Strike Team 0708 at the Echuca Floods
There is a town about 200 miles north of where I live, called Echuca, which lies on the Murray River and has been flooding for over 20 days now.
And monday a message came through on the volunteer fire brigade (CFA) app, asking for volunteers for a strike team to go up there to help with the flooding for two nights. It's been too cold and rainy to do any beekeeping (despite that its the reverse-seasons equivalent of May now!) so I responded that I was available. I'd have liked to stick around work since my friend Doug from the states has just arrived on Saturday and has been hanging around (he's staying with my boss this time), but I felt since I could spare myself it was my civic duty to do this.
Tuesday at noon I was picked up from the local fire station in an FCV ("Field (?) Command Vehicle," a dual cab pick up with enclosed back) headed to Geelong, carrying one other volunteer from nearby Colac town and two CFA staff who were just headed to Geelong. On the way I learned that the river is "up 96 meters" (315 feet, 29 stories!) which sounded on its face nonsensical. Further clarification indicated that they for some reason measure the flood water height over sea level (!?!? I've never heard of this being done before, is this done in America too or is this an insane Aussie thing?), and that the normal river height is 83 meters. So it's up 13 meters (43 feet, 4 stories), which is still pretty impressive but I suppose more plausible.
Levees of clay and sandbags have been erected to protect the city, and, famously, the "Great Wall of Echuca" has been erected right through part of the town, leaving part of it to flood and protecting the rest. I'd already been hearing rumors about this, and how it, as one might imagine, is not very popular with people from the wrong side of the levee.
Our strike team assembled at a fire station in Geelong town. It was 10c (50f) which already had me shivering, and reportedly 6c (43f) in Echuca (again this is the middle of the day in reverse-May! This place is so bloody cold!!), so we were anticipating being cold. Presently we were all assembled, about 12 men and 2 women, aged middle age to old.
Departed by charter bus at 13:20. It took a few hours to get up there. I'd grabbed a book from my shelf to read during this time -- "Congo Journey" by Redmond O'Hanlon. I'd gotten it just before a project in the Congo which eventually fell through, and had been saving it to read whenever that project should resume, but being as I have no Congo project on the horizon I decided just to go ahead and start reading it now. How have I never heard of this author before?? It's very good! I've read a lot of travel writing and this is some of the best. What particularly stands it apart is he'll often have an entire paragraph describing something, which I'd come to think of as risking getting into "purple prose" territory, but he absolutely makes it work. Also he makes good use of dreams and things to give backstory / character depth, which is a thing I've been experimenting with, so it was great to see someone doing it successfully.
It was only during this drive that I learned from overheard conversation that we'd be doing night shift ::cue the ominous bass sound from All Quiet on the Western Front::. I had assumed it had been described as "two nights" merely because that was the most relevant information for people to calculate how long they'd be away from home. 16:15 we passed through the first town that had visibly suffered from flooding, Rochester, Victoria, with sandbag barriers in front of and around many buildings. I was told 1,608 houses had been destroyed in Rochester.
At 16:40 we arrived in Echuca at the emergency services headquarters. It was 11c (52f). Immediately we saw a man in shades-of-grey camo uniform walk by.
"What uniform is that?" someone asked
"The Navy" someone answered
"What's the Navy doing here, we're nowhere near the sea"
"Well, I think the sea came here."
Then we experienced the classic "hurry up and wait" while we waited for our shift to begin at 20:00. Hamburgers were served. An army bushmaster (lightly armored personnel carrier) arrived and we were able to climb in and on it for entertainment and edification. I was excited because its a piece of equipment Australia has been sending to Ukraine ("But," the accompanying soldier explained to me when asked, "they're using it more on the front line than we do. We wouldn't actually drive it up to the front line because it doesn't have enough armor but they... well they gotta do what they gotta do").
During the briefing we were warned that some locals have been very hostile and abusing the volunteers (I assume these are locals from the forsaken side of the levee). We additionally learned that we shouldn't need to do any sandbagging, mainle we'd just be monitoring static pumps that have been set up to pump water out from the storm drains within the protected area. It should be quiet and fine but if we were to get more than 7mm of rain it would overwhelm our pumping capacity and we might have huge problems.
