MY LAST FLOOD POST....

Whilst I want to keep a record of the summer of 2013....
Tonight will be my lost posting on the floods....
I realise today that I have had such a feeling of sadness and loss this week, and most of it has been tied up around the devastation of the floods in North Bundaberg....
Even the floods in Rocky haven't affected me like the devastation of my home town...
I have spent the week with knots in my gut...
Feeling so sad and down....
And this is not the way I want this year to be....
There has been a feeling of loss of my childhood...
How on earth I explain that one I don't know....
But the areas that have been most affected in Bundy are the streets I walked in,  the streets I lived it and it has all changed forever...
I also felt very confident that we lived in a house that was beyond flooding...
And to see that house flood has shaken my confidence in a lot of things and makes me realize more than ever that nothing in this material world  is certain....
No where are you safe...
Devastation comes when we least expect it...
North Bundaberg is just like a war zone....
How good is it that we don't know the future...
How good is it that the only future we can be sure of is our faith in a risen Lord....
That is all that has held it together for me this week...

I have seen my brother in law and sister in law loss everything....
We had a phone conversation with them, only six hours before water was thigh deep in their house and they were confident at the time that they would be fine...
Even they had no idea how quickly those waters were going to rise and inundate their home...
Still struggling to beleive the magnitude of the damage to my old home town...
There is still a good slice of my heart that belongs in Bundy..
It is a town that has been good to my family...
I know as a community they will rise above it...
I just wish they didn't have to go through this pain....
These photos were taken in the exclusion zone....
This is what the folks in North Bundaberg walked across the bridge yesterday to find....

Moved a good three to four blocks away from where it is supposed to be... The only thing stopping it here was the light pole..

Smack bang in the middle of the road in Queen Street

The clean up crew checking it out...

An indication of just how far this home traveled... He is supposed to be in Hinkler Avenue and it was found where it is circled...

The Bridge had a huge gapping hole in it....

It will be months before it is repaired....

Houses disappeared.... probably washed out to sea....

Completely disappeared

Vanished.....

Wiped out.

Others will most likely need to be destroyed and rebuilt...

Decimated 

Close up - Where would you start...

Then there was the mud.... thick oozy mud..

The massive cleanup

Where do you start....

Cars that were moved to higher ground were just picked up and dumped as the waters receded

Cars just dumped

And the infrastructure...
So much work to do before this side of Bundaberg will resemble a suburb to be lived in again...

Hanbury Street

Gapping big holes where there once was road...

Another good reason not to drive on flooded roads...

Of the slippery slimy mud

But Bundy has spirit....
As do Queenslanders in general.
People came from near and far to help...
The army moved in....

Add caption

The Red Frog Bridage from Toowoomba came
My neice arrived with this crew

Volunteers from Toowoomba came to help

They worked tirelessly to help the folk in North Bundaberg.

My lovely niece took photos of our old house for me also as they drove past to clean up houses just up the street.....

My childhood home

Mud and slop..

A quick snap as they drove past...

Really although the water went through....
They faired well...
Much better than a lot of the other North Bundaberg homes which were in the rush and flow of a river traveling at more than 80kms an hour...
Bundaberg has never seen a flood like it in all of its recorded history.
Here is praying that they never ever ever again see a flood of this magnitude....