Kevin Dunque says it is a horrible thing to have to say goodbye to your house. “Switching off your house — I have never had to do it before,” he says. “You go ‘electricity,water,gas’ … the place is so horrible and quiet. Watching the water creep into your yard is very depressing. Creepy is a good word.”
Kevin Dunque with his dog GrizzJason South
A week after an evacuation warning was first issued for the border town because of flooding from the Campaspe River,Echuca is still on high alert as the Murray River continues to threaten homes.
Victoria’s SES chief officer of operations Tim Wiebusch said the river was still slowly rising. It reached a level of 94.84 metres (Australian Height Datum,above sea level) at 3pm on Sunday,and was expected to hit 95 metres to 95.2 metres sometime on Monday.
The worst flood recorded in Echuca was 96.20 metres in 1870.
Emergency services went to 20 homes at Echuca Village and told them to evacuate because of seepage from the levee,Wiebusch said.
Dunque,a 62-year-old retiree,rowed to Bynan Street in a canoe with his German Shepherd,Grizz,on Sunday to check on his home.
He said most of the houses in his street have been inundated but because his is two feet off the ground he has been lucky so far.
“I’ve got 100mm left and they are predicting it will be more than that,unfortunately,” Dunque says. “It’s right through all my sheds and underneath my house,of course. The next couple of days they are expecting another peak and I guess I am going to lose. Anyway,it is what it is when you want to live on the edge of the bush. It’s just a wonderful spot to be. It’s hard to be angry with the waterways near you when you love them so much.”
A Fire and Rescue NSW strike team,SES volunteers from Cootamundra and Albury,and Surf Life Savers joined forces to help evacuate an elderly couple and a family of four on farming properties in Moama.
The news was better in Kerang.
“We have now seen a peak on the Loddon River at Kerang of 77.97 metres,just below the 78-metre mark that was being forecast for this event,” Wiebusch said on Sunday.
The water level had since receded to about 77.84 metres and was expected to fluctuate between 77.7 metres to 77.8 metres,he said.
“Kerang is still largely isolated from the major transport routes and is going to continue to be that way ... for at least another five to seven days,” Wiebusch said.
There was also a watch and act warning for Melbourne’s Werribee River and the Barwon River at Geelong,he said.
A levee divides Echuca on Sunday.Jason South
There have been more than 8500 calls for help to the SES since the start of the flooding,the SES chief said,and about 750 rescues have been carried out in the past seven to 10 days.
“Around 300 of those have been for people that have remained in their properties and chose for whatever reason not to evacuate when those reasons were current,” Wiebusch said.
Premier Daniel Andrews said on Sunday that there was significant rainfall in the north and waters were rising at Echuca and Kerang,breaching levees in some spots.
“There’s been some rising above the levee banks that have been built there,in isolated spots,” he said.
Residents ship sandbags in Echuca,one of many towns battling floods across Australia in the past week.Jason South
Andrews said thousands of emergency workers in the state’s north were working to support those affected,but warned the flood event was “far from over”.
“This is going to be a very long journey,” he said. “There are very significant challenges faced in the next couple of days as waters peak.”
About 50 flood victims were staying at the Mickleham quarantine hub,he said.
Road crews are working to repair flood damage and fix 42,000 potholes caused by flooding and reopened 499 roads across the state.
Merv Smith said he was “done” after working around the clock to sandbag his property at Echuca.Jason South
Merv Smith,75,has been preparing his property,mostly alone,on the eastern side of Echuca. “I reckon I’m done,” he said. He supported the creation of the makeshift levee,but laments it wasn’t better planned. “You have to protect more than less,but at the end of the day ... you’ve had 50 years to do the levee bank in the right place,” he said.
Dallas Mitchell has been working for days with his nephew,Riley Murphy,and friends to secure his father’s property in East Echuca.
They have built an earth wall topped with a row of sandbags,piled six high. But the water has reached the sandbags and is starting to leak underneath and Mitchell says he is starting to get nervous.
“There’s all trenches that we’ve dug everywhere,where we’re trying to run the water away from those earth walls into the driveway,and then we have a hole in the driveway with a pump in it that we’re trying to pump out as fast as we can,” he says.
Dallas Mitchell’s house (bottom left) surrounded by water on Sunday.Jason South
“And there’s a pump underneath the house because we keep having water pop up underneath the house and we’re not quite sure where that’s coming from,to be honest.”
Mitchell says the sandbags have turned to mush. “We are too scared to touch anything because if you stand on some dirt somewhere all of a sudden it wells up and water starts coming out.”
Ray Cross,a retiree from Melbourne,has a holiday house in Pakenham Street in Echuca,just 20 metres from the riverbank.
He spent Sunday in his tractor,ferrying people through the water to doctors’ appointments and other chores in town,and picking up supplies and fuel for the pump,which is churning water out of his garage.
“We have got nine bricks to go before it hits the ground-level floor,” Cross said.
“Everyone’s worried that the river’s going to keep climbing,but I can’t see it getting too much higher. At the moment,the river is running fairly fast. Let’s hope it stays that way.”
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