Mount Keira residents who back onto Byarong Creek had their nightmares realised early on Saturday, as a huge torrent broke the banks and lifted a backyard cabin hosting two Airbnb guests into the water.
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00:00 After the torrential rain from four o'clock onwards, about six o'clock, the bridge blocks
00:09 with all of the debris that you see with the trees, trunks, branches, as it does tend to
00:15 do quite often.
00:17 Once that blocks, it backs up, the water rises, and it goes through the least resistant, which
00:23 is overland, not following the creek, because it's full already.
00:26 What happened then, the water rose that much, we think about what we're seeing here and
00:32 what I've got on my CCTV, about a metre.
00:36 It lifted the cabin off its foundations, it then swept it through the back here, there
00:42 was a fence and my garden patch was behind there.
00:46 That's just been wiped out from the whole unit.
00:50 It was then careened down to the bridge, horrendous speed, and it slammed into the bridge and
00:56 broke apart.
00:59 Two people who were in the cabin, I don't think they were sleeping because the noise
01:02 of everything was so loud, were still inside when it slammed into the bridge.
01:06 My neighbours across the road saw it, were able to get over there, help them get out
01:12 of it.
01:13 They called the ambulance and off they went to hospital.
01:16 This is a common occurrence when we get rain like this.
01:20 The bridge is a wrong design for this area, the culverts are at an angle to the actual
01:25 creek, so it traps any sort of debris that may come through.
01:32 When it traps it, it causes a dam.
01:34 The '98 flood was exactly the same, we've got exactly the same today.
01:39 The major difference today is we almost had two fatalities when the cabin crashed into
01:45 the bridge.
01:46 The noise was horrendous.
01:47 I've got it on my CCTV at 6 o'clock, at one minute my car thought there is no water.
01:54 In two minutes we've got three quarters of a metre of water and it was rushing through.
01:59 The debris is just horrendous.
02:03 Wiped through my whole back garden.
02:06 We were lucky this time it didn't go in our house, the '98 flood it did, but it went under
02:11 and it pushed a lot of things out.
02:13 Two of our cars have got some water damage, we don't know what will happen with them.
02:19 And most, if not all of our fence has been damaged to the point where we go back to insurance
02:24 again.
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