few hours later, I drove down there. The water was gone.

Jaki      But it took a long time for the Barratt Creek bridge to be open. It was 2 or 3 days before it went down.

Ian       High tides push it up and hold the water there. The last flood I drove across Barratts

it was about 600 700, just nearly come to the bonnet and I went to Mossman, got a few things, but the waters real still, it wasn’t moving, On my way back I noticed in my rear view mirror a local police car was following me because you’ve got the Road Closed sign. Oh well. There was two cars in front of me, they stopped there at the Road Closed sign, I just went around them, kept on going to Barratts Creek. And i looked in the mirror again, the police haven’t got a snorkel so they can’t follow me. There was a few cars stopped there, even Steiny was there. [Robert Steinberg]

Peter   Let hope it's over.

Ian       it's not as hot. We had a couple of humid days, real bad, and that was it. it wasn’t that real stinking sweaty heat.

Jaki      There were a couple of very hot days there before. We can’t complain about the heat.

 Gaye Scott (interviewed 26 February 2019):

We got up in the morning and it had gone down but it was still quite high. Where we are, we have about 300 metres of road, so we could turn that way and go upstream but only got around the corner and there was a big landslide of mud but you couldn’t walk in it, because when you walked in it, it went up to your thighs in mud. And then the other way was water, so the river had come over onto the road and was still there. And we’ve been told by Jaki Turner never go into floodwater because of crocodiles. We did that in the first flood at Tranquility, we were trying to get up to the waterfalls and we had some pictures of me, up to my waist, just trying to get up to the waterfall to see the track, and Jaki said ‘Don’t you ever go in’. So whenever it flooded, either at Tranquility or where we live now, you can’t really go anywhere near the water’s edge because we are told that the crocodiles go, ‘Ooh there’s something new’. So like all of us, they're curious ‘Haven’t seen that before.’ So off they go.

In the 2014 floods there was a crocodile sitting on the bank by the bore pump so that was pretty scary. They said ‘Yes they do come in for floodwaters’. So if the flood water’s there, you don’t let dogs or children near. I guess that’s the scary thing for Tony and Alicia. Being locked in and not being able to go anywhere.

We were cut off probably from the Saturday afternoon, all day Sunday and on the Monday we probably got out about 9.30. The telephone went off at 2.30am only because that’s when the last text message came through and then I think it came on again on Monday morning at about 9.30. As part of my job at Council I was sending out updates but on Sunday morning. I couldn’t send an update because even though we have a generator, we didn’t have any wifi because we didn’t have the phone tower.

And I couldn’t tell anybody. We’ve fixed the fact that if I don’t send out an email to Georgia who’s at Council, then she will send the email out to people. I have about 180 people on the mailing list to keep them updated. But they got their update on Monday morning. What was funny on Monday morning was that you get the die-hards that are out as soon as they can and they come through water, just to see how far they can get, so we see a couple of cars coming through but they’re kind of the big 4WD thing. So about 9.30 we thought the water’s down enough so we’ll go. We arrived in the Village and people were starting to come out. The only communication we did have, I heard Sally Maher on the CB on the Monday “Hello is there anybody out there?” and I went ‘Hi Sally, it's your next-door neighbour’. She was trying to get hold of Sauce, who’s Ian Worchester, to come and pick them up so they could go and check the caravan park. She tried all sorts of different channels and it was really funny to hear a voice because we hadn’t heard any voices for a while.

 Sally had to push, shove and swear at a very wet grumpy and stubborn miniature horse to get her to move to higher ground and as the rain kept on, she and husband Peter moved vehicles and all their diesel machinery out of their shed to higher ground too. When they were up to their thighs in water, they opened a fridge, filling it with water, and found a couple of beers which she threw into the ute and she thought ‘That’s it’ and they headed to higher ground also.

On the Monday morning, once we got the phone back on, people could get out from Stewart's Creek and from Douglas Creek and we kind of all congregated in the Village and had a bit of a chat. There was a couple of tourists that were wandering round, shell shocked, looking for coffee and of course there wasn’t any. They were supposed to be staying at Cape Trib and of course they couldn’t get there, so they were looking for accommodation. But it was quite difficult because the Village hadn’t had any power at that stage.

And then we all wandered round to Jaki’s place and we had the fire truck and we just helped Jaki clean up. There were guys that were clearing the mud out because it was about a metre from her roof. She had a whole lot of stuff in what she called her loft, well the water covered all of that.

She’s got the wonderful rescue story. She rang through at about 8 o'clock to get rescued. She tried to get a hold of Dave Patterson who has a boat, she tried I think Paul at the fire brigade. They eventually got on to Ian who lives in the Village, she knew had a boat, and they’ve had a coffee van at Woolies for about 6 or 7 months. Anyway he and Paul went to rescue Jaki. It took them about an hour to find her because the river was so high. They launched the boat on the road, they didn’t go on the river. She lives on Barratts Creek so they tried to follow the road, which goes over the bridge, past the Daintree Tea House restaurant and Jaki’s just before the Eco Lodge.  So eventually they saw the tops of the travellers palms which are in front of her house. The power transmission lines were there and Paul said at one stage ‘We’re meant to go, we can’t go and get her’ but Ian said ‘No we’ve got to go and get her’. So they arrived and almost got to her front door, and she’s got a big ramp up to the house, and she was, as Dean Clapp says, up to her tits in water. So she comes out, she hands over her beautiful dog, they take the dog, she goes back inside, the electricity’s still on at this stage, she comes back with a bag and then she does this fantastic leap onto the boat because it was quite high and she was in the water here, but got into the boat and was back at the house behind the café at about 9.30. So it was quite scary for her. I was up in the loft and we could see the water mark and if she’d have been still in the house, she’d have been sitting up there in water up to her chest with her little dog for four or five hours had she not been rescued.

 She takes her car and parks it up the road about three or 400 metres so that it’s out. Dean said to her ‘Next time you’re moving the car, keep going.’  

Dean had his staff cleaning up down at the Daintree ferry because they have the ticket box down there, Dean owns Crocodile Express and they arrived back in the Village at about lunchtime, so we were all at Jaki’s place moving furniture. She was dazed at that stage. I went and got some beers and Coke and brought them back. We were up in the loft and you're kind of crouched down, we were pulling big plastic boxes of clothes and opening them, they were full of water. ‘Right all of these are red now, she might’ve had a red jumper in it’. They weren’t waterproof. She was flooded again in 2014, the house does flood.

Jaki and Michael Turner built the house 30 years ago and when they were there, they started the Butterfly farm and of course it was at their house that Beryl Wruck was taken [by a crocodile]. So they’ve had a long association with the Daintree Village and tourism there. Although Michael’s passed away so it’s just Jaki.

