Leone’s experience is not unique in the Lismore region. She, like many others, has shown bravery and strength of character to make it through the 2022 floods. However, none of us are invincible.

Leone has suffered from PTSD since the 2022 foods - like many others. I am hoping that this story of resilience and triumph can bring strength to those who need it, but please note this story is about overcoming harrowing experiences.

The interview for this story was conducted on the morning of the 13th of August - as the water levels are rising in Lismore, once more, to flood levels. The events of this week are triggers for many to relive the harrowing night of February 28 2022. Leone’s hands betray some nervous ringing, but she manages to relate her story in a calm manner.

A good friend, Suzie is present, and tells how different things were the day before. Driving around in the rain, trying to get to her home and to her cat, Whiskers, before the waters rise caused Leone’s body to react physically causing her to feel like she is going to be sick. She is aware she is not alone in these moments of anxiety.

Yesterday, Leone’s story looked at a positive encounter with Resilient Lismore, and obtaining help as a pensioner living on her own in South Lismore.

Leone describes her experience as being “Profoundly affected by the floods.” She begins her flood story by telling me about her friend, Whiskers.

“This is my trusty companion here. He kept me on the level as the water was coming into the house. It was just the most horrible feeling, watching it creep from the corner of the veranda and then just coming up and up and up to the doorway, and I tell you what, I almost patted the cat's fur off.”

(Leone and her companion, Whiskers, sit where she did two and a half years before while watching the water encroach into her house).

Leone had taken her car to her daughter's place on the hill and returned home.  

“I wasn't anxious then when she said to me, why are you staying at home, mum? And I replied, well, because we were fine here in the 2017 flood. We still had electricity, we had the toilet and the water, we could shower as the hot water system was working.

“Another reason was that there were looters walking up and down the street through the flood water in the 2017 flood. Any houses that were empty, they were going in and helping themselves to what they could.

“I realised that I'd made a mistake once the water started coming in the house, because there was no way of escaping. I was basically on my own steam by that time. 

“That was a nasty moment.

“I think I was a bit stunned for a while after that because I just remember sitting on the bed and just watching the water level because I still had electricity for a couple of hours after the water came in the house.

“I could see the water coming up over the skirting boards. I was thinking, oh, it's going to stop for sure now.”

Leone had retreated to her bedroom to sit it out with a torch. But the water was relentless, and she watched it rise up over the door panels one by one.

“And then the mattress started to float off the bed. And I just went, it's time for a contingency plan - which I'd already made. 

“I've got a loft in this second bedroom, and I'd already put dinner and water and pillows and things like that up there. And so I just got the cat and climbed up the ladder and had the foresight to pull the ladder in after me, just in case it floated away.

(Leone’s loft, where she spent the night, flood water swirling directly beneath her.)

“I stayed there in the dark and, then at dawn, daylight came at about quarter to seven, because the rain was so hard, it was really quite dim in the room. I could see that the water was over the window sill, and I thought, 

“Oh, God. I'm in the middle of the river here. 

“That's what suddenly dawned on me. I could see the ferocity of the water flowing. There were waves breaking in the water - it was really quite frightening.”

Leone’s house is bordered on three sides by waterways. Leicester Creek, Hollingsworth Creek and the Wilsons River. The water was flowing from so many directions. The flood waters were tumultuous in South Lismore.

“I knew I had to get out.” 

That meant leaving Whiskers. Leone didn’t think taking a cat on the potentially treacherous escape would be a good idea. And she didn’t know where the cat cage had floated to. She realised that Whiskers may not make it, but she wanted to give him his best chance.  

“So I put the ladder back in place to go and get food for the cat. I'd never even thought about that because you don't. I just wasn't thinking ahead. 

“Luckily, the water was deep enough because the ladder slipped when I was climbing down. I fell right into the water and went under. I was completely soaked. 

“I made my way out to the kitchen. The water was probably a bit higher than waist-deep, and my recliner chair was wedged in the doorway to the kitchen. I thought I'm going to have to swim under this bloody thing. And how am I going to get the cat food back?

“Luckily, it hadn't expanded by that stage, it must have only just wedged in there not long ago. Other things that were wedged in doorways became impossible to move without dismantling them. Once we came back into the house, they'd swollen up so much.

“So I dislodged the thing, floated it away, and the cat food was already bobbing around the kitchen in its Tupperware container. How convenient!

