Shoel – “ This flood came up in our shop almost 2.2 metres. We have a high top shelf. All our lamps we had out the back. We would have saved some lights on the next shelf but when the water came in it tipped the shelves so we lost all those.
I went home at 4pm and the water was rushing down Ballina Rd and I called my partner Dave as I was worried at the extent of water. He said ‘We’ll be right, they haven’t told us to worry yet’. The only guy who gave us any indication that it might come over the levee was the man who owns the Sewing Store. He has been here for years and from what he was seeing and hearing from the SES, it was going to be like 1974. About 5pm we got the SMS to evacuate the CBD so we knew we had to get in there and pack up. We were here till 7.30 but were told to get out. We thought at worst it would be waist height so we put lots of stock up on our benches but it came way over and we were pretty much in direct line of the levee onslaught. Because of the levee people felt they would be safe so many of us didn’t go high enough. We’ve lost half of our stock. All our hanging lights are gone and all our light globes. I can only use them for display, they can’t be resold as they are rusting and the water went into the fittings. We may have some hope with insurance as it was storm damage that created the flood. Many of us in this town are covered for storm but not flood. Normally when we have a flood it takes days but this happened in such a short period. We need to get back on our feet otherwise we’re done.
I grew up in Forster Tuncurry. I lived in Byron for about 8 months and I met Dave online on Myspace. So that’s going back a bit. I moved to Sydney because my sister was down there and that’s where Dave lived. We stayed for about 2 years and came up here for holidays at Christmas that year. Dave grew up in Alstonville and his parents are still here. We were walking around the shops in Alstonville and saw a lighting shop for sale in a Real Estate window. Dave is an electrician so that’s how we found our shop Brightway Lighting. We wanted to get out of Sydney as we’d had enough so we thought this would be cool. We took the punt and bought it. That was 9 years ago in May. We now have our beautiful daughter Lakey who is 17 months.
We are open and ready to go. All our suppliers are happy for us to pay our bills off when we can. Some suppliers have been happy to donate some stuff to us. I think we will be ok. We took the risk of buying a business so we’ll take the risk of building it back up. It’s just getting the rest of Lismore to say. ‘We are going to be all right”