Now she’s staying in a little house behind the Daintree Village Tourism Information Centre. So there’s the Croc Express and the Information Centre that are both owned by Dean Clapp and part of that real estate has a a little flat behind it. Deans been really wonderful.

She’s working with the insurance company at the moment. They’ve got cleaners that are staying in Cairns. They're coming up every morning and they're doing 3 hours of cleaning and driving back again. The insurance company organised them. Because the builder won’t come in and do an assessment until they’ve cleaned the house, get the mud off. I thought we’d done a fairly good job with the fire hose on the Monday.

She’s on the lower side of the road on Barratts Creek and the Tea House is in the higher side and they had water through their place. And the Eco Lodge had water which is higher. So she is quite low even though it's quite high set off the ground, it’s quite high when you're standing there. And she has crocs, she watches the crocodiles. She had a rickety pier that does down to the edge of Barratts Creek and there are crocs there. Sauce often does a tour past there.

The jetty in the Village itself got covered in a huge amount of sand, and water goes over the lower part of the caravan park.

The funny thing is, you drove into the Village on Monday morning, it looked perfectly normal. It's only down at the river bank where the pier is and the bottom car park but everything else looked beautiful because the Village’s built in the right spot. It’s high. The water comes around it but it’s fine.                                                      

I think the Village got power on and then there were 11 properties on Upper Daintree Road which were without power and we were one of them. They had to isolate two properties, Tranquility and what we call Doyle’s place which is Glen Doyle’s, because there was actually a power line down at Doyles place,. Once they'd isolated those two properties they were able to turn the power on to the other properties.

 Ergon were really really good. I think people were disappointed in Telstra but very appreciative of Ergon.

 Saturday was the Australia Day then Sunday, and Monday was a holiday. But I think Ergon had helicopters there on Sunday just doing an assessment. And then again on Monday I think. We could see them go over the Village and then down Stewart's Creek and they come along at eye level so they must've been following the power lines to see what damage there was.

 Tony and Alicia moved up to the big house and they came down in the morning after and found that the water had been through the farmhouse that they lived in, which was very stressful for them. I think the little girls’ room, they’d just decorated up with little girl things like unicorns and stuff like that. The boy had his little man cave with all of his things and I think she had bought some furniture. Once they'd settled in I think she’d gone down to Northern Interiors or Early Settler and bought some additional furniture so they were ensconced in the farmhouse and there was water through it. The freezer was over, she’d just stocked up because they’d been through the flood on Boxing Day, full freezer, had food for a month, and it was tipped over. So they were just devastated. Back at the big house, Tony was trying to get hold of Roger who’s the owner just to let them know what had happened. And they were on NBN satellite so they're not reliant on the town telephone. They had generator so they had power and Tony said every so often, the NBN thing would pop up, they'd get a signal. So he said ‘I got Roger on WhatsApp’ and Roger happened to be sitting down at Choo Choos having breakfast with somebody and Tony rang through. So after talking with Tony, they had decided that they would have to get them out.

So it was arranged and then there was the big thing because they had the dog so I think somebody had to go down to the Mossman Hospital and give the helicopter a pet cage, I think Paws and Claws might have done that. But Tony was saying ‘I was happy to stay with the dog’ and so they helicoptered up there and picked them up and they stayed with Roger and Maggie at their lovely house in Port Douglas, overlooking Dickson Inlet. And of course the kids were devastated about the house but the next day said ‘Is this our new home?’ It’s a fabulous home, it’s in Murphy Street, beautiful views of Dickson Inlet.

They’ve actually closed Tranquility now. They’ve still got their 220 head of cattle which were fine and they have moved into the Lodge which is usually rented out. I don’t think they're moving back into the farmhouse. Maggie, Roger’s partner, won’t let him do it. Because they’ve got three little kids and one of them’s going to Daintree Village State school. Or two of them. India goes on a Friday because she’s at kindy.

Everything in the Village was fine. The inundations were Pete and Sally’s shed, Daintree Tea House restaurant, the Eco Lodge, they were able to get out the staff out on Sunday morning. But they were stuck there for a while.

 Tony and Alicia when they were coming out in the helicopter, they saw four people waving at them from the Eco Lodge and I think the SES chopper went back to see if they were alright. I think there might’ve have been a landslide but they got out on the Sunday.

There's a house that’s halfway down the road you go to the ferry from the Captain Cook highway, and two people staying there with their son, quite elderly maybe in their 80s, and I think it was the wife had a heart attack and died on the Saturday so when they went into the house, she was dead. That really complicated things doesn’t it. It's not that you’re landlocked, but you're landlocked with somebody who’s passed away.

There's a couple of people who live on what we call Kiely’s creek. They go up Upper Daintree Road to the CREB track crossing, they park their cars there and then they take a dinghy back down the creek and then they go into Kiely’s Creek and there’s six properties there. Karl and Helga have got two of them and when there are any warnings like this, they park on Upper Daintree Road up on the hill. And his car got inundated.

Opposite Crowie’s place, which is about 287 along Upper Daintree Road, there was a property that’s across the river and we all call him The Guru. He had parked his car halfway up Crowie’s driveway and it got inundated. We went past and the doors were open and the hood up, but he’s got it going.

Laurie Taylor thought she’d lost five cattle which is extraordinary considering she’s so far up Stewart's Creek valley. Noli retrieved 130 so I don’t know how many he lost. James up at Tranquility, the Tranquility cattle come from Astria (?) station which is up past Coen and he came down and did a camp draft and he’s satisfied that he’s got most of them. There was one that was dead but not sure if it was from the flood, might be a thing called Three Day which happens after the wet. But he didn’t lose any. Keith and Michelle Reynolds, I don’t think they lost any. And Pete and Sally didn’t lose any. Osbornes didn’t. I think most people had the cattle up except for Noli. He didn’t obey Maurice Mealing and Serena.

The Daintree River does a big meander and we could get in a boat and avoid the village altogether and take out the entire meander. I don’t know how many kilometres it would be across. It was just like a brown lake and then you watch it slowly come down.

 Sometimes it leaves a lot of mud and sometimes it's what they call a clean flood. Along the road there were parts where the water had receded that were fine, you thought ‘Nothing’s happened here’. Then you got to bits where it was really slippery where it had left a layer of mud. It left a whole lot of sand on the boat ramp. It’s funny how it works. sometimes it leaves mud, sometimes it leaves sand.

