[Sound of Phone Ringing]

TAHLIA:

Hello.

RUBY:

Hi, Tahlia, it's Ruby

TAHLIA:

How you going Ruby?

RUBY:

I'm okay. How are you going?

TAHLIA:

Yeah, we're getting there.

RUBY:

And where are you at the moment Tahlia?

TAHLIA:

We’re located in Taree on the mid north coast. And we live on a 30 acre property. So we have horses, we agist to other people, so they have their horses there as well.

It's still pretty wet and muddy at the moment. It's not as heavy as what it was, but it's still a constant rain.
So if we look out in the paddock, there is a lounge suite. I have some bins that belong to the property, about 60 acres over the back. There is a wall unit, chest of drawers. I think further down that we spotted.

RUBY:

Wow.

TAHLIA:

There’s just everything floating. Our horse jumps and feed bins. They're all floating. And if you walk over to the school, you can see those. What would you say? It's like fresh apples that were on the ground. That was jam. It's just everyone's cupboards that have been washed completely out everywhere, everything.

All I can see is just mud and slop. Like when I say slop, I mean like pools of water where you can just step in and you sink down half a metre in water and mud and just this water everywhere. The fences are broken with his trees and debris sitting on them and going through them.

It's definitely a lot worse than what it was when we were younger and that that was only 15 years ago.

[Theme Music Starts]

RUBY:

From Schwartz Media, I’m Ruby Jones, this is 7am.
Nearly 20,000 people have been evacuated, as Australia’s east coast suffers from the worst floods in more than half a century.

The deluge started last week, when hundreds of millimetres of rain fell across NSW, causing significant flooding across the state.

On Saturday morning thousands of residents in western Sydney were forced to evacuate, as the banks of the Hawkesbury River burst.

A state of disaster has been declared in a number of regions, with rain continuing to fall this week.

On the mid-north coast, one of the heaviest hit areas, more than a metre of rainfall has fallen since last thursday - the equivalent of two-thirds of the region’s annual rain.

The region was also hard hit by during Black Summer, with many of the same communities devastated twice… first by fire.. now by flood.

Today, Australia’s battered east coast and what the increasing frequency and severity of wild weather events is telling us about climate change.

[Theme Music Ends]

RUBY:

So Tahlia this all began on Friday, when a weather warning was put out for your region. Can you tell me about that and about what happened next?

TAHLIA:

Yeah, it was Friday night. Lovely afternoon. It was raining normally like heavy. And then we got a weather warning late afternoon to say we have severe rain and forecasted and they didn't tell us how many mils. I think it was a very low amount. And then that night, it never stopped pouring like it was it was that much. It was like the roof was rattling, like it was howling. It was really severe.

RUBY:

And can you talk me through what happened the next morning, on Saturday morning?

TAHLIA:

Yeah, I got a phone call from my brother at about seven o'clock in the morning to say that he needed help, that he was flooded and his house had gone. The SES was bashing on his door to get out in the morning. He got out just as the water was coming through the back of his house and he was panicking. I've got out of bed. And when I was trying to settle him down and walk to my kitchen window, open the blinds, and I’ve had had a panic attack and I’m like mate I have to go. I've got to go. The horses that were down the bottom paddock at that time, were already up to their stomachs in water.

RUBY:

Yeah right.

TAHLIA:

We had no idea it was even that bad.

RUBY:

So what did you do?

TAHLIA:

Well I just, I dropped the phone, I hung up, and I ran straight out into the paddock and grabbed them out. The electric fence was still on, I didn't even turn it off. We got the two out from the back paddock. And we brung them up. And then I had to go back and get another one. And the water was coming in really fast.

At that point, we got the ones from the back paddock up to the top yards where it was still a little bit dry, but then within an hour of trying to get everything out and done, the paddocks just kept going under and under. We put a thing out on Facebook for people to come and help get the horses out, between our horses and our next door neighbour. We had 18 horses.

And within an hour and a bit, the water was just flooding in. We got five out and then my neighbour's house went under, her eight horses were stuck on the hill up the back. By this time, it was about a meter and a half and water. And we had to swim down to get them off the hill and bring them through.

And the floodwater was rising. It was getting that bad. It was up around, I think it was around our necks by that time. Yeah. And it was just it was really severe and we didn't realise how bad it was getting. When we jumped in.

RUBY:

Mm.

