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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781504310222 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Balboa Press AU |
| Publication date: | 10/23/2017 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 82 |
| File size: | 7 MB |
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CHAPTER 1
CELEBRATING AUSTRALIA DAY
The beginnings of 2013 had not been particularly auspicious. For those who believed in bad luck, these first days were the beginning of a whole year featuring bad luck related to the number 13.
On January 20, a low-pressure system in the far north, over the Gulf of Carpentaria, became a tropical cyclone and began dumping water down the east coast of Queensland. For the last couple of days before Australia Day, the weather had been pretty much rain, rain, and more rain. At my home in North Bundaberg, six adults were stuck inside, as well as my four-year-old daughter, Ruby. I had been working in the office, so it didn't really bother me so much.
It is also true that we are a large family and used to each other's company. So no one was really getting on anybody's nerves. Instead, the family was able to fill the time by cooking, cleaning, and watching television. Other family members dropped by, too. Everybody was pretty happy, considering nobody could get outside much because of the rain.
The rain was all a result of that tropical cyclone, which was now called Oswald. Oswald seemed to be the usual sort of cyclone; nothing special. As usual for a cyclone, it started up north and headed our way — south. We're used to expecting rain from these cyclones, and sometimes they come close enough that we get some big winds. Sometimes we have a flood.
There were many warnings, of course, on radio and television. But Bundaberg had its once-in-a-century flood two years previously, so I don't think anybody thought we should be seriously worried about Oswald.
We'd only had rain for a short time, and it didn't seem so heavy, but it was constant over several days. Everything felt damp. The heaviest rain, the news services told us, was out west, over towns like Gayndah and Mundubbera. That meant it was raining heavily in the catchment area of the Burnett River, which flows through Bundaberg. It also meant that while we hadn't had a heavy downpour of rain here, the river was filling up fast.
People didn't seem too worried, but I went to bed that night concerned. It was still raining outside, and I had a feeling I can't describe — a bad energy that I couldn't explain at the time.
The next morning, I woke up and learned the bad energy probably wasn't from the cyclone. I had other things to worry about.
I went down to the office, which is at the front of the house and quite a distance from where everybody had been sleeping. It was only because we slept some distance off, and because of the rain, perhaps, that it could have happened.
We'd been robbed!
I saw the office had been ransacked as soon as I opened the door. The room was a total mess.
That was a big surprise. I couldn't think. Someone had been in our house. I stood there for a moment, unable to do anything.
Then came the biggest surprise.
The thieves had actually stolen our safe. I couldn't see it anywhere.
What do you do when something like this happens?
I couldn't believe we'd been burgled. I didn't think of ringing the police straightaway. I was so shocked. I couldn't get my head around what happened.
There was a sense of it all being not quite real. Not as if it were unreal, like a dream, but perhaps as if it were happening to someone else. You see and hear about crime all the time on the news, but I could never believe that it could happen to me.
So I didn't call the police. Instead, I ran to tell my wife, Gina, who was still half asleep.
"Honey, we've been robbed," I said. I remember the look on her face. The surprise. Then the dawning shock that people had been in our home while we slept.
Only then did I think of the safety of the rest of the family and ran to tell them about the intruders. BM, Trinity, and Ruby had been sleeping nearby. Gem, my mother-in-law, and Uncle 7 were on the other side of the house.
At least everybody in the house was safe, but all of us — the whole family — were completely stunned. How could we not have heard anything? Not when they searched the office desk. Not even when they took the safe.
My wallet was gone. So was the rent money. They'd also taken Gem's and Gina's wallets. These items had been stored in the office drawers.
We had stored our passports in the safe, so they had disappeared with it. In total, someone had taken almost $10,000!
That's how the situation slowly became real to us all. Thinking about it now, it didn't really take long to come to grips with what happened, but time seemed to have slowed. Hours seemed to have passed after I first walked in that office door before I called triple zero.
This is where Cyclone Oswald began to trouble us. First, I was put on hold for quite a long time. When the call was finally answered, the woman I spoke with could only take down the details because no police were available. All the police were out preparing for the flood they believed was about to hit.
Instead of worrying about that, the family spent the whole day, Australia Day, playing detective, trying to track what had happened, maybe discover some suspects. But there wasn't a single footprint inside the house, which was odd considering it had rained all night. We had no luck.
Instead, we were completely distracted from what everybody else was worrying about.
There are no accidents in life. Everything happens for a reason, whether it is good or bad. If it's good, learn to be grateful for it, and if it's bad, learn to forgive. Understanding this gives me a new perspective on life, and I can have a more peaceful life.
CHAPTER 2
GETTING READY FOR THE FLOOD
It rained even more heavily that night.