 Stewart's Creek bridge was fine, it was just debris, it went under and came out. I think Harlow’s goes under and Laurie’s beyond that so she can’t get out, and I think Jan and Tracy and Dean and Anya, they have to wait to get out. Next to us Ian and Tenille Hill, they’ve got three children. Mark Halstead came and rescued them on the Sunday. When I say rescued, they just walked out. Maybe they didn’t have power so he thought ‘I’ll come and pick you up’. So he waited at this end of the landslide and they must've walked through. We saw them driving out on the Sunday morning. We are at 91 Upper Daintree Road and I think they’re at about 130. They’re our next-door neighbour but one. There’s our house, then the council owns the little gulley and the Hills are on the other side. They had two landslides between them. We normally can’t get past their cattle grid because it floods there. And when I walk upstream and I look down the river, I actually lost where the river was because it just covers all of the Hills property which is now owned by Noli gets entirely covered, and you can’t tell where the river is. The trees that line the banks are gone. And they're massive trees when you go down there. And when you see debris hanging from the power lines, you know that the river has gone up that high. It’s amazing how tall it gets. It’s not like it’s rushing because it's quite still once it goes out everywhere. When it starts to recede, you start to see big clumps of bits of wood going past but not at a particular rate, just with the tide. But while it’s a lake you can’t actually tell where the water is

Ian and Tenille Hill, they’re survivors like us because he sold his property to Noli I think six months ago. He’d had the place on the market for a while and then he kept the house and a few hectares so he could run some cattle, and Noli bought property on either side of the road as well as the pasture across the river. He wasn’t flooded at all and his cattle are all up the hills. But the Hills have been in the valley for generations. I think his Dad was here.

It was kind of exciting. There’s us and Barry Cluff and Di Cluff-Staine, they have a BnB which is behind the caravan park and they’ve got a really good view from opposite to us. Nobody lost their life so that was alright. It was kind of nice to experience. Graham always says, ‘Nothing will be as big as the 2014 flood, or the ’96 flood’. People always ‘Oh it’s not as good as the ’96 flood’ and that’s what they kept saying in 2014. It's funny because people want their flood to be the biggest one.

The 2014 flood was Cyclone Ita. There was lots and lots of rain falling in February and then there was the cyclone in April. Most of the damage was in Upper Daintree Road and also Cape Tribulation Road so there wasn’t a lot of damage to the rest of the shire. Jaki’s place was flooded but she’d gone, she’d got out of Dodge which she should’ve done this time.

Bairds Crossing got damaged and stopped reading so they don’t know if they can get a height. It's different at Bairds to the Village, they're two different heights.

 The SES were there on the Monday. as Jaki pointed out, in their nice clean blue uniforms. There was an attempt by the SES to coordinate with council in getting access but they didn’t really do anything in terms of rescuing anybody. You couldn’t get out of Mossman. Foxton was over until the Monday. But there was nothing really for them to do. It’s nice to have the SES and I guess it's different, I read about floods in Townsville in urban areas and there’s 900 calls to the SES. In the farming communities which is what it is, everybody has their own tractors and their DUs and their chainsaws they just get on with it, get on and do it. And we couldn’t call the SES because we didn’t have any communications, which has now been fixed. Paul Hoye has given Barry Costain a satellite phone which is permanently there now. Barry Costain, they run the Daintree Village BnB. He’s in the fire brigade as well. He’s an ex pilot so he knows all about communications. So he’s got the sat phone.

Tony and Alicia at Tranquilly. She was a bit mortified. She said ‘We went up there to just be’. They didn’t mind the remoteness of it. When they got rescued, Roger was having breakfast with somebody from the new radio station in Port Douglas, so they got interviewed. ‘They were ‘Oh Gosh’.

The Valley’s been built to allow the water to go out and back. It’s well planned. the landscape is designed for that flooding, for the river to every so often break its banks. And I think it brings lots of nutrients into the soil. Up at Tranquility where it gets flooded most of the time, the cattle are always there, they love it, that particular grass. They’ve got 450 hectares and they like this one area. so it makes it very rich soil which is it's great. An agent who goes around Queensland said this is the best country, it’s beautiful compared to elsewhere he’s been. And I think that’s why because it has this beautiful river that gives so much.

Laurie Taylor  (interviewed 12 March 2019):

I’m missing some cattle, I think I've lost them. Originally I was missing 23. I found quite a few of them. They came across the creek when the creek started to come down a bit. But I’m still missing 8. I found one of them had drowned in a big washout, but the other 7, I think they got washed away. I've checked all over now and they haven’t turned up so I think they're gone.

 My father used to say they’d blow themselves up. That’s why, years ago they'd find them out at Snapper Island. Because the cattle have 3 stomachs and apparently when they get in water they will suck in air and float. But the trouble is they get caught up in trees and things. In years past, we were trying to find cattle after a flood and my husband and I were walking around one day and saying ‘We can smell something’. And we were thinking one had got caught on the river bank.  But it was up a tree, disintegrating, dripping on top of us. So this is what happens. They get caught in a particular area. they might think the creek or the river’s going to go down again. They get on high ground but the river keeps coming up. And when you’ve got trees either side of the river bank, they can’t get out.                            

Usually every year I make sure I've got plenty of food. I've got freezer and I've got a generator so but I was thinking I've got 20 litres of fuel, what if the power’s off for five days, I'd better ration this generator out in case it doesn’t come back on. At Christmas time it was 12 days. And this time it ended up being 13 days, but just being myself there I don’t need a lot of food or anything. My nightie days I call it, I don’t have to get dressed.

Even though it was raining, it was really humid and then the rain eased off a bit and I thought I’d better go out because some of my cattle had come out onto the front paddock. They had been up on the hill with grass usually at this time of the year. Anyway they'd come down and I didn’t really want them on the front paddock because they bog it all up because there’s been water all over it. It's a lot better if they stay on the hill. Anyway, I went out into the paddock and I thought ‘Oh this is about the fourth shirt I've had on this morning, soaking wet with sweat’. And I thought ‘Nobody can get here, I’ll just get round in my knickers and bra that’ll be alright’. So I went out into the paddock and iI was shushing all the cattle back up into the hill paddock because fences were down because of the flood. I had my little notebook with me because my cattle have all got numbers and I was identifying yes, this one’s here. After I’d finished getting the cattle out, I came back on the front verandah, I was sitting there in my bra and my knickers, and I had my sweat towel beside me. Next thing, helicopter comes up and I went ‘OK, I’m sitting here, they can probably see me under here, I’ll just get the cloth and put it over here so it looks like I’ve got a white top on’. They came up and around the house. I thought ‘If they can see me I’ll just put my thumb up, letting them know that I’m OK’. I didn’t know if they were checking on me, but obviously they were checking on the poles. I've got a pole right beside the house. They flew around the pole about three times and I could see they were looking at the pole. Really low. And they flew down the paddock and they checked the pole in the paddock and then they landed down at my front gate and I went ‘Oh my god, I’d better get some clothes on.’ Thank goodness they didn’t come up to my place. Two blokes got out of the helicopter and checked the poles and there’s a bit of a humpy down there on the river bank, must have a power box there, and they were checking the power box, it might’ve been a problem there that was taking all the power out.

