THAT TIME BRISBANE FLOODED or WHY I'M MUD-PHOBIC!

If you’re reading this from somewhere outside of Brisbane or Australian you might not be fully aware of the grand scale flooding Queensland has been experiencing.

It all started (for me at least) on January 11 when we were evacuated out of the CBD. At that point I was just excited to be leaving work early, but I realised pretty quickly it was more serious when my friend Jane turned up on my doorstep later that afternoon saying she’d had to pack up her belongings and vacate her house! We went back to the property that night to rescue a few last things (obviously the all important law textbooks and back catalogue of vogue magazines) and by that stage the water in the garden was at knee level.

times were hard

At 11am the next morning the water was past the second storey of the house. It got worse all over the city as the days progressed. I live on a hill and was lucky enough not to even lose power so I took in flood refugees and we had flood parties despite the food shortages. But by the weekend as the water began to recede the big clean-up had to begin.

  

Again if you’re reading this and weren’t affected I’ll need to set the scene. The receding flood water left a sticky trail of silt, sludge and debris, which smelt like a chook pen and covered EVERYTHING it touched. What didn’t help was that it was category 3 water loss – the same category as raw sewage! and for most flood victims they just wanted to get rid of it all so the streets were filled with towering piles of furniture and flood affected belongings which seemed to absorb and intensify the smell.

the toxic e coli mud that was everywhere!

I set off (with no protective goggles, face mask or cleaning implements) bright and early on Saturday morning. After a short detour to procure the last pair of rubber gloves in my neighbourhood I set off for a suburb not too far from home near my old university.  

grocery store sans water

grocery store mid flood

The shopping precinct on the main road had had gone completely under water and the little Asian grocery store had lost everything. Every product from every section of the shop was flooded and then out of refrigeration for 4 days. By the time I got there they had made a giant pile of noodles, rancid raw chicken, yoghurt pots so fermented they were bursting, laundry power, detergent, mi goreng, packets of things, trays of rotting fruit, mixed in with dead fish from the river, exploding glass bottles of fermented juice, chocolate bars, rotten steak, ginger beer anything you could imagine and it smelled so BAD!

I was bagging everything into garbage bags (I'd found a packet of them in the pile of crap) and doing my best despite my men's XXL rubber gloves, when this other girl with a shovel threw a heap of rubbish into the skip and a giant squirt of toxic sewerage sludge from under the feral food pile went up under my glasses and into my eye!!!!! I ran over to grab my drink bottle and flush out my eye forgetting that I'd squeezed lime juice into it that morning to make it taste better (teach me to be such a pampered princess) so I was basically flushing my eye out with lime juice. It was burning but I thought ‘suck it up Steph get back to work!!’ but then I also decided to go and help scrub the mud off the walls in the bakery instead of working in the filthy food pile.

I was pretty good at wall scrubbing and then my friend Kate found me while I was being force fed thank-you potato chips by the bakers wife and I helped her friend clear out his appt in the next street over. Then I got a call from Jane who was sobbing because after taking a break from cleaning the extent of the damage sunk in. I offered to make her dinner and set off to offer help to a friend from work. Kasie’s garage had flooded, not so bad but it was filled with boxes of her parent’s belongings. We worked away by torchlight for a few hours in the pitch black of her flooded garage. Then when I emerged into the sunlight and couldn't see but I thought it was because I had toxic mud all over my glasses. 

On the walk home a brewery truck pulled over in front of me and the guy jumps out and goes 'you look like you've been a good volunteer, have a slab of XXXX Gold!' so for the next 3ks I struggled under 30 cans of XXXX looking like a bogan Quasimodo.

Bogan Quasimodo

Which brings me to getting home and dumping the beer and realising that the reason I couldn't see was the result of my swelled up eye weeping tears of green and yellow pus (not in fact rubbish on my glasses). I freaked out a little about potential blindness and raced down to the chemist. I was the only feral in the chemist in gumboots smelling like a chook coop but the assistant did let me see the pharmacist who (on hearing what was potentially in my eye) immediately prescribed antibiotic eye drops. Then while he was making up the script another customer got really involved and decided to turn my eyelid inside out to check for foreign bodies. At this point I didn't know he was a doctor so I was a little confused as to how I had got myself in a situation with another customer probing me and why the pharmacist was doing absolutely nothing about it. But eventually I got the drops, got home, flushed my eye hygienically, had a shower and after using the drops every hour for 3 days all is now better, I didn't go blind and my only regret is that I didn't take a picture! 

But seriously, I blog in jest. This has been a period of significant loss for many. Our hearts go out to those who have lost their homes and/or friends and family, particularly those in Toowoomba. If you would like to support the victims of the flooding in South East Queensland visit the Premier's Disaster Relief Appeal to donate.

The start of something new

Do you ever feel as though your life is a pantomime? I definitely do. Fortunately for me I crack myself up and I’ve found it’s usually the gravest things that will elicit laughter from friends and family. 

I’m starting a new adventure and one of the criteria is that I am able to demonstrate my ability as a content maker and storyteller. I have lots of stories and I think this will be the best way to share them.

Comments greatly appreciated :)