The next morning, we drove around a bit to get an idea of what was going on. Listening to the news and weather warnings can give you only so much information, and that is probably out of date by the time it's put on the air. We wanted to see for ourselves what was happening after the heavy rain. We wanted to know exactly how worried we should be. Trinity thought she might go back to her home at Bargara.
We drove towards the river only to find it was flooding again. (I say "again" because the river had flooded as recently as New Year's 2010–2011). We came to a place where people were dragging their caravans up to the side of the road. Gina asked if they needed help, but the caravan park manager had flood emergency plans in place, and they seemed sure they'd be all right.
To be honest, we thought nothing of the rain and the potential for flooding until we heard the State Emergency Service (SES) announcement that everybody should start preparing for another disaster, and everyone in the area might need to evacuate.
The SES couldn't tell us how high the river might peak, but the considered opinion of the SES and other emergency service channels was that it might reach 8.5 metres. The previous flood peak had been more than half a metre lower, at 7.92 metres.
With that in mind, we knew the water would reach the prayer hall (in-house temple) in our home, so we prepared to lay sandbags. Our prayer hall had started life as a garage. Outside, it hadn't changed much, but we had replaced the usual garage door with sliding-glass doors.
Our family practises Tao, a philosophy teaching the way of life. As you can imagine, there are not many of our faith in this area, so we felt we needed a place we could come together as a family to celebrate our festivals and our learnings. It's true that we could have chosen to have a special place set aside in the house, just as other faiths might. But we are such a large family that we thought it would be better to make our garage into a small temple, our prayer hall.
We knew that we could do nothing if the flood rose as people were saying it would. At the same time, we knew we had to do everything we could to save our home, especially our prayer hall.
Gina and I immediately set off, driving around to find some sandbags. There were none available on our side of the river, and as evidence of how cautious the authorities were, we were unable to get across to the other side of the river because the bridges had been closed.
I started to realise just how much trouble this Cyclone Oswald was creating and how dangerous it might be. Gina, at the time, was thirty-six weeks pregnant with our second child, and as we rushed back home, I felt the first stirrings of panic. In my head, I began listing all the what-ifs and all the maybes that Oswald might bring with the rain — and how it could affect our family.
At home, Mum was the centre of calm. She suggested an obvious solution — that we make our own sandbags. So we pulled out dozens of pillowcases, found empty rice bags, and filled them with sand from a nearby children's playground.
We had enough bags to protect the prayer hall if the water rose by the extra half metre being predicted. After placing the sandbags, we took the precaution of lifting everything inside the prayer hall up as high as we could.
Then news came that the river would keep rising as water flowed down from Gayndah and the Burnett catchment. We were told Paradise Dam would overflow. As before, nobody was offering precise numbers or heights, but they did agree the water was expected to arrive sometime on Monday, January 28.
That was our signal to start shifting everything again. We thought of it as a precaution only because how could the river rise so far? But we put everything in the living room and kitchen onto a higher level again. Small items, like electrical appliances and anything we wanted to save, went on tables.
Then there was nothing we could do but watch, and wait ... Watch and wait ... And boy the water came up fast.
By 5 p.m. Sunday, the floodwaters had reached our 2010–2011 flood level and was halfway up our driveway. Only an hour later, the water had made it inside the prayer hall.
We all panicked. For a third time, we went around the house, moving as much as we could up, up, up. That was a real workout. We moved all the little things as well as big things like beds, mattresses, desks, tables, and couches.
Even though it was raining on and off, the weather was hot and very humid. We were all so drained and very tired, especially Gina, who was carrying our baby and was due to give birth in only four weeks. She hadn't stopped all day. We had all, me especially, pushed ourselves harder knowing that.
It was time for us to decide what we were going to do next. Should we stay in the house until morning? Or evacuate now.
When SES first started talking about the need to evacuate, we thought we might move next door, where the house was on stumps and sat much higher than our own. The house belonged to relatives, and they were out of town. Naturally, they were concerned to know about the flood, but we had agreed that, if the worst came to worst, we could evacuate to their house. I'm pretty sure we were all joking at that point. None of us really expected we might have to move next door to their place.
Uncle 7 and I went over next door, wading through water that by this time was just below our knees. We checked the back door and front door, and both were locked. A front window was ajar just a little, but it was too high up for us to get to.
We could have gotten a ladder from our shed, climbed in through the window, and opened the house right then and there. It seemed such a big step to take, going into another person's home, especially when we weren't even sure we'd have to.
So we decided to just stay the night and wait and see what happened next. Nobody could sleep that night. Outside was silent. It had stopped raining, and the sky was clear. I could see the full moon. We had all been too busy preparing for the flood that we had forgotten how quiet it was without the rain. I could feel the anxiousness and worry of everyone. We all had this eerie feeling ... waiting to see what happened next.