So for next time, don’t walk around the paddock in your bra and knickers, I thought that wouldn’t been a very nice sight for them.

I've got about six paddocks up on the hill and they were in one of the upper paddocks further up the creek and there’s a low area between the front paddock and the next paddock. Sometimes they get caught in there on the lower bit and I think where I’ve lost these 7, they’ve been washed out of that lower area. but anyway, things happen like that when you're on a farm.

I’ve got about 70 there at the moment but 7 lost is better than 23 lost. Originally I thought I’d lost about 23 on my first count. They may have washed down into other properties as well. A lot of properties up there haven’t counted all their stock yet. I’m keeping my fingers crossed, they might be amongst the other herds. Whether they tell me or not I don’t know They might turn up yet. But as the time goes by I’m thinking they’ve gone. It's a lot of money. Not only the money you'd get if you were selling them but also the money you’ve spent on them so far, it’s gone. It's not good. I don’t rely on that for an income but it's an additional income for me to keep me going, to give me those little bit extras.

I have lost one or two before but I put that down to crocodiles. I've got crocodiles up there. Everybody in Daintree used to come up to our place years ago when I was a kid. Have big picnics, swimming, it’d be lovely. The guy next door had put a rope swing up that you could swing out from the hillside and drop into the creek. My kids used to camp on the river bank, the creek bank.

But we've seen a croc there and we've never seen a croc there before. This was Christmas last year. And they’ve come back this year. My father had the property before I had it. He took it up in 1932 I think. And he said ‘You’ll never have crocs up here. The water’s too cold’.

Maybe there’s getting too many down here and they're pushing them up, that’s my theory, they’re pushing them upstream. They're at Harlows Bridge as well so they're moving up.

It rained and rained on Friday night and again on Saturday. I've got a rain gauge. It overflowed actually at 10 inch, it’s 25 mm in it and there’s a big container, the whole lot was over, I thought I can’t measure that, it’s already gone. Well over a metre. I’ve seen more. It wasn’t a record, not for me but I’m up there, it might be been completely different this way (near the Village}.

My family in Brisbane were concerned because they couldn’t contact me. I wasn’t concerned, I've been there. Done it before. For 12 days. That was the longest I've ever been. My family were up here, must be 12 years ago. They got caught with me and we ran out of nappies, so I was on the sewing machine sewing nappies. Nappies and toilet paper were the main thing we were running out of. But my next door neighbours came up. He got his rod and reel, he cast over the creek and got to our side and Scott my so- in-law took the fishing line and then put a string on it and pulled it across and put a rope on it and we got our toilet paper and Scott got his cigarettes and they put a thing of fuel on it and we were right.

That’s something I probably would do if I got a chance, is put a flying fox across the creek so that you could transport stuff across, because it’s very dangerous for somebody to come up there in a boat because the current is so strong. I don’t think you'd go anywhere. You'd just sit in one place when the water’s up, it’s violent. When I go down and look at Stewart’s Creek and you see trees going over, cartwheeling down the creek, that’s really powerful water. And where it's all gauged out, where I found the dead cow, you can see the trees on the river bank all scoured out underneath, no dirt left there at all. And over near the high bank is just this big hole. I’ve never seen it like that before. The creek’s gone in behind the trees and just scoured out all the dirt. it's all soft dirt. It’s alluvial soil. It's all soft, sandy and soft.

 There’s a lot of sand came down. My top paddocks border onto the World Heritage area where there’s nothing, only trees and mountains. There’s piles of sand on that have come down. I think it's because there was so much water come down at one time in a narrow space, just gauged it out in different places. Because there’s sand dumped everywhere. Wow look at that, some of it's dumped across the paddocks. You can see sand all through the grass.

 I wasn’t really scared because I'm up on higher ground so I just sit there looking at it, thinking How long’s this going to last. I wasn’t really worried at all because I've done it before. Everybody else was more worried than I was. About me. They should’ve known I was fine

 My sister-in-law is Esther McDowell. Colin their son looks after his Mum and Dad. They're both invalids. It went through their house in ’96 and apparently Essie was stressing about the water starting to come in the house again. Anyway she had a heart attack and died.

They couldn’t get the ambulance to her and her husband Bill until the next morning in the helicopter. I’d say it was stress. She had sugar and high blood pressure and everything too. She was 10 years older than me. 83. I didn’t know anything about it until the Monday, it happened I think it was on Saturday night, whenever the river was at its highest. I think if it hadn’t have gone through the house in ’96 she would’ve been giving orders, Get us out of here. Since ’96 they’ve put a big bund wall along the roadway to stop the water going in there in a big flood.

I got the phone back on the Monday. When they got the generator. The power came back on, I think it was about half past 4 on the Monday. Because they must've found the fault. When the Ergon lady rang me it was about 2 o'clock, and when the phone went I thought ‘Oh the phone’s ringing, Wow, I've got a phone again.’  A bit of excitement for the year.

Billy Dunn is a professional fisherman who lives at Degarra, near the Bloomfield River.  Interviewed at a meeting at his home in Degarra on 11 March 2019. Degarra is at the northern end of the Bloomfield Track.

Billy was standing in his back garden which faces the river.

This is a very peculiar flood. We’ve never had anything like this ever before. This is the Woobadda river with the big new beautiful stone bridge. Then it joins into the Bloomfield River right here and the mangroves on this side is an island. What happened this time was a couple of reasons, the main reason was that they both flood at about the same rate. This time the bloody Woobadda didn’t flood hard enough. The Bloomfield went absolutely berserk and rode over the top of the Woobadda. There’s a very sharp corner up here, it couldn’t make the corner, there was too much volume of water to make the corner, so it blasted a hole straight through the top of this island and came directly into the houses a bit further up this river. Went through their houses into what we call the Anna branch. The flood actually came from that way, the land side, not the river side. It came round and then came back.

 The sea level slowly rising. 3.5 metre is the highest tide in Cairns this year. We've never had a 3.4 before. We’ve had a 3.38 but we’ve never had a 3.4. I was on the World Heritage Wet Coastal Management committee, it's a bit of a mouthful, and that went from the south bank of the Bloomfield to Cardwelll to the Hinchinbrook. We did a Coastal Management Plan for that area, government management plan back in early 20000s and it took five years. One of the first things we discuss is moving Cairns to Mareeba because the airport in Cairns is like about half a metre above high tide level and very suss.

The sea level’s rising, the rainfall was high this year. So the river’s getting shallower and shallower and so how come, more rain, high water level, shallower river. Behind those low mangroves are those rock cages things they put in, bastions or something they’ve called and they put them in like steps, and they put something like 500,000 tons of rock in the river first so they had a footing to put their rock cages on. We anchor our big boat at the mouth of the river there, it was 6 metres deep, now it's three metres deep.

