When the floodwaters receded late last year, it was clear to many of the impacted caravan park owners the road ahead was not going to be an easy one.
More than six months later, this is the reality for local accommodation providers like Picnic Point Caravan Park co-owner Brad Davidson and McLean Beach Holiday Park co-owner Jacquie Mealing.
It’s a story repeated at riverside caravan parks all along the Murray and Edward Rivers.
Although many have since reopened and are grateful to see some of their old business slowly return, the flood recovery is far from over.
When the Pastoral Times spoke to Mr Davidson late last week, he had spent the 24 hours pumping water out of his park ready for the long weekend.
He had received 95mm of rain alone last Wednesday.
All of his unpowered sites were underwater on Thursday, and campers were booked in for the long weekend.
“It's just a matter of getting the water off the green grass so I can put campers on it,” Mr Davidson said.
“It's still wet, like there's still pockets of water but there's not much more I can do about it;
“I've got to get people in but it just makes it hard.”
Mr Davidson said his wife and park co-owner Paula had spent Thursday night on the phone ringing people who had bookings over the long weekend to let them know there’s water in the park and they “might have to squish in a bit”.
The recent challenges come after Mr Davidson said the 2022 floods cost Picnic Point caravan park more than $500,000 in losses.
He said they’ve since received $47,000 in flood grants, but this was after they had to fork out the money from their own pockets in order to buy things such as pumps and petrol.
At McLean Beach Holiday Park in Deniliquin, Mrs Mealing said they’re also worried about water releases because of how full the dams are after all the rain last week.
“We're watching all of that and it's not good, it's not good at all,” she said.
In November the holiday park was swallowed by the Edward River in the biggest flood to hit the town since 1956. Only six cabins, which sit on stilts, escaped damage.
Mrs Mealing said as a conservative estimate, the floods cost the caravan park a total of $1 million in losses.
“It's impacted the number of annuals, so that's the baseline business for us,” she said.
“And then it's also roads and infrastructure facilities in the park. Our camp kitchen. Our boom gates went, that's $20,000. It all just adds up.”
Although Mrs Mealing said she was “eternally grateful” for the $50,000 they got back in flood grants from the government, losing $1 million is “a lot for a small business”.
“It does help but in terms of scale of what's happening, it's very little for what needs to happen,” she said.
“All of those holiday periods, the Christmas holidays, Easter, we didn't really have an amenity block, so we could only take very few visitors, apart from our cabins.
“So that's had a huge impact on a business like us, and that was going to be our first Easter since COVID.”
Mrs Mealing said she was also thankful the government also helped fund the enormous clean up the park faced after the floodwaters receded.
“They funded the clean up as in the skip bins and that was a huge cost,” she said.
“That's several $100,000 that it cost to do that. There were about 100 skip bins, big skip bins. When you think about what amount of rubbish that is, that is not something that you want to be doing regularly.”
Mrs Mealing said the good news is they’re starting to see the number of annuals increase again, with a good number of people in the park for the long weekend.
“It's not an easy road, as in it's not immediate. It's not that you close and then you open the next day and business as usual,” she said.
“It's a hard road, but we're seeing really positive signs, which is good.
“We went from like 190 annuals down to 100 from the floods, and we're back at 134.
“That is 34 new people getting back into the park and really good news.”
Mrs Mealing said another positive was that in the current climate people still aren’t travelling overseas as much. The interest in local travel continues to grow.
“I think the more people think about regional travel, the better it is for everyone, and that certainly helps the economy too,” she said.
“It's redirecting that we're past the floods, that it's safe to come and visit, and that everything is available and open. Sometimes people think that after there's natural disasters that they just want to avoid those places because they're not up to taking people.
“We are open and we'd love to see people come back and help us get back on our feet.”