“I was really struck by the things that were floating around me. I've got childhood toys of the kids on the window sill out there and they're all just bobbing around merrily in the water.

“It was surreal, absolutely surreal. 

“I took food and fresh water up to the loft for the cat and a good hug goodbye.

“I didn’t know whether I was going to see him alive again.

“It was extremely traumatic for me to have to do.

“I never even thought to get things like a change of clothes or anything like that. I guess you know, when you're in a traumatic situation, you're just thinking about the next step of survival.

“I went to my bedroom, where I left my handbag on the dressing table, which was bizarre that I hadn't taken that up in the loft. It was all wet on the bottom, but everything was okay in there. 

“I got my handbag and went to the front door to try and get out, and it was wedged tight. I couldn't move it. I really had a moment of panic. Then thinking, oh shit, I'm going to bloody have to stay in the loft. And I don't know how high the water's going to get.”

(Leone points to the traditional way out, but she had to clamber over the opening on this side instead.)

After so many difficult moments that morning, Leone acknowledges how the challenge was" to make logical, progressive decisions for our future quickly. It took a little longer to make sense of so many things. She then recalled that there were French doors that opened easily onto the front porch.

“I made sure I shut them again so nothing floated out and got lost, and then I just went and stood on the verandah. Heaps of boats went past, but the rain was so heavy that nobody could hear me calling out. 

“That was fairly frustrating, more than frightening. I thought I really needed a chair to stand on because, by this time, the water was up to my neck. I knew I had metal chairs out there, but I couldn't find one.

“I'd had a piano out there, and it had washed over in the flow of water.”

 Nothing was where she remembered it being. 

“I remember just having a feeling of, wow, I could drown here.

“It was getting illogical because I knew that I could go back inside and get up in the loft. 

“Finally, standing on the chair in the doorway, the water was only chest deep. I was really lucky then because a fellow came along in a boat; I believe he worked for the SES. There were two men in the boat. 

“The driver was amazing, all those trees that he had to negotiate. He just expertly reversed the boat in there, and I was able to use the piano as a step to get up onto the railing, and then I just leapt in the boat.

(Negotiating the trees in torrential water was just another challenge to be overcome. The importance of good boatmanship, but just being able to operate a boat was critical)

“It's interesting because I've got damage to my knee from where I broke it a few years ago, and so it's quite painful at times. I never had one twinge getting in that boat, I tell you what, I just leapt in there. That was pretty amazing

“I was so thankful.

“The only reason they heard me is because they were looking for a specific address or specific house, so they were going really slowly along to try and find this family that they were sent out to rescue. 

“They ended up being the people on the corner across the road, and that was really quite dramatic because they had an infant who would have only been about two days old. 

“The woman had a caesarean, and her stomach was exposed, and she still had a drain coming out - why they would have sent her home from hospital, God only knows. So she's there in the muddy water with this caesarean scar, trying to climb into the boat. 

“And so there was her, the mother, a husband, two other toddlers, and the new baby, and two enormous dogs and but luckily, a friend of theirs in a motor boat pulled up, and most of them went in that boat

 ‘It was the husband, I'm assuming, and me and the dogs in the SES boat.”

Leone explained how much water was falling from the skies. One of the men in the SES boat was bailing water as they rode around. They had stopped for around 10 minutes to get everyone sorted, and in that time, the boat filled up with about 20 to 25cm of water, Leone surmises.

“It was unbelievable."

The SES boat took them to a large room at the back of the Norco Building, which is a multi storey building.  

“There were two Norco workers there. They were fantastic. They were handing out dry Norco uniforms to everybody to put on because everyone was soaked.“ 

Leone remembers thinking, “Well, what's going to happen now?” Leone and her boatmates were the first to arrive at the refuge at Norco, but about 70 people were there by the time she left. 

Leone was not liking the prospect of staying there overnight, the animals were fouling and there were a lot of people coming in.  

“The SES wouldn't cross the river. That's why that tinnie army was so essential, because they were doing the crossing. So many more people would have drowned had it not been for all those amazing people getting out in their boats to help.”

“It was about quarter past nine by the time I got to Norco, and at about quarter past two, these two young guys on jet skis turned up and they said, Does anyone want to ride across the river?

“All I could think was, God, I've got a bloody horror of jet skis, after a dreadful experience that I had. But what am I going to do? 