TAHLIA:

The water was it was mucky. It was filthy. It was covered in spiders like I mean, thousands of spiders.

RUBY:

Wow.

TAHLIA:

It was severe. Like we had spiders crawling up our shirts on our hats. I'm not even joking when I say thousands of spiders that were just walking across water. And they had their white egg sacks in their mouth, they were just trying to survive just as we were.

We got bites all over us. At the moment, we've got like little pimple bites from our body all over us. There was a snake went swimming past. He didn't mind about us. He was just trying to get out of the water.

So we got trapped in the paddock for over an hour and then someone alerted the rescue squad to come down because we were missing. So the rescue helicopter, he did come down, he was watching us in the police, and that was he, we got out eventually because one of our friends, she smashed the fence down to get them through.

RUBY:

And so did you save the horses?

TAHLIA:

We nearly lost one of them. A mini pony went through into the water, but it was too deep for her to stand. So she went under, she's OK, though, because the volunteers that come helped. It was just some young kids like teenagers and their mums and a man come to help. And I had no no experience with horses. That they jumped in and they swam out, they for all the spiders, everything.

And the only thing that we kept going was that we have to get out of the floodwater. It was just to keep going. We gotta keep going. We gotta keep going. Because if we stopped and we wanted to, we I don't think we would have got out

Our house is fine because it was on stilts or was raised up, but all the sheds, the property, the house in our property I know was building a granny flat. That's all gone. All our sheds are washed through the driveway, everything. And my next door neighbour, she's lost everything like it went to the second level of a two story house and it washed out everything, like all her belongings are through our paddock as well. That was in a matter of five hours, it come through and took everything.

RUBY:

And so how are you feeling about the next few hours and next few days?

TAHLIA:

The next few hours we're not really worried as much because I suppose we just going to keep going the next few days. There's a bit more of a touch and go, because we know the weather can change within hours. And we know they're saying that it's going to go back as worse as it was, and if it does, that means everything's going to go all back under again.

RUBY:

That's so terrifying.

TAHLIA:

Oh it was horrible. It was the worst experience, I've ever had in my life.

RUBY:

Is it your experience that the weather events like this, but also your region was also affected by fire recently as well? Have these kinds of things become more common and have they become worse?

TAHLIA:

Yeah, lots more worse and more common, it’s one disaster to another. Years ago, we'd have a small flood and it’d be fine, a few bush fires here and there. Now it's just taking the whole states, the whole lot. There's no one spared out of any of it.

This is only going to be worse. And then the next six months, they're going to be something else between the fires and then the droughts and then the Covid and then now the flooding. What's going to be next?

RUBY:

We’ll be back in a moment.

[Advertisement]

Archival tape -- News Reporter 1:

"The forced spill upstream from Warragamba, churning out roughly 100 olympic swimming pools every minute."

Archival tape -- News Reporter 2:

"So far 18,000 people have been evacuated. Now, most of those people are living on the mid north coast."

Archival tape -- News Reporter 3:

"The end of the rain won’t be the end of the floods."

RUBY:

Mike, how are you?

MIKE:

I'm dry, thank you very much.

RUBY:

And what's the weather like where you are, how’s the rain?

MIKE:

Where I am at the moment, in the inner west of Sydney. It's not raining very heavily at this exact moment.

RUBY:

Mike Seccombe is The Saturday Paper’s national correspondent.

MIKE:

But I believe it's raining more heavily further out to the west, out around Penrith and up into the Blue Mountains and over the catchment of Sydney's dams. So it's, it's still pretty heavy, so we might have a way to go with this yet.

RUBY:

Yet it seems like there was a lot over the weekend wherever you were in Sydney.

MIKE:

Oh, there was a huge amount. Sydney's biggest dam, which is Warragamba, was overflowing and it was spilling, according to Sydney Water. So according to the official figures, it was spilling something like 450 gigalitres a day, which is for context, that's roughly the volume of Sydney Harbour coming over the dam wall every day.

So it's huge, and large areas of the state and large areas of Sydney are under water.

You know, large areas of the central west of New South Wales have got like 200 per cent, 300 per cent of their monthly averages in just a few days. A large swathe of the coast from like around Ballina, south Coffs Harbour, Port Macquarie, just to the north of Newcastle, all that area, they've had 400 or 600 millimetres.

Thousands of people have been evacuated and thousands more yet may yet be. I heard one suggestion that maybe 50,000 people might have to be moved before this is over. Let's hope it doesn't come to that.