It's a combination of the sediment off the roads, cattle maybe a little bit, mainly road works and putting this in there. Well that took about half a mile of probably 40 metre width by 3 metre deep, it's a lot of volume to take out of the river. The river before would come around the bend, hit the deep hole, suck it through that way. Now there's no deep hole there, it's going round the top of the island.

The whole road was falling into the river. To put the road further back into the mountain encroached on private land. So that’s one of the reasons for the cages. The other reason is the dirt roads, maybe a bit of cattle. There’s no farming so it can’t be farming.

 By the time you get to the house it's maybe three or four metres above river height. Before it’s never come over here. Main house about 80 metres away from the river.

The flood didn’t come from the river, it came from the back. It was the Bloomfield River. You wouldn’t expect it to come that way. I’ve been here 45 years. I don’t trust it. It knows the bloody way now. There is an Anna branch goes through there. I always thought this Woobadda river had just moved over that way. Now I realise that’s always been the run off for the Bloomfield. If it rains too hard it goes through there. Must've been previous occasions it went through there.

Want to see where we started? This is a $500, 50 year old house. The water came through here. This freezer was over here. It was only three weeks ago. Australia Day. It was funny because we had a little flood on Xmas Eve, pulled up the drinkers a bit. We had another one on New Years Eve and another on Australia Day.

The water was about six inches high, not very high really. The dog got a fright. Michelle yelled at her. Zoomed out, went too far, fell off the edge of the verandah.  I was fishing. We’d unloaded in Cooktown on Friday night. We do live coral trout. Touch and go whether the truck was going to get through. Lot of money involved. $30,000 on the truck. Get held up by the floods. Then the truck came up the inland road to Cooktown. They never can get across that Little Annan Bridge. That’s a real stopper. He said the water was just up, six inches, he just made it. All the roads were cut at that stage.

Saturday I couldn’t get here because the roads were cut. There was a lot of rain. Wasn’t anything out of the ordinary. Sunday morning when I woke up, they had that huge rain back here on Saturday night.  The Bloomfield and Daintree rivers both come up in the same hills, you can stand on the top of the hill, you can throw a rock that way, it’ll go into the Mitchell river and the Gulf of Carpentaria. Throw a rock that way it’ll go in the Daintree river, throw a rock that way it’ll go into the Bloomfield. Heaviest rainfall was up in the Mt Buldun area. There's an automatic river level recorder at the Roaring Meg which is on the Bloomfield River. Once the Bloomfield goes over the top of the falls, it changes its name to the Roaring Meg. It's the same river, just different name. From 2 metres to 9 metres in an hour. 7 metre rise in an hour. Highest it's ever been. That’s the Bloomfield river. That’s what happened. At this end it was the last of the big tides. The tide held the floodwaters up and then once the tide turned. Woosh The Bloomfield bridge at Wujal, new modern bridge, they said once in 100 years it would go under. It went under before they finished building, and this year it's gone over the guard rails which are another metre and a half higher, it's gone right over the top of that. A lot of water.

 Maggie. Maggie dog. About two o'clock in the morning Michelle’s asleep in the room at the end. Maggie’s jumped on the bed to wake her up to say There’s a flood happening. This is Australia Day. Hey Mum, something’s happening. Michelle’s woken up in the middle of the night with a wet dog on her bed “Hey get the bloody hell out of here”. The dog’s shot out on the verandah, out into the yard and just got swept away.

I've been fishing out here for 40 odd years. I've actually drunk the water at the reef that’s 12 miles out to sea. I've leaned over, put a pannikin in, and drunk it. Fresh water rides on top of salt water.

Maggie would’ve gone to probably six, seven mile out to sea. Took her two days to swim back. Every time she’d nearly get back in with the Incoming tide, the tide starts going out. Tide goes in, she comes back in again, tide goes out, goes back out again. After three days we’d given her up for dead. We’ll never see her again. On day five they found her wandering around about five mile away. Past Ayton on the way up to Cooktown. She’d swum ashore somewhere up there and was walking back this way. Unreal. She’s about 11 years old. Pretty old for a dog. She’s a good swimmer. When she came back she was really really clean. Cleanest she’s ever been. She’s one of those dogs got oily fur. Wash her for a week you wouldn’t get her that clean. Not a drop of oil left.

Everybody knows everybody. One of the young guys on the other side of the river goes pig hunting with us, he knew her.

 We had water all the way through the house. Worst thing is the mud. We had carpets. Tiles is the way to go. Even then it took four of us two days just to get the mud out of that room. Very very fine mud. Silt. Really hard to get rid of.

 We’ve had no mosquitoes. It's the first wet season. The floodwaters were so big it's taken all the breeding stock. Lava, everything got destroyed. Now the mozzies have to start again. There's always some good comes of it. Got to look on the bright side.

Comments from Community Meeting

Held under the mango trees at Daintree Village with Douglas Shire Council, 12 March 2019

Jancy Lee from Lower Daintree near the ferry turnoff said ‘Congratulations to DSC. Crews were out there straight away’.

Mayor Julia said the repairs would cost about 15 or 16 million dollars. There were many major roadworks and landslips e.g. at Alexandra Range, and Thorntons. It doubled the workload of staff for the next year.

Many people thought the local hall should be open.

Jancy Lee said  ‘We know the key is available and everyone knows where it is.’

But apparently they didn’t. Formerly the hall was always open in extreme weather and locals said it would have been good this time because there were a couple of people that really needed somewhere to go. The people thought the hall is underutilised.

Barry Costain said ‘It’s been resolved between Paul and I. Whenever there’s a moderate flood warning, preferably the fire brigade can get the key from Trish and open up.  Resolved.’

There was a comment that the hall needs a supply of water, tinned food, UHT and an honour system. And sandbags. Paul {Snelgrove] from the fire brigade has 60 in the fire shed but they need more. Getting sand is no problem but they need 4-500 bags.

People remarked that the media arrive for the disaster stories but there was no follow up to say the place was open again for business, and most people there rely on tourism. They suggested that Council should have marketing fund and Tourism Port Douglas Daintree should also promote it two days after a disaster, saying Daintree was open for business again.

The State government also needed to push the message. A campaign along the lines of ‘See the rainforest in the rain.’ was suggested.

It is potentially disastrous that the State’s emergency broadcaster, the ABC, can’t be heard in Daintree because of transmission problems. Apparently there is no money for a new transponder. Locals have to rely on the internet or BoM site. When they have power.

Peter Willis said: The BoM website is OK providing that we had access to that service. We had no internet. We had no power. And no phones.  We were totally cut off.

