Nobody came to Lucy Vader’s rescue after she had been trapped on a roof in the floods for seven hours.
Mr Nobody, let’s call him Jason* to save confusion, had heard about the impending flooding and had spent the evening of February 27 securing his Lismore business.
‘I’ve got a business in North Lismore and it does flood. I listened to what they said – it was going to be a moderate to major flood. I have a flood plan and I followed that plan. I got everything up, well above the highest flood level ever known.
‘Absolutely everything got inundated – destroyed.’
Jason knew when he woke up on the morning of the 28th that the flood was bad, even before he go out of bed. ‘In the 2017 flood, I woke up to trillions of cars driving backwards and forwards on our street, all rubbernecking. When this flood came along: absolute silence. I knew instantly it was a bad one because no one was even able to get in to rubberneck.’
Three donkeys
Jason grew up in Lismore so he knows what floods can do, and what he knew, was that there were three donkeys in a paddock on the other side of town that would be struggling if they weren’t taken to higher ground – they weren’t his donkeys – but he knew they would drown without him, so he got into his kayak and he began to paddle toward them.
Jason couldn’t see Lucy Vader but he was paddling in her direction when she saw him and yelled out. He had just crossed the river over near the south Lismore bowling club. ‘There’s a big vacant plot behind her place. I had been yelling out whenever I got near a house and that’s when she started hollering back. I couldn’t see her through the bushes – I couldn’t see her house.’
Nobody came to rescue Lucy
Lucy said that at the time she realised she was worse off than she had first thought. ‘A man in a single person orange kayak appeared. He looked like heaven. Like gold. Like goodness. I said, “Are you the army?!” (she had been told the army was on their way.) ‘He laughed and said, “I’m ‘nobody’. And I’m going to get you off this roof”.’
Lucy said she felt that there wasn’t any way a helicopter could have gotten to her and Jason says that there were hundreds of gas bottles floating in the water and trees over the top of everything. ‘To be honest, she wasn’t going to get picked up for a little bit.’
Rescuing Dotty the dog
Once Jason got to the house he helped Lucy get off the roof and made sure she was safe in the kayak. Then he went into the house to look for Lucy’s dog Dotty. ‘I went to the side window but I could not smash the glass no matter how hard I tried. She said I could get in through the door.’
This is where things got tricky. The top of the door was entirely submerged and from the roof perspective, Jason, who had never been in the house before, didn’t know which room Dotty was in, only that she was in a bedroom.
Jason got out of the kayak, dove under the door frame into the house, and eventually located the right room. ‘The dog was sitting on top of a mattress that had pinned itself underneath a fan, so she was dry but with the water coming up higher, soon she would be swimming.’
How to get Dotty out?
Jason’s epic effort to save the dog was only halfway home and he had to work out how to get Dotty out the way he came in – under the water. ‘I had to convince the dog to get off the dry mattress and come with me. I’m lucky she didn’t bite me.
‘I just had to grab her and once I dragged her off the mattress and into the water and past all the floating lounges and furniture and stuff, she swam quite nicely. When we got back into the front room with the (submerged) door, I just had to grab her and duck dive underneath the door to get out – she didn’t think much of that either!’
Jason says Lucy was very emotional at seeing her friend. ‘Oh, she was crying. I think she was pretty happy.
‘I had tried to save three or four dogs already but they were all too big – there were heaps of them swimming around. Dozens of them.’
We know the story of the rest of this rescue. Jason took Lucy to higher ground and he paddled off into the sunless, pouring rain.
But there is so much more to this story.
Over a dozen people rescued
Jason rescued over a dozen people that day. None of them knows who he is. As he launched himself into the water at 8am he was told in ‘colourful’ language by the SES that he was to ‘get home’.
‘I told them I was heading to the donkeys and if I didn’t go, would they? They said they wouldn’t so I told them that I was going.’
Jason says he understands the SES have an important job to do and they have to warn people off but he says there were just too many people needing help to stay put.
He believes that some of the people he rescued wouldn’t have made it if he hadn’t paddled by. He says that because he was in a kayak he could hear people calling for help – no engine noise to drown out their calls. He said his ability to maneuver the kayak and get close to houses and avoid power lines more easily in the small craft, meant that he was able to carry out his rescues.
He says that during the day the SES passed him several times as they all searched for people and told him to get home. They told him that they didn’t want to have to come and rescue him, but their protests grew weaker throughout the day and in the end, they gave him a lifejacket and let him be.
Jason said Lucy was in a bad way when he got to her – she was suffering from hypothermia after many hours in water and rain – but sadly she was better off than many others. ‘I pulled an 80-year-old out of the water who had been there for eight hours with floodwater up to their chin.’
When the boats stopped
Jason says one of the most chilling parts of the day was late in the afternoon when the sound of boats traversing the water stopped. He worried about who hadn’t been saved.
After about nine hours with no food and only a few sips of water Jason was exhausted and he paddled home to his family. Halfway through the day he had lost his VHF radio ‘in the drink’ and he knew his wife would be worried.
Like many people who do heroic things, he doesn’t feel like a hero. ‘People were dying. I did as much as I possibly could to help, then I got to a point where I couldn’t do anymore and that’s when I went home – and I only just got home. That was it.
‘I did the best I could. No more, no less. I couldn’t have done any more if I tried and I wasn’t going to do less than I possibly could. Everybody would do the same thing.’
Three donkeys
And the donkeys?
Jason did in the end make it across town to where the three little donkeys were. ‘By the time I got to the donkeys, two of them were dead. The last one was still alive but only just – I reckon in another five minutes he would have been dead too. He was floating, his feet were at the side of him and his nose was in the water. I actually thought he was dead when I first saw him but I heard him snort.
‘I grabbed him and put his nose on the side of the kayak – he actually kept it there and we “swam” down to the showgrounds about half a kilometre away.
‘Yeah. He’s alive.’
This is just one of the dozens of rescue stories.
Like everyone else affected by this catastrophe,
Jason is looking forward and will rebuild his life.
Jason* would prefer to keep his identity private.
Lucy in the sky with rainfall (the story from Lucy’s Vader’s point of view)
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