Thousands of livestock drowned and the damage bill is running into tens of millions of dollars.
Two people died and one is still missing.
Dairy farmer Luke Bloomfield was not prepared for the ferocity of the floods.
«To see the river rise nearly two metres in under an hour once it came over the levee banks and flooded the farm was just unbelievable,» Mr Bloomfield said.
He had moved his herd to higher ground but it was not high enough.
«The impact on the herd was massive with 180 cows drowned in the flood and there were more swept away,» he said.
More than 50 per cent of his farm was inundated – there was damage to drains, pump stations, centre pivots, power poles and pasture. He also lost 300 bales of silage.
His neighbour Rick Rockliff was trying to save stock as well.
«The river rose so quickly from my ankle to my chest in a few minutes … I got bowled over by a log so I thought it was time to pull the pin … silly thing to do but that’s what you do,» Mr Rockliff said.
He managed to get 400 sheep to higher ground, but a group of lambs would not move.
«You rear them from birth and it was just one of those things … you feel sorry for them because they were obviously stressed and typical of sheep, one jumped from the bank into the river and the rest followed,» he said.
He never saw those lambs again.
Unbeknown to these farmers and the communities on the Mersey River, the rain falling in the distant catchments of the Western Tiers on that June weekend were record breaking, with 403 millimetres over 48 hours.
«I guess there was just so much rain back in the catchments, you’re hearing stories of 50 to 60 millimetres of rain an hour for 10 hours and we hadn’t had any rain here at all at that stage. Obviously that’s all got to come down through our river,» Mr Bloomfield said.
Farmers on the Mersey River are critical of the BOM warning system.
«They were completely inadequate. We were told about a minor flood warning for the Mersey River on the Sunday, so I came down with a couple of guys and we shifted everything into higher ground … but even that wasn’t high enough,» Mr Rockliff said.
Dairy farmer Michael Perkins said he believes the BOM «failed miserably».
«I think that is something we will all learn from and hopefully it is resurrected because there’s probably 30 or 40 kilometres of river and there’s measuring stations along the river, so there’s no real reason why we can’t get some better warning than we had,» Mr Perkins said.
Mr Perkins’s dairy property is closer to the river mouth, and unaware of the record rainfall, he went to bed confident he would be prepared for minor flooding.
He woke up on an island with a fast moving river all around his house and had to be lifted off the roof of his house by a rescue helicopter.
«We lost all our yearlings, our young stock which is our future,» he said.
«We lost 50 in one hit ,we lost 25 milking cows straight after that with varying sorts of sicknesses … we are stud stock breeders and we put a lot of time into selecting how we breed our cattle and what we are breeding them for and we’ve lost generations of that in one day.»
The Tasmanian Government set up a review into the floods and took public submissions.
The BOM declined an interview with Landline, but in its submission to the flood review, it revealed that throughout the June event across Tasmania it issued numerous severe weather warnings, flood watches, flood warnings and river and rainfall watches.
It also conducted 70 media interviews and kept in close contact with organisations like the State Emergency Service.
The flood review’s final report has been handed to the Tasmanian Government and is due to be released publicly soon.
Farmers are hoping the review tackles their concerns about the flood warning system.
«I want to see some answers into what’s gone on [and] I want to see that people in the future in this community get adequate warning that there is something coming, to give yourself time to move stock or move your house or whatever you need to do,» Mr Perkins said.
«We’ve lost stock, there’s been lives lost. I mean it defies belief in a modern age that that can happen from a flood that’s been coming from quite a distance away.»
Source: ABC
Link: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-04/tasmanian-farmers-call-for-improved-flood-warning-after-2016/8582994
