Almost two years to the day that Lucy Vader was saved from rising flood water in Lismore by an unknown man in an orange kayak, she got the chance to meet him and tell him how grateful she was that he carried her and her dog Dotty to safety.
After Lucy managed to climb onto the roof of her house, Lucy spent hours waiting for a rescue crew that never came. She had her phone but the battery’s life was slowly dribbling away.
Kris, who had paddled across town to save some donkeys in a paddock near his workshop, stopped to save people along the way – Lucy and her dog Dotty, whom Kris dived into the watery house to save, were just two of that number…
So much has changed forever
Since February 2022 many things have changed in each of their lives – Lucy, who is a fine artist, has poured her PTSD into her paintings and bringing her ruined house up to flood code – and then made the sad decision to leave it.
Though Kristen’s house was safe in the flood, his business Big Scrub Salvage wasn’t. It took him months of hard work and thousands of lost dollars to recover aspects of his business in Lismore.
When they finally met on the weekend, Lucy, who had no idea who Kris was, just gave him a very big hug and quietly said: ‘Thank you for saving my life. Thank you for saving Dotty.’
Lucy gifted Kris one of the paintings from her upcoming exhibition Exaltation at Sydney’s Michael Reid gallery as a token of her unlimited gratitude.
Though two years have passed, for some people, like Kris and Lucy, they still live daily with the aftermath of a catastrophe they had no control over. Lucy is still fighting to stop more people being put in harm’s way when the next flood comes and Kris is still dealing with unwieldy and the often unfair division of financial support for those affected by the floods. The twists and turns of the insurance industry is making his life a misery.
As Lucy heads off to her latest exhibition in Sydney, Kris reflects on that very fateful day. Would he do it again? He doesn’t know – it’s only in hindsight that he realises how close he came to losing his own life on February 28, 2022.
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