Floods in Victoria: Shepperton night tense but Goulburn River peak lower than expected | Australian weather

When Carol Adams went to bed at her Shepperton North home on Sunday night, she wasn’t sure if she would wake up to a sandbag-busting flood in her driveway.

“I didn’t sleep until 4am,” she said. “I couldn’t go anywhere, where should I go? I have a dog, she has four cats, and my brother-in-law is behind me.”

The Goulburn River peaked at 12.06 meters on Monday morning, just shy of the predicted 12.2 meters. That meant the water was washing against Adams’ rose, but not her previous step.

Adams said he had never seen a flood like this in Shepperton for 20 years. “This is ridiculous. A lot of it is coming down the drain,” she said.

“Fortunately, there are children running around with cars and trailers. [sandbags] For you…and now there are worse people. “

State Emergency Services (SES) confirmed the rescue of about 100 people in the Shepperton-Goulburn Valley area, and many had to be rescued from harm overnight.

Thousands of homes were flooded or blocked, while lower-than-predicted flood peaks spared thousands more.

“That 15cm makes a huge difference in the number of properties that are isolated or impacted,” Victorian SES chief Tim Weebush said Monday morning.

“We currently believe about 4,000 facilities are isolated or have some degree of flooding. Because it is at massive flood levels.”

Further down the street from Adams, Jennifer Cannon was on her front porch drinking tea, enjoying the sunshine and new waterfront views.

Cannon has lived on the same property for almost 50 years and remembers the 1974 flood, the worst in the Goulburn Valley’s recent history.

She said she was in her 20s at the time and had nothing to do but “sit and watch the water come up.” “You, like many things, weren’t as scary as they were back then,” she said. “All you could know was radio and television.”

In 1974, a flood inundated the house and destroyed the garden. Decades later, it was rebuilt on higher ground, just like there are many houses on the street. “I’m better now. No water, nothing,” she said.

Greater Shepperton Mayor Shane Sulli is already on the mend. He has barely left the emergency relief center at the town’s showgrounds since Friday.

“I don’t know what day it is,” he said Monday morning. “But the community has been great. We put the callout in and they started filling the sandbags. The response has been overwhelming.”

Over the past four days, hundreds of volunteers and community groups have flooded the center, raking sand and distributing food and supplies to hundreds of evacuees by 4am.

Nearly 200,000 sandbags have been buried by volunteers alongside Australian Defense Forces and rapid response teams before the peak of the massive flooding expected on Monday.

Sari said it was a relief that the worst-case scenario wasn’t reached overnight. But with thousands of homes in Greater Shepperton affected by flooding and major roads in and out of town still blocked, the job was far from over.

“Last night was a pretty tense time with the expected increase heading into the early hours of this morning,” Sari said.

“But luckily we were able to wake up with a small amount of positive news … we know that in the next day or two we will need community support more than ever. , I hope it starts to recede.”