During last month’s wild rains, Mackay was among Australia’s worst hit with flooding of biblical proportions. 4MK program manager Scott van der Linden tells the story about how this Prime Network station stayed on air while water was pouring through the light fittings. What follows is his report…
What a big day it was on February the 15th, we’d had a few days of heavy rain which meant we had a lot of roads closed and the phones had been ringing steadily for a few days with listeners wanting information.
I’d made the offer to Meech, our breakfast announcer, that if the phones really started ringing hot, call me and I’ll come in at 5am and help man the phones.
Very early Friday it started raining hard, and steadily.
A few hours later at 5am, I woke again and it was still raining hard and I thought I’d get up and give Meech a call to see if he needed a hand.
On air he was already taking calls straight out of the 5am News, so I decided not to call yet. Instead I looked out the front window and discovered we had a big problem. The road had flooded and water was making it’s way up the front porch and was already part way up the wheels of my car in the driveway, and I could not get out of the driveway.
A car then stalled in the middle of the road so I had to go and push this guy out of 3 feet of water.
Part of the problem with this flood is that by the time the town started waking up – it was too late. Streets were underwater, cars written off, houses flooded.
Around 7am I was picked up in the station 4WD and drove the 8k’s to town, at that stage myself and the sales manager knew we had a real big problem on. At work, the gutters gave way and water started leaking through the roof at several litres per second, it was coming out of the lights.
We had to rush to get sandbags to cut off the studio area, and the water continued into the Sales area, under the door of the control room and through 4 other offices.
At the height of the rain at 8am, 150mm in an hour, the City suffered massive blackouts, and the city’s phone system collapsed so we had no phone communication with the council emergency centre.
Our breakfast announcer Meech was on air 5am – midday, then I did the midday to 6pm shift, and Meech came back to do 6 – midnight.
Because it was a flash flood, the water had pretty much gone by 6pm that night in most parts so the cleanup begun as soon as the rain eased.
Over the next week we dumped satellite programming from 5am – 6pm and stayed local with updates on roads, relief centres, centrlink emergency payments, council cleanups etc.
The City learnt a big lesson – everyone here talks about cyclone’s, and while they’re deadly, you go on Cyclone Watch and Cyclone Warning, and often have days to prepare for what’s about to hit. With the floods, there was no warning we were going to get 600+mm of rain in only a few hours.
In total 4000 homes were damaged, and as I’m writing on March 5th, Meech our breakfast announcer is out in his ute delivering couches, beds and clothing to people who lost everything. And he’s been doing that for days now, that’s going above and beyond the call of duty.
