The View from Ground Level

No pictures today, instead an email I sent back to friends and family back home about the situation in the flooded suburb nearest our house.

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It's a nightmare in the flood zones. Today we spent all day making food & taking it down to people in Fairfield. Mary worked the bakery and made a whole bunch of cookies & treats, while Brett and Meredith and I had a sandwich factory line going. I think we made about 80 sandwiches. Whatever 6 big loaves of bread works out to. Brett brought over a cooler and we filled it up with food twice, then hauled it around and gave them out. We also passed out a whole pile of apples, and later on we did the same with a carton of beer. The beer was cheap swill - 4x - but to say it went over well would be an understatement. The running joke is that it's no big deal if the 4X warehouses get flooded because a bit of flood water would improve the taste. Still, not as low on the totem pole as Fosters. Everybody was really appreciative. There were a number of other people passing out food like us. One guy working in his driveway turned down a sandwich, saying he'd be gaining weight if he accepted all the handouts. We saw two other big BBQ tables set up grilling sausages and the like for the masses. One guy had a meals on wheels set up with a BBQ in the back of a ute.

Fairfield is way worse than Taringa where I was helping James and Jacky yesterday. Not because they got hit harder (although they did), but just because of the scale of the affected area there. J&J's place was one of maybe 40 or 50 dwellings in the area affected. I posted a picture of the junk on the street yesterday. Multiply that by 4 or 5 on every street, then imagine the same thing on 30 or 40 blocks in Fairfield alone, then imagine that in every one of the dozens of other flooded suburbs. So many ruined houses. All along the streets there are mountains of flood affected crap that had been hauled out of houses and piled by the roadside. One such mountain was about 12 feet high and 80 long. Just endless amounts of garbage. Brett and I only covered about 6 blocks of it too, so we saw maybe a half percent of the affected part of the city. I don't know where they're going to put everything. It will take hundreds of dump trucks to clean out even one suburb. God help you if you live anywhere near the place they'll put it all. Hopefully they can dump it in a big quarry and just set it all on fire. Maybe that'd be worse.

It's astonishing to see at the street level. There have been lots of pictures of the damage from the sky but when you're at ground level moving around on foot you appreciate the damage much differently. Every scrap of vegetation is a dirty grey-brown. Every house is just destroyed. Every driveway is full of inches of mud. Streams of water and crap from people spraying out houses, every lawn turned into bogs. And everywhere the smell. A fetid, cloying odor that coats everything and everyone and hangs over the whole area. You can practically taste the tetanus. Storm drains block up unless people get down and push the muck into the sewers. One guy in a bobcat had the right idea. He grabbed a mattress in the front claw and used it like a great big mop, pushing a wall of muck down the street. Most places we saw haven't even begun to rip out the gyp rock walls yet, and when they do that will flood the streets with another massive load of muck soaked trash. The gyp rock will be even less recognizable as having once belonged to a house than the endless fridges, chairs, sofas, books, and fabrics that litter the place now. We also passed a warehouse that got hit. A house has a lot of stuff in it, but the amount of junk people were pulling out of this warehouse was unreal.

A scene - one block had a communal fire hose that was being passed from house to house. There was still a bit of traffic on the road, so to keep people from driving across it and crimping the hose, somebody made a little ramp on either side using about 16 volumes of a soaked through set of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Luckily it's nice out. Sun with a bit of clouds, and only 28 or 29 or so. It would be worse if it was 30+ or if it was pouring rain like in '74. All the same, some places are starting to dry out, and as that happens there will be a lot more silty dust. Masks will be more important for everyone in the upcoming days. There are still a lot of cavalier attitudes towards safety. More people are wearing proper boots and shoes than I saw yesterday, but I still saw a few people in just singlets, shorts and thongs, with no gloves. Hell, I saw one guy walking barefoot out of the area. He'd better hope he doesn't have any cuts. I grabbed a big box of gloves from the lab yesterday and was handing them out along with the sandwiches. I found humour worked - "Kevin Rudd got dropped by an infection already, and if it can bring down an ox like him it'll do the same to you." That worked better than the blatant appeals to self interest I tried previously.

The army and cops are around here and there, but the vast majority of the people are residents and whoever they can convince to help. We saw a few volunteer groups. The boy scouts had a BBQ table set up. There has been a massive outpouring of good will from people just showing up though. We saw lots of people that had no connection to the place they were scrubbing down. It's kind of a tale of two cities. If you're outside the flood zones life is pretty normal. I think everyone who is up above it all feels the need to pitch in. Right now every pair of hands helps, but it within a week or two most of the gruntiest of the grunt work will be done. After that, the city is going to be chronically short of carpenters, electricians, plumbers, tilers, and skilled tradespeople of all kinds. If you know any skilled construction people who are looking for work, send them down.

I'll be going back to school next week sometime. Summer classes reconvene on Thursday, but campus will be easily accessible earlier than that. I got across it with a bit of difficulty yesterday on my bike, so by Monday or Tuesday I'm sure most of the walkways and roads will be cleared off.

For now, I'm just thankful that I can come home to a shower and my own clean bed.