RUBY:

Mm and some of the areas that are being hardest hit at the moment, they're also some of the same regions that really had a really hard time with the bushfires last year as well, right?

MIKE:

Yeah that's part of the tragedy of it, really. The poor people who live there, you know, I might add also drought, you know, before the fires was the drought. So they've had the drought. Then they've had the fires and now they're having floods.

Large parts of the mid-north coast that burned, you know, in the black summer are now experiencing just biblical amounts of rain. And one can only imagine that a lot of the ground will still be bare or bare-ish from the fire and, topsoil will be being washed away. So it's pretty grim. It's literally drought and flooding rains.

RUBY:

Hmm. And we do keep hearing about these types of events being one, a new one in 50 year event, one in 100 year flooding, that kind of thing. And, um, you know, the New South Wales premier, she said that the floods were beyond anyone's expectations. But it does seem, as you say, like these kinds of weather events are becoming more common. So is it time that we changed the way that we talk about this kind of thing?

MIKE:

Well, I think it is. And I might add, in the case of the fires, some of those fires burnt into rainforests that the scientists reckon wouldn't have burnt for a thousand years. So we're talking in the case of the fires, we're talking one in a thousand year events, at least.

In the case of the floods, maybe one in 50 or 100. But they seem to be happening more frequently than that.

So, yes to answer your question directly, it is time we started thinking more about this, and it's time that we started getting a bit more serious about doing something about climate change, which, at the moment, as we can see, seems to be accelerating.

RUBY:

And so how much of this can be attributed to climate change?

MIKE:

Well, the scientists always warn us against attributing any one event to climate change, so I won't do that. But what we can say is that extreme weather of this kind is becoming increasingly frequent here and around the world.

The Bureau of Meteorology suggests that over time, the south eastern part of Australia will actually get less rain overall, particularly spring rain. And I know that sits a little oddly with these record breaking floods. But in fact, climate change makes weather more extreme. It doesn't just make it drier. So, you know, it confuses some people that the same phenomenon can cause drought and also flood.

But the explanation is actually pretty simple, because what happens is, as the climate warms, there's more evaporation. So for every degree warmer the climate gets and in Australia, it's maybe a degree of degree and a half so far for each degree of warming, the air can hold an extra seven per cent of water vapour. So that means that the land dries out quicker. But there's all this extra humidity floating around in the air. So when it does rain, it pours. And that's what's essentially happening here.

And I might add, water vapour is itself a heat trapping gas. So we have this feedback loop whereby a hotter climate means more evaporation. More evaporation means more heat, means more extreme weather.

RUBY:

And what are governments doing to respond Mike? Is there an acknowledgement that these weather events are becoming more severe and more common?

MIKE:

Well, certainly in the case of the fires, we had various enquiries, all of which pointed the finger at climate change being involved. We obviously haven't had any enquiry into the floods yet. And I haven't heard anyone in government talking about the role of climate change. But it's undoubtedly a factor. And unfortunately, our federal government in particular is basically doing very little about it. Some of the states are a lot better. South Australia is very good on renewable energy. So’s Tasmania with its hydro. But, you know, the federal government is still talking about new coal fired power stations. In the case of the National Party, in the case of the liberals, they are talking about not so much coal as gas, which is just another dangerous fossil fuel. So I'm afraid the signs are not very good with the current federal government in terms of taking this as seriously as they should.

We've seen multiple bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef. We've seen mangroves dying off up in the Gulf of Carpentaria. And these are all climate change related phenomena. So, wherever you look, you can see evidence of things getting away from us. And, and unfortunately, there seems to be just inertia on the part of the Morrison government.

RUBY:

Mike, thank you so much for your time and stay safe.

MIKE:

Thank you very much. Stay dry.

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RUBY:

Also in the news today

An evacuation order has been issued for more residents in the Hawkesbury-Nepean catchment as the NSW flood emergency continues.

The next 12 hours will be critical for the state as two weather systems combine to deliver more rain to already peaking rivers.

And Prime Minister Scott Morrison held a press conference yesterday, pledging to improve outcomes for women in Australia.

The press conference followed allegations Liberal staffers had filmed themselves performing sex acts, in the office of a woman MP.

During the press conference Scott Morrison raised an alleged harassment complaint within News Corp… News Corp has since responded saying the claim was "simply untrue".

I’m Ruby Jones, this is 7am, see you tomorrow.