 An emergency text message was sent out but elderly people don’t have smart phones and the majority of Daintree locals don’t have mobile coverage. And in heavy cloud cover, nothing gets through, even satellite phones.

Paul Hoye:  I sent out an emergency alert. I asked for it a little bit after 9. Took about an hour to go through the government system and only one person in Queensland can sign off

on it and that’s part of what I’ll be submitting to the Flood Enquiry. It’s supposed to go as a text to mobiles and voice to landlines. I’m interested in hearing which people got. I get a message from Emergency Services saying how many devices it went to, and when you look at that, it went to thousands. I have a polygon of where it's supposed to go. Even if you're a visitor it's supposed to go to you.

One lady in Douglas Creek got landline message four days later when Telstra came to fix her phone. The following day the phone went out again. She got stuck in Mossman on Friday and when she did get home, she had to use a tractor to get onto her property. Later she needed ambulance but didn’t have a phone and she was too ill to get on her tractor and drive out.

 It was suggested that in rural areas everyone should be on Priority Fix.

 Most people received a cheque from Ergon saying sorry that they lost power, but nothing came from Telstra for being without communications for two days.  People suggested there should have been a Telstra representative at the meeting.

A lady commented Telstra is a monopoly and a disgrace. They won’t come to meetings because everyone screams at them.

 Some other quotes were: I had relatives on the other side of Barratts and had no way of letting them know short of swimming across.

They're an essential service so it's not right.

Phones on Stewart's Creek Road are always going out.

There are loose cables there that wash away.

 Barry Costain said: Emergency Services helicopter was coming in to do a safety retrieval at Tranquillity. I came down and spoke to them. I said We've got no power, no comms and thanks to them and Paul [Hoye] in particular, within an hour he gave his personal satellite phone to the crew who delivered it to me and I've still got it here as an emergency communication. I went round and told everyone that if there’s a medical emergency make sure you know that I've got a phone. Unfortunately not everybody knew but I tried to tell as many as I could.

Paul:  I’ve bought a new one, Barry.

Barry:  I have the Bed and Breakfast behind the Big Barra.

We shouldn’t have been in that position to start with. As a result of me making contact with Paul, I took it on myself to get community feedback to council.

For the Telstra tower, we didn’t have any power because the back-up battery lasts 2 or 3 hours and that’s it. They don’t have an automatic generator that cuts in. But within a few days a generator turned up. It was the personal property of the guy who does the tower maintenance. He left it there with fuel, connections, until Telstra could provide a Telstra generator.  Nobody is aware of this, but that generator disappeared. It wasn’t stolen, the fellow that owned it came and picked it up his personal property. Kenadon are happy to keep the fuel up to the generator and make the appropriate connections if possible. 

We need 4-5 days of fuel.

Barry is with the local rural fire brigade which is also effectively the SES. People thought a noticeboard with emergency numbers near the post office boxes would be a good way to keep in touch.

When there is bad weather, the helicopters can’t get in, so it was suggested that a Flying Doctor kit be kept at the fire station. But without communications, directions can’t be given for its use.                                                

Barry: After we got the sat phone and Telstra under control, what happens if the tower gets hit. There’s no backup. Paul put me in contact with his communications people and we were looking at possibility of having a radio part of the council network. We did unofficial site surveys at the top of water tower or the top of fire shed so we could connect to the council network. That was left with council but no feedback.

Paul:  I have a quote.

Laurie Taylor said her power and phone went off Friday night. This also happened at Christmas and she was stuck on her property for 12 days.  She has priority on her phone because of heart conditions. But her phone was not back till Monday afternoon over the Australia Day weekend. She has a generator but didn’t want to start it because she only had 20 litres of fuel. When she did start it, she could get the internet on Saturday night. Her brother got onto emergency services saying she was there by herself. They referred him to the police. On Sunday the Ergon people were flying around. On Monday they landed at her front gate 500m away. She gave them a thumbs up. At 2 o'clock Ergon rang saying they couldn’t get power on Monday because they couldn’t find the fault. They were not allowed to drive across the creek.  Ergon said the phone was back on because they had just delivered a generator and technician to Daintree township. She said she prepares for this every year but not to be stuck for 12-13 days.

Usually every year before the wet the Council clears the pipes under the causeway but that did not occur this year and it had logs underneath so causeway wouldn’t go down.

 Dean Clapp said Good job Council for removing landslides. Stephen Gulliver is amazing [on his bulldozer]. It was amazing how fast the power got back on.

We need a rubbish bin at the jetty. Lex has rubbish put in his car every night. There was one but it's gone.

The big tree down at the pontoon he thinks it's save-able.

Dean took photos of the sand at low tide. At the moment he can’t cruise. He took the pontoon out of water and hid his boats. But the pontoon will sit on sand when it's put back.

It needs an excavator with longer reach. And some local advice.

Dean also said there’s a need for a wifi phone box in Daintree. There are in Mossman and Port Douglas and Cairns. They have a pink top. You can park close and use the wifi which bills to your phone account. But if wifi is provided in accommodation houses, the account is used up with kids watching movies.

Dean wants to replant the common. He put red cedar in near the picnic tables which grows really well but council sprayed them and they died.

Someone commented that the camera at Barratts is good till it gets dark. Mossman has a light and you can see the water. But there’s no light at Barratts. It needs a battery powered solar light to last 12 hours. Also needs camera that works underwater. We hope the water doesn’t get that high for a while again.

The question was put, “What are council’s long term plans for Daintree? “

Paul Hoye said he’s working on improvements like getting the ABC back, getting the roads fixed. Barratt Creek is a problem because it’s a Main Roads bridge like Bushy Creek.  Council can only suggest things to the State. Automatic road closure signs like at Foxton are needed at the Eco Lodge.

In 2014 during Cyclone Ita they didn’t have automatic river gauge or automatic rainfall gauge. Council paid to put them in. and also for the flood cameras at Barratts and Foxton. In actual fact it should be the State paying. Council needs to put in for funding for Barratts to improve the flood camera. When it was put in it, was the best it was. Every year the camera has gone out, sometimes only for a day. Paul Hoye will write it into Recovery Plan.

Nowadays the road is being cut off at Zackreisens.  Last year it happened more often than in 15 years because there was more intense rainfall in the Saltwater and Mossman catchments.

Lex  Mealing: The ’57 flood was a metre higher than this one. The 1895 flood from what my grandmother said would be 3-4 metres higher than recently. In 1895 there was nothing cleared. The media said it was the highest since 1901. That was garbage.

Paul Hoye:       For all those events the measurements have been taken from a different point. Water behaves differently with feed ins, bends in rivers and things.

Lex:      They reckon in the ‘57 flood 50 inches of rain fell in 24 hours but in Stewart's Creek where Laurie is, the river was flowing backwards.

