During COVID-19 we have had a great deal of negative news from personal restrictions to slow the spread of the virus to business closures and job losses.

As it is Sunday, we felt it time for a good news story. Another example of people helping each other when help is needed.

Recently, the NightOwl convenience store on Woodlark Street (near the Gollan Hotel) had their freezer blow up.

The freezer was a 4x4 metre walk in that was operating at -10 degrees instead of -25 and fixing the freezer meant contacting a trade and turning off the unit for 24 hours then turning it back on and waiting another 24 hours to cool to the correct temperature.

To give you some perspective, we are talking $10-15,000 worth of potential stock loss on top of a 35% drop in revenue due to the coronavirus restrictions.

Owners Carlos and Heather McDiarmid started contacting other owners and managers close by to see if they could lend a helping hand as well as a freezer.

"We had frozen pizza, cheesecakes, ice creams, bags of ice, pies, bread rolls, the whole lot. We had to find somewhere to store our stock".

"First we contacted Glenn at the Gollan Hotel, he comes here every day to buy a coffee" Carlos said, "we got a trolley and stored what we could in his freezer but it wasn't big enough to handle all of our stock. We have a large freezer".

So, it was off to talk to Cath Simes at Mary G's across the road who luckily had a freezer they weren't using due to the coronavirus pub restrictions and another load of stock was saved.

Finally, Wayne from PFD brought in some coffin freezers and another friend offered their freezer so that all the NightOwl stock was saved until the problem was fixed, a $5000 bill.

(tradies fix the NightOwl 4x4m freezer)

When all was fixed and their stock was back in the freezer, Carlos left some surprises to say thank you.

"I just want to say thank you to these people for helping me through a tough time", Carlos said.

"It reminds me of the flood from 2017. We bought this place three months before and then came the water, 1.6 or 1.7 metres and then all of our money was gone because we just bought it."

"We were wondering what we were going to do when we saw 40-50 people asking if they can help us. More than half of these we have never seen before in our life as we only just opened the doors."

"They were all dressed up with a mop, bucket and rag to help clean".

"This is what I love about the Lismore community", Carlos added.

As a community we have seen some hardship in the last three years.

Business owners are resilient, overcoming each disaster or obstacle put int here way but they would not stay open without your help and support.

This is where we, as a community, excel.