‘I’ve never seen anything like this’

author avatar
Relief: Sadie Pattison, 5, shows off the receding water level in Lachlan Cres at 11am Monday, October 17.

Shepparton resident Jacinta Pattison had a sleepless few nights as she watched as floodwater approached her Lachlan Cres home.

She considers herself one of the lucky ones, as her house sits towards the back of the block, and water from the Broken River only reached high on her driveway.

But it was the waiting on Sunday and Sunday night to see how things would pan out that was the hardest.

“It’s the unknown. You don’t know what it’s going to do. And the water just kept coming,” Ms Pattison said.

She said after the Broken River peaked, there was a pushback of water into it from the Goulburn River and water continued to flow into her street.

“It came up a lot worse than in 1993,” she said.

Nervous wait: The view from Jacinta Pattison's house at 3am on Monday, October 17.

By 6am Sunday, the road on the western end of Lachlan Cres where she lives was flooded.

“Within a couple of hours you couldn’t see the other end (for water),” she said.

She got up again to take a look at 3am Monday, and the water seemed to be holding steady at the level of four hours earlier.

Out on the road itself, Ms Pattison watched as the water level reached the hips of firefighters.

Going down: The rocks on the driveway mark the level floodwater reached at Jacinta Pattison's Lachlan Cres, Shepparton, home. This photo at 11.45am Monday shows the water as it recedes.

By 7am it had only crept a bit higher, but was still thankfully on the driveway.

Ms Pattison’s great niece Sadie Pattison placed large rocks on the driveway to mark the approaching water levels.

Later Monday morning the water started to drop away slowly, the rocks marking it as it receded.

Clean-up time: There was plenty of debris left behind as the floodwater receded from Jacinta Pattison's Lachlan Cres home in Shepparton at 7.15am Tuesday. The rocks show levels where the water crept up to at different times.

Ms Pattison said it was the largest amount of floodwater she had ever seen.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” she said.

“When you looked down Lachlan Cres, it looked like a lake.”