Laurie :  This time it wasn’t as high at my place as ’96. Then at it was least a metre higher because it came over my front paddock and there was debris on the bottom wire of the barbed wire fence. And this time it didn’t even make it up over the bank. So it would’ve been a couple of metres lower this time. That’s the top of Stewart's Creek. You’ve got a lot of creeks coming in below where I am. I don’t know what happened down here

Paul Hoye:  At the Bairds Alert before it got washed away it seemed to get to about that record level of ’96. And the Bloomfield River got to that ’96 level but it went a metre higher through people’s houses.

Laurie: It all depends on where the catchment starts. Whether they all come down together. You’ve got Douglas Creek, Harlows Bridge, creeks near my place, if they all come down together you’ve got a problem

Julia Leu:   Where I am it was lower than ‘96, we can take that from the level of water at the Reynolds rental. We helped rescue people from there in ‘96. It varies.

A lady said: It comes at speed now. Before it came up slowly and you had your boat and you could prepare. It's totally altered now. And the speed of the current.  Trees are falling now.

Grass will hold soil. Now there are many more landslips.  We need to revegetate with grass not trees.

 Laurie:  In 1979 we lost half a paddock. We planted trees but the bank would go. It didn’t stop till we put in grass that moves across the ground and holds the soil together.  We're worried about sediment on the reef. It will wash out if you plant trees. It happens in this sort of country. Trees will change the river course.

Deb McPaul said a bridge became a dam and the beams were cracked. One beam was lost in this flooding. Her by-pass isn’t fixed so she can’t get a cattle truck out. So she suggests to upgrade the bridge or make it into a causeway. The amount of debris that comes down from the rainforest is phenomenal. She lives at the end of Douglas Creek and massive trees have been washed down.

Corinne von Kaiserlink said floating logs are caught on Harlows bridge rails and it becomes a dam too.

Culverts are too small to take all the water and they're not cleaned out. There’s a need for bitumen where it floods to keep the tourists here and make it easier for them to move around.

Centrelink didn’t know about $180 emergency food funding being offered by State.

It was suggested that people should sign up with bank account details because government agents were coming round offering $180 but couldn’t get to Deb or Laurie’s door across the creek. Now they're told it’s too late to claim.

Lisa Golding from DSC $180 was for loss of food and clothes to claim within 7 days. There’s more serious money available than $180. Everyone here entitled to $1000 for loss of furniture, equipment and also stock.

People must have had 25% of house under water. Not like Yasi when everyone got $1000.

Julia Leu: There’s $1 million split between Whitsunday, Townsville and us for tourism said Wendy Morris. 

There is also funding available for loss of trade for BnB for example not having a phone for cancellations, and getting guests in and out.

The Douglas Shire Council asked for feedback on small business losses and to assist in preparing a local recovery plan and to contribute to the State plan.

A survey was posted out but many people in Daintree didn’t get it because it only went to house addresses and not to PO Boxes. It asked what the challenges were for council, what were the top priorities, how would you split say, $100 rate money. Were roads a priority?

People said the area was declared a Disaster Area but it must advertise “We’re back in business”.

Lisa: There’s an Instagram campaign for local people to post their photos. What it looks like in the wet. It’s green.

 Outcomes and suggestions

 David White:  I’ve since learned that there is a very good thing on the Bureau of Meteorology website, it's hard to get to but when you know where it is, you bookmark it. You can actually see the readout of their flood measurer at Bairds Crossing which is upstream of Daintree Village. You can look for yourself at what the river’s doing. It's a handy tool which I didn’t know about back then but I do know about it now.

Leon:    They had a helipad. Made our job a little bit easier for sure. That’s something that anyone can take out of a situation like this, living on a big river like that, it’s a handy opportunity for extraction if needed for any medical emergency those facilities for us.

The locals at Daintree without mobile phone coverage could consider the use of an EPIRB if emergency services were still required, and that that would be a sure way of gaining our attention. There’s no requirement for telecommunications in the area and then that beacon going off would have raised the alarm for us to go up there to investigate the reason for the activation.  Certainly a good option in a situation like that when all communication drops off, to be able to still gain the assistance of emergency services if required.

The signal goes up to a satellite then bounces back to the Rescue Co-ordination Centre in Canberra which is manned 24/7. if they’ve registered the beacon, it will have a telephone number attached to that. Then they can try to call that person and confirm what the requirement is. In this instance that wouldn’t have helped but would have drawn attention that somebody is in need and they don’t have any communication, so let’s send a helicopter up to go and investigate. And that’s when we would get tasked for a situation like that. With a medical team if required. So certainly a good back up option for lack of communications, the EPIRB.

Clint:      One ticket box got washed against the fence. They're owned by the Council and they were designed by the Council so that they're not bolted to the ground, they're just sitting there. The original design had them with a 15 amp plug plugged into the power box so that if the rain was coming, or water was coming down, then you just unplug it, put it on the back of the tow truck and take them away. But someone in their wisdom decided apparently that was unsafe. So they hardwired them, so we couldn’t take them away. Pretty hard to get an electrician in the middle of a flood, so there was nothing we could to about them. You couldn’t cut the wires, you’d get sparked yourself, so it’s kind of a pointless project.

When you have a rain event, most of the water runs down the creek, done. When you have a flood there's a lot of wasted water that doesn’t get captured for drinking water, stock water, you're not capturing it for making electricity, it's a wasted resource, flood water. I guess that’s the farmer coming out in me. It's a resource there that we could be capturing something out of. It means you’ve got to put dams in.    

We have ways and means of getting messages out normally. We all keep in contact with UHF radio. It’s cheaper than mobile and it’s more reliable.

Paul Hoye:    We’ve got quite a list of people that we stay in contact with and we’ll definitely look to expand that. We’ve got some good contacts from the event up in Daintree now so I've left my satellite phone up there with the Rural Fire Brigade because I really don’t want to go through the experience of not having communications if there’s more flooding.  I've bought a new satellite phone. I think the biggest problem with the Daintree being flooded was loss of communications and not knowing what was happening, particularly for the people who wanted to know whether their wives or their parents were alright.

We’re trying to do a predictive model for the Mossman River catchment and predict when a lot of the roads may go under water. It's a bit of a new science, relies on lots of data, it’ll probably take a year to test drive but we’re 95% complete on that.  For the short term it’ll come to me, but it will give a portal which will show what rainfall is forecast seven days out, what roads we might expect to go under and that gets firmer and firmer and when it gets to two days out, you should have reasonably very accurate data. Of course we've got to test that.