“What alternative have I got? I don't want to stay here all night, so I said, Okay, I'll go and I said to this young guy, I'm really nervous because I've had a bad experience. And he said, you'll be right with me, he said, I'm very careful.

“So I got on this jet ski. He was just so great, this guy. We got to the edge of the river. I just looked at the stuff coming down the river, and it was flowing as fast as anything. And I asked him, how are you going to get across there? And he said, Hang on tight!

.

“He just took off really fast and drove diagonally so he could see what was coming down the river and could dodge it. It only took us about 15 seconds to get across the river. And then we were in the trees where the water wasn't flowing so fast.”

Heart racing, Leone looked around and with a bit of shock and disbelief, she saw, “at least five SES boats just moored to trees over there, not doing anything. It was really quite bloody bizarre.

“The jet ski driver said, I won't bother dropping you with these guys, you could be here for hours - until they get a full load, they won't go anywhere. 

"But they weren't even going to try and go down streets and stuff to see if people needed to be picked up. It was really, really quite weird.”

They took off heading for the hill on Ballina Street. That way, Leone could get to her daughter.

“Looking in the shops like Aldi, the water was almost up to the ceiling and in some parts, the water was over the electricity lines. 

“It was an amazing experience. Just seeing where the crossroads were, where vortexes were swirling, where all the waterways were meeting, and vortexes in the middle of the water. 

“It turns out a bottle cap got stuck in the exhaust, and so we had trouble keeping going. We had to sputter along so slowly, but finally, we got there. I just gave him a big hug and said, 

“What a man, what a man. Oh, God, it was incredible. 

“I walked up the hill, and that was really surreal as well, just getting off that boat and walking up the hill to meet my daughter, 

The batteries in her phone were running low as many people were calling to check on Leone. But she had managed to let her daughter know she was on her way.

“Police wouldn't let her come down the hill to the water to meet me. She had to wait right up to the top of the hill, and so I had to walk up to meet her. 

“I didn't realise the impact that it was having on other people worrying about me.

“She just burst into tears when she saw me walking towards her.

“I was really surprised because I never thought that it would be so dramatic. I was feeling quite calm about everything.

“So that was it," Leone finishes her story matter-of-factly.

Asked what she would do differently, she said she would have put more things up in the loft. Her parents bibles, and other precious things.  

“I put the vacuum cleaner up there! I didn't think of putting jewellery or anything up safe!”

Many of her belongings stayed in the house, which was as enclosed as she could make it, but much was lost and destroyed.

A friend located her father's police name badge in the mud behind her house in the clean-up. It was a bright moment in the loss of so many treasured belongings.

On returning to the house days later, the debris that was left behind made the yard nearly impassable.

When it came to the clean-up, it took the best part of a month. 

Removing the pile of debris in front of her house that had been her life, Leone gets a little choked up and says, “A big claw machine, this big thing eating your belongings and putting it into the truck. That was terrible. I couldn't watch it. I had to go down the street.”

The persistence of flood mud was a surprise to everyone in the cleanup. “You had to gurney the walls three or four times because mud just kept coming out of them. It was really strange because you think you've cleaned it, and it would be clean, but you'd come back the next day, and there'd be more mud there."

In Leone’s bedroom, there is a mark on the mirror where the water reached its peak. It remains as a legacy of what she went through.  

Leone had rung the SES the day before the flood. “They were answering the phone at that stage, and they said, if you were there in the 2017 flood, you didn't have any problems, you should be fine.”

Those words, she described as "cavalier", cost Leone so much.

Before we end Leone's story, some of you might be wondering, what happened to Whiskers?

“Our friends from across the road had four cats that they left, and they came back over the bridge in a kayak to get them. So, they came over here and had to break the glass on the back door to get in to check on Whiskers.

“It was the one thing that really worried me for all those days. Would he still be there? Would be dead? Because I didn't know how high the water had come in the house. 

“It was really, really heartbreaking because I thought the poor thing is probably thinking somebody's never coming back.

“They videoed as they came in. Well, you could hear Whiskers calling and just the joy in his voice of hearing somebody in the house. 

“They got an old tennis racket cover from up in the loft, and just zipped him up in that and with his head sticking out. And then they kayaked all the cats back over the river.”

Safe and reunited at last.

Here is the first part of Leone’s story about finding help after struggling through recovery, predominantly on her own.