I will never again underestimate the miracle of a hot shower.
We've been watching the news on TV (luxury!) and there are just so many heartbreaking stories out there - people who've lost their family, homes, businesses. If I watch too much of this I'll end up a useless mess, so it's best to just get out there and be useful.
5pm
It's so good to be home. Can't imagine what people who've lost their homes must be going through.
We got home, and looking at the streets around us it seemed almost apocalyptic. Browned leaves were falling off trees to the silty ground and they looked like ash. All greenery below hip-height seemed like it'd been sucked of life. It was like a photoshop newbie had gone through and sepia-fied the crap out of everything.
So, so many houses around Perrin Park (or Perrin Lake, now) have been inundated. I guess people who evacuated started heading back in yesterday, because piles and piles of grey-brown furniture, books, clothing, bicycles, miscellaneous bits of wood and screen doors and even an entire scooter lined the footpaths, awaiting collection by the rubbish guys.
We cleaned out our fridge when we got home - bloody rank. Then we donned our cleaning gear, grabbed a broom and walked along the street to try help.
We made a little bit of a dent; at one unit the walls were made of plasterboard, which had crumbled into thousands of piddly chunks all over the floor, leaving only the frame's wooden skeleton inside. The owners/residents were taking it really well despite that, telling us half-jokingly not to clear a certain pile of rubble as it was a dam they'd constructed in front of the bathroom to contain the unmentionables that had backed up out of the toilet.
After a while, though, we ran out of people to help in our area. Once they'd gotten everything out and started hosing their houses down, there wasn't much we could do. And heaps of people around here needs the power switched back on.
What they're going to need now is money (and hopefully, good insurance policies). I've heard that so many people won't be covered by their policies - people who've been paying it for 20, 30 years have been told it doesn't cover flooding from a river breaking its banks, or that it doesn't cover flooding at all unless you specifically asked for that coverage in the first instance. It's all about the fine print.
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