At 9 p.m., I started marking some measurements — ten centimetres, twenty centimetres, thirty centimetres, forty centimetres, and fifty centimetres — on the house wall near the driveway. I knew that once it reached the forty-centimetre mark, we needed to leave the house.
I hoped it wouldn't come to that. I knew the water was rising, but I didn't really know how fast. So I stayed there and watched the water level.
By 10 p.m., the water had only risen by about five centimetres. That's not so bad, I thought. I did a few quick calculations. At that rate, say two hours per ten centimetres, it would take the river seven hours to reach the forty-centimetre mark, which would put it just at our front door.
That meant we wouldn't have to decide about leaving until five the next morning.
But I like to be safe so, just to make sure, I stayed to watch the water rise for another hour.
And yes, it rose only another five centimetres in an hour. It had reached the ten-centimetre mark and confirmed my prediction. Feeling safer, and a little more secure that I had a plan to deal with this disaster, I went to bed.
Not that I slept much. But I was aware, no matter what, that we all needed to rest as much as we could. It had been a hard day for us all, moving everything up to safety and sandbagging. Those sandbags weighed about thirty to forty kilograms each.
We were all tired. Gina especially. There was a very real possibility Gina would need all our strength to help her, pregnant as she was, get through the next couple days.
Knowing how important it would be for Gina to be rested, I went in with her and tried to rest, too. But all through the night, we could hear Mum and Uncle 7 going outside. We knew they were checking the water level. Knowing they were on watch should have meant we could sleep, but Gina and I spent the night drowsing, half asleep and half awake.
At 4 a.m., Mum called to us from the hallway, saying it had reached the forty-centimetre mark. So the river was at our front door an hour earlier than I'd calculated. That meant the river was rising faster. It also meant that, as we'd feared, the prayer hall, our laundry, bathroom, and library were completely flooded.
It was time to move.
Our first plan had always been the house next door. Moving there might have been a bit of a joke at the beginning, but the joke had turned into truth. Surely we would be safe in that house. It was up on stumps, and quite a bit higher than our own home. We knew it was locked tight except for that window.
The water at the top of our front steps mocked me. Rain had stopped falling, and the water was smooth and featureless. If there hadn't been so much of it, it could almost have been a tranquil pond at the bottom of the garden. But it was floodwater, and no matter how peaceful above, beneath the surface were unknowns, perhaps dangerous unknowns.
With 20/20 hindsight, I saw now that Uncle 7 or BM or I should have taken the ladder and gone across and opened that window earlier. But earlier, none of us had quite believed that we couldn't ride out the flood in our own home. Now, not only did we have to move, but I felt it was up to me to get the ladder out of the shed at the back of our house, and it, too, might be flooded.
I wished I had thought to get the ladder out of the shed earlier, even if we hadn't intended using it straight away; just to be better prepared. All the time we'd been sandbagging, and I'd been watching the water rise slowly past the measurements on the house, all that time passing, and I hadn't thought to get the ladder out of the shed just in case it was needed.
I guess in all that time I hadn't faced the truth of the situation. Maybe I had hoped, deep inside, that the flood might not be as bad as people were saying. Wishful thinking.
Dawn wasn't far off, but it was still very dark looking out at the water. We had no power at all across North Bundaberg by that time. Quite correctly, the authorities had disconnected the electricity at the first sign of floodwaters. It was eerie to look out, see no lights at all, and remember how many people lived nearby.
Faced with the prospect of wading through that black, silent water in the dark, I began to accept the enormity of what was happening. This wasn't something just happening to my family. In homes all over north Bundaberg, people would be looking out at the water, wondering why they'd decided to stay, why they hadn't been a little better prepared or reacted sooner to the call to evacuate.
At that time, standing on my top step, what I really didn't understand was that for some people, their homes were already completely lost, and they would wake up, wondering what their future would be from this morning onward. My family still had our future to make, and I was determined that it would see all of us happy and safe again, even if we had to walk away from our house.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Tragedy to Triumph"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Toan Nguyen.
Excerpted by permission of Balboa Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Introduction, ix,
Chapter 1: Celebrating Australia Day, 1,
Chapter 2: Getting Ready for the Flood, 7,
Chapter 3: The First Evacuation, 21,
Chapter 4: The Second Evacuation, 28,
Chapter 5: Third Evacuation, 35,
Chapter 6: The Final Evacuation, 44,
Chapter 7: The Cleanup, 46,
Chapter 8: Case Study, 49,
Chapter 9: What I Learned from Oswald's Flood, 56,