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Where the Richmond and Wilson rivers meet is Coraki, and people there have lost everything
The small town in northern NSW was cut off by flood waters for five days. Susan Chenery surveys a devastated community
Follow our Australia news live blog for the latest updatesGet our free news app; get our morning email briefingThe first thing that hits you is the smell – the reek of overflowing sewage, rotting animal corpses in the river, decaying vegetable matter, toxic waste, all the things the flood brought up. It gets into your skin that smell. Under a low grey sky in bacterial heat, the town of Coraki is a wasteland, a dystopian nightmare. In the air above us, helicopters drag bales of hay across the brown inland sea that surrounds the town.
Piled high outside almost every house, are belongings encased in sludge and mud, the entire lives of the occupants. No one has escaped this disaster. People are still very raw. Coraki is where the Richmond and Wilson rivers meet and the area felt the full brunt of both flooded rivers. On Monday 28 February firefighter Shane Cox was wading around in the water helping people, when he says it “went up another 2 metres”.
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