The biggest problem we have in Douglas Shire is a lack of automatic rain gauges on the ground so we don’t get the data to understand what’s actually falling and landing on the ground but we’re going to put a new rain gauge in our Rex Creek intake which is about a kilometre above Mossman Gorge and we’re hoping that will give us an indication of what’s falling in the catchment as opposed to what the models are predicting. And the models predict everything from the soil moisture to the rainfall to the intensity of the rainfall, to the flow, and then we've got to try and understand what that means for all the roads.

Tony and Alicia:    When the camera at Bairds Crossing is working, and if we can get onto the internet, we can see updates. It doesn’t seem to be updated anywhere near as frequently as some of the other points. And then during the flood in April, I think the calibration was all wrong because it was telling us we could get back, but we got trapped out.

Alicia   We sat on that road for three hours and the road was still well over. So we had to turn around.

Tony    Took accommodation in town. That was because it wasn’t working properly at Bairds

Since we’ve been here and since this has all started, it really seems to be a very unreliable update. And very inconsistent. Other spots are getting updated all the time. 6pm we’ll look at Bairds and it hasn’t been updated since 11am. There’s no accuracy there at all.

Jody:     The biggest thing that could be improved is the phone connection. And the electricity goes out, that was also very scary for our guests here. They tried calling triple zero and that didn’t even work and that’s probably not acceptable really in this day and age. All of the other things, OK, things happen, but not being able to call 000. Everyone in this whole area experienced that same thing.

The reason it's such an issue for me is in ’96 we never lost phones because Telstra used to have a generator that they would bring up and they’d have fuel there for our wet season, because we all know we always have a wet season, and there would be somebody in the Village that had a key to go and put fuel in the generator and press a button and we wouldn’t lose phones. We’d still have no power, but we all have little generators and we’re all prepared for that. But the phone connection is the thing I think could have definitely been improved.

Jaki Turner, and Peter and Sally Maher:

Jaki      Telstra should get a bigger battery. Absolutely. It's unbelievable that the phones go out so quickly.

Sally     That has been rectified now. Peter Mantus is refuelling the generator, so as long as there’s enough fuel in the Village.

Jaki      Because they didn’t allow anybody locally access to refuel it.

Sally     And that’s why it went out because no-one was given the key to fill the generator and they're saying they need to send a technician. Well I don’t think you need to be terribly technically minded to fill a generator. Anyone in the village can run generators because that’s what we do. Plenty of reliable people. And they have now since found one.

Jaki      He lives opposite and it’s all on high dry ground so it's not a big deal.

So that’s fixed, but it’s a long time coming.

Jaki      I think there should be something permanent established in the Village itself that the community can access, like communication. It’s so important.

Ian       They evacuated a guy up the road here and put him in the school teacher’s, the principal was out of town, so they chucked them in his house, he wasn’t too happy about that. The whole family in there. The hall should’ve been opened up properly or something like that for everybody to gather there.

Jaki      Exactly. Trish Harlow’s got a key for the hall.

Ian       It doesn’t last long, the flood’s a pretty big flood, two days in and out again, three at the most.

 The river cruises went back to business on Tuesday January 29, 2019.

Douglas Shire Council website:  www.douglas.qld.gov.au

An estimated $15 million damage bill is expected to be tallied after a wet season soaking that saw monsoonal rainfall and a record-breaking flood in Douglas Shire.

The figure is the highest since Cyclone Ita in 2014 and is expected to double Council crews’ workload for at least the next 12 months.

The Daintree River reached its highest flood level in 118 years and more than 2.5 metres has been recorded at Whyanbeel Valley, north of Port Douglas, since the start of the wet season.

Despite this, Douglas Shire Council has re-opened all roads and is now working with Tourism Port Douglas Daintree (TPDD) to push the shire back onto travellers’ itineraries.

Suggestions from Community Meeting 12 March 2019

• The Daintree hall should be open for evacuations and stocked with a supply of water, tinned food, UHT and sandbags, operated on an honour system.

• Reinstate radio reception by the State’s emergency broadcaster, the ABC, to the Daintree and use the service for alerts to people who are without smartphones.

• In rural areas everyone should be on Telstra’s Priority Fix.

• Put Daintree on the Council’s radio network in case the Telstra phone tower is out of service.

• Before the wet season, the Council needs to clear pipes under the causeway and bridges.

• Put a light at Barratts Creek and a new camera that works underwater.

• Automatic road closure signs similar to those at Foxton are needed at the Eco Lodge.

• People should give bank details to Centrelink in case of another disaster hand out when government agents can’t reach their front doors.

• A notice board near Post Office Boxes with emergency contact numbers is needed.

Wrap up, months later

•  Paul Hoye at DSC says that specifications have been obtained to build a three-phase mobile generator which will be compatible with Telstra hardware and will be available to remote communities including Daintree Village.

• There is no news yet on upgrading the transmission of ABC Radio to the Daintree Village area. The radio broadcasts are available in cars at the moment.

• The Rural Fire Brigade now has access to a key for Daintree Hall.

• DSC will install flooded road warning signage at Barratt Creek.  Also automated rain gauges will be installed at Upper Daintree River and Bloomfield River to improve ability to collect data.

• A satellite phone will be provided from DSC to the Daintree Rural Fire Brigade when the Wet season starts.

• The DSC is testing an aerial for a long-range two-way radio to connect the Village to Council’s network.

• Bairds Crossing was repaired and opened in early August, allowing access to Bairds Alert River Gauge, Upper Daintree. Temporary river height monitoring station was in place. Re-installation of permanent gauge is dependent on riverbank repairs.

• October:  Laurie Taylor has just fixed her fences but this time she’s made a shorter fence so she doesn’t have to repair the really long one any more.

• Mayor Julia Leu wrote letters for the Daintree Tea House and as a result they were given a business loan.

•  Jamie Kleinhans from Paul Hoye’s office at DSC wrote to Pam on 23 October 2019, specifications have been obtained to purchase a three-phase mobile generator to deploy to remote communities. This mobile generator will be compatible with the Telstra hardware and will strengthen communications (e.g. receiving Emergency Alert (EA) messaging). This mobile generator will be pre-deployed to remote (high risk) communities such as Daintree Village.  It will be added to Council’s Fleet Register.

• Critical sites within the Douglas Region has been updated and is in line with the Queensland Emergency Risk Management Framework. The mobile generator will be added to the Critical Sites Register.

• ABC reception-I am following up on this, but have nothing to report on yet.

• October 2020, flood cameras have been installed by DSC on both banks at the Daintree Ferry.

Link to recovery plan https://douglas.qld.gov.au/community/disaster-and-emergency-information/

Compiled by Pam Willis Burden (October 2019). Pam received a RADF Grant for research on this project in the 2017-2018 round. The Regional Arts Development Fund is a partnership between the Queensland Government and Douglas Shire Council to support local arts and culture in regional Queensland.