I was living at the end of Middle Pocket when Zoe hovered off Gladstone, with a big wet tail blowing easterly gales off the ocean for over a week. More than 1,500mm of rain fell in Byron Shire in just three days!
We had to scream to be heard above the sound of rain drumming on our corrugated iron roof. The creek outside became a raging torrent and washed three metres of riverbank away, taking our road bridge made from tallowwood trees and ironbark sleepers with it.
A week after the worst of it, we hitched a ride to town on the back of Lenny Philip’s Bedford truck.
The entire Billinudgel valley was a vast orange lake, with only the top of white posts marking where the road was. Standing on the back of the truck was like being on the bridge of a ship, with a long V-shaped wake stretching for hundreds of metres into the flooded properties on both sides.
These lucid impressions remain with me as clearly as the days they happened.
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
