Dumpster Diving and Good Food

No, those two thoughts don't usually go together. But they did today.

This morning we started off going to buy some closed shoes for me. Every shop in Brisbane is sold out of gumboots so I just got some disposable walking shoes instead. My feet and hands are already full of holes from blisters and cuts which is really not a good idea in this mud. I heard from three medical sources today that it's an ABSOLUTE MUST for anyone who's been in the mud to get a tetanus shot, and probably a course of antibiotics too. The bacteria in this sludge are terrible!

We also bought some supplies for friends who are cleaning out their flooded new house. We dropped off their supplies and commiserated over the extensive damage to their place with all the hard work they've put into it, then went to our own apartment building and got going with cleaning out the grounds around it. There was sludgy mud - Lots of it - Covering the driveway, footpaths, garden, and flower beds. We commandeered anything that had wheels and used it to cart the mud down to the river - Shopping carts, wheelbarrows, wheely-bins.

Mud, I've discovered, is really heavy so it was dirty and exhausting work. But once again volunteers turned up from all over Brisbane and beyond to come help - Including our friend Charl. A volunteer web site was used to allow people who wanted to help to register on a database. The organisers had expected 7,000-8,000 people to register. They got 50,000. Volunteer meeting points had been set up all around the city and volunteers were given ID cards and bussed from there to wherever they were needed. Others just walked around neighbourhoods finding flooded buildings and offering to help. We had about 200 people working in our building and on the street today.

Some of the couple of hundred residents and volunteers cleaning up in our street

Once we got the mud out of the way we made a start on getting rid of goods. We had to clear out the garages completely to be able to clean them, so goods got dumped regardless of whether they were water-damaged or not (unless the owner was very quick in claiming items). Miraculously a queue of dump trucks arrived and we spent much of the day throwing cupboards, beds, mattresses, boxes of books, tools, family photos, paperwork, and spadefuls of unrecognisable gunk, all of it soggy and dripping with fetid brown water.

Just some of the stuff removed from garages in our apartment building, waiting to go to the tip

Meanwhile other people continued cleaning the insides of the garages, foyer, storerooms, boiler room, generator room and other rooms I didn't even know existed. It's constant work of spraying and sweeping, spraying and sweeping. The dirt is extremely difficult to get off.

Once again, the volunteer corps surprised me. Over the past few days many people had come to realise that the workers get hungry, and so throughout the day today there were strangers walking around handing out bottles of water (which they opened for us so that we didn't get the neck dirty), cool-drinks, beer, individually-wrapped sandwiches, biscuits, wraps, cake and home-made cookies. One guy even came driving around in his ute with boxes of curry and rice on the back, offering to feed anyone who was still hungry.

And it was all so good!. 

The current status of the building is that it is not inhabitable (no power, drainage not working, lift trashed, no fire alarms, etc, etc, etc, etc). It will take two weeks at best to get power on again, and then there's still all the other repairs to do - Things like fixing the lift, repainting, fixing the emergency generator, replacing the smoke alarms, replacing damaged / removed doors, replacing carpets and repairing the collapsed ceiling in the foyer. The bottom two levels of the building are currently just a shell. We are very grateful to our friends Charl and Joanna who have given us such a great place to stay. There are so many thousands of people who's homes are now also uninhabitable that I'm sure it will be impossible to find another furnished place to rent in the meantime. 

More cleaning and dumpster diving tomorrow. And a tetanus shot!