1 week Ago By Thomas Kelsall
With a floodwater levee wrapped around their town, residents in the remote South Australian community of Innamincka say they are stocked up and ready for weeks in isolation. The township of less than two dozen people in South Australia’s far north-east has been cut off by road . The Strzelecki Track, the 472-kilometre rural road connecting Innamincka with Lyndhurst, is closed and impassable east of Moomba, according to the State Emergency Service (SES).
Rising floodwaters have cut off Innamincka and surrounding stations, SES says. Other roads in the area are also impassable due to flooding, as well as roads in Queensland and New South Wales, the SES said on Friday. Flooding also reached a height of 14.
4 metres at the causeway on Cordillo Downs Road in Innamincka on Friday morning, the SES said. Innamincka Trading Post co-manager Jayne Whaite said the main priority had been ensuring sufficient fuel supplies. "[It was] just a lot of stress with making sure that we get the fuel in to keep the choppers in the air to keep moving the cattle ahead of the water, instead of just walking away and seeing the devastation that it's causing," she said on Friday.
"We stocked up as much as we could to help out with fuel and food items and stuff like that." Jayne Whaite says the impact on local businesses would be "huge". Ms Whaite said Innamincka's isolation during tourist season would have a "huge impact on the business" but said "people's lives are more important than turning the till over".
"If they open the roads up and make it safe for people to come, that's well and good," she said. "But I can't see that happening in the near future — maybe a month or so down the track, maybe longer." The SES advised on Friday that flood impacts were likely to remain in Innamincka and surrounding pastoral areas "for a few months".
It warned anyone intending to travel into the north-east of the state to "Do not assume supplies are available. No fuel or food is available in Innamincka for travellers," SES said. Mick Whaite says the small community has banded together.
Mick Whaite, co-manager at Innamincka Trading Post, said the community was working together. "We've lost our tourist season shop-wise, but generally speaking with SES helping us out ..
. you can still carry on." Innamincka has been surrounded by water.
Janet Brook, co-owner of the Cordillo Downs Station, said not being able to move cattle was one of the biggest impacts of the roads being cut off. "We don't know at this stage when those roads will open up to be able to get cattle out," she said. "We've generally got pretty good food stores and other things stocked up.
"The difficulty is not being able to get out and move around, we've got all the roads sort of shut to the north, the east and the south for quite some time." Logistics challenge for emergency services SES field liaison officer, Matt Warne, said volunteers had arrived in Innamincka on April 5 to assist with flood preparations and supply food, fuel and fodder for livestock. "Working in a remote community like Innamincka we do face several logistical challenges, obviously the distance is the primary one," he said.
"Also things like local contractors are less available and further away, and then ongoing resupply and crew movements also presents a challenge." SES has built a defence wall to protect the township from floodwaters. The SES has also installed a temporary levee around the town to protect it from floodwaters.
Mr Warne said the type of portable levee installed was used "extensively" "It's a big steel cage lined with geo-fabric, we fill that up with dirt and compact it and wrap it in plastic," he said. "That provides a really good mitigation strategy to prevent floodwater from entering the township area." Floodwaters moving at 'huge velocity' Outback pilot Trevor Wright has been observing the floodwaters in South Australia’s far north-east for the last week.
He said the floodwaters coming down from Queensland have a "huge velocity behind it". Roads out of Innamincka have been blocked by floodwaters. "When I got up near Innamincka, the first thing I noticed was it was already about 80 kilometres out from Innamincka just because of the sheer speed of it," he told ABC Radio Adelaide on Saturday.
"Normally when you see a flood up there, you might see it go out 10 or 15 kilometres but this one is huge. "The further out it gets, the wider out it becomes." The deluge which battered south-west Queensland is now draining downhill to a catchment area five times the size of the UK.
Mr Wright said at an altitude of 500 feet, "you can see the spray coming off the back of the trees". "Which says that the speed of the water going through there is huge," he said. Mr Wright said he was concerned about the amount of damage caused to the roads in the far north-east.
"I think the government's going to be tied up with a lot of infrastructure fixing up roads and that," he said. "There's going to have to be a lot of time and effort spent getting them back up again.".