This could have been a beautiful picture but I was already crimping too far to the right to try to avoid my colleague walking into the shot and then he got in there anyway
At 20:00 in the last waning grey light of the dreary day we mounted up in our trucks! I was in tanker "Winchelsea 1" with the guy from Colac (Nick) and our crew leader was a 30ish fellow named Tommy. I was surprised to find life going on entirely as normal within the protected part of Echuca. People driving around, coming home from whereever they'd been, parking their nice cars in their driveways amidst their immaculate manicured lawns, putting their bins out since apparently the next morning was trash day. Meanwhile just on the other side of the Great Wall of Echuca similarly beautiful looking houses had water lapping at hte walls just below the windows. A homemade sign posted to a pole above where one of these houses front lawns would have been read "THE NEEDS OF THE MANY HAVE DROWNED THE NEEDS OF THE FEW! CLASS ACTION!"
View from atop The Great Wall of Echuca
Things were calm enough that most of our pumps were usually off and just needed to be turned on for about 15 minutes every hour or two. Like a bumblebee we rotated through inspecting about five pumps in our sector. Presently we found one of our pumps was not keeping up even when it was on. We hooked the hoses on our truck up to assist the pump (which is why we were using fire trucks), and even that didn't work, so we called for back up and eventually we have four trucks in addition to the big pump working on it.
Eventually it was discovered that in a connected storm drain the gate that should have sealed it off from the river had become stuck in the open position so water was just flooding in. Some facilities guys from the city came out and worked on it with crowbars and two-by-fours (the crowbars didn't reach far enough in) and got it closed, which enabled us to get the connected pit under control finally. We'd later learn in addition to this, when they were able to more thoroughly examine things in the morning, it would be found that the pump had sucked in two sandbags, which had a very detrimental effect no its effectiveness.
The problem pump by morning's light / as a colleague ascends to sainthood. Note four additional hoses hooked up in addition to the big pump.
I was very uncomfortably cold all night, even sitting in the truck cab I wasn't quite comfortably warm. And having been awake all the day before this night sihft brought me up to about 36 hours awake. I decided it was decidedly worse than a 15 hour flight in a middle row on a standard airline, though I'm not sure it was worse than the same on a budget airline. It was pretty shit. But still, I asked myself, and friends have asekd me when I complained about it, why I signed up then and I dunno I don't regret signing up despite how cold and miserable it was. I believe strongly in civic duty and it needed doing.
Break from 0200-0300. Around 06:30 with morning's light dawning I was able to see things for the first time and took a few pictures which are presumably embedded around here. Then my phone died. Finaly we all returned to base at 0800. Bus at 0900 took us to a "family fun camp" that seemed like a pretty cheesy place (I'm pretty sure when I was a kid it would have insulted my intelligence and self respect to go to a summer camp with the kind of goofy cartoons of cowboys this place had everywhere), but at this point I just wanted to crash into a bed. Plugged my phone into the charger and crashed out on a top bunk. When someone woke me up I thought it was for lunch at 1300 but he informed me no it was 17:15 and we had to go back to work! Okay well at least I've gotten some sleep!!
A resident goes for a morning kayak where there formerly was a major street
Shift II
Corned beef ("silverside?" is corned beef? Looked like corned beef to me anyway) for dinner, delicious, though they wouldn't let me have seconds and usually even among firefighters one serving of dinner still leaves me hungry. This night was a bit better since I was well rested going in to it and by wearing my other jacket (Dickies brand light "Eisenhower Jacket"), I was slightly less uncomfortably cold (still uncomfortably cold). Our pumps didn't give us any trouble and didn't even need to be turned on as much, so I was actually able to read my book a fair bit between rounds of checking the pumps. During our nightly break I was able to scrounge another plate of dinner from the fridge and microwave it and thus be satisfactorily fed.
Around 01:45 warning lights on our dashboard came on and it was determined that there was water in the fuel. We'd fueled up at a local fuel station ("servo"), so it's plausible during the flooding water got into their fuel cistern. This was of great concern to all the trucks since many had fueled up there, but as far as I know ours was the only one that had a problem. To play it safe we brought our truck back to the depo and got in another truck that had only two crewmembers, so now we were five. Since only one person needs to get out to check the pumps really, this gave me even more time to read. I mostly read my book all night.
Someone got into the halloween spirit. We added the beer can
Returned to base around 07:30, breakfast and back on the bus to head home around 0900. The end.
As I said, it wasn't fun. But I am still more wondering how people can just not volunteer for things like this than any thoughts about not having gone myself.