Help family who lost everything in Lismore floods

My name is Helen Koker and my family and I just lost everything in the floods in Lismore NSW 2480 on Monday morning 28/02/22

**scroll to the bottom for more pictures or follow my Instagram stories @helenkoker

Please also see “updates” here on GoFundMe.

BRIEF SUMMARY OF LOSS

➖ All furniture (lounge, beds, mattresses, chairs, drawers, desks etc)

➖ All major appliances - fridge, washing machine, and much more.

➖ Our income stream, our business - we lost our entire office and photography studio - computers, cameras, lenses, lighting, stands, modifiers, props, hard drives, etc

➖Our home, we rent and the house is no longer inhabitable for the foreseeable future, we are now homeless.

➖Irreplaceable family heirlooms and childhood mementos

A FEW WORDS ABOUR OUR SITUATION 

➖ The floodwater peaked 4+ metres higher than the official predictions. The river peaked at 14.78 metres. 

➖ No one was prepared because no one saw it coming.

➖ Our house is very high. The top story of our house has a floor height of 13 metres, predictions said it might get to 10 metres at most - it wasn’t meant to get into our downstairs more than 1 metre at the most, let alone a couple of metres of water upstairs. 

➖ Worst flood in recorded history (back to the 1800s) for this area which is extremely flood prone.

The below was the original text for this fundraiser, I wrote it on Monday 28th of Feb, half a day after escaping the floods:

Hello, my name is Helen. It’s hard to even know what to write, right now I’m sitting in my car soaked through and shaking. Like many of the people across the north east of Australia, we have just lost all worldly possessions overnight.

We are amongst the worst hit, in Lismore NSW, as this flood has surpassed even the most devastating in history.

It hasn’t really sunken in yet and I’m finding myself feeling guilty for each tear because at least we got out with our lives. Everything else is gone. The whole town is gone. We didn’t have enough warning to get anything bar a couple of bags and our beloved pets. All the weather mapping, the predictions, the Bureau of Meterology - no one saw it getting this bad.

Right now I’m struggling to find the words to convey any of what we are facing, struggling to find the energy to think beyond immediate survival, all I know is we are going to need help.

Our home is underwater and we have where to go, when we do find somewhere to land our only means of income is our business, and with tens of thousands of dollars worth of our equipment gone I can’t even begin to think about how we will build back years of saving up to buy new lights, camera equipment, the 30 or so seamless paper rolls, the years of hand selected props, our computers. Our data.

Money can’t get back what we lost, it can’t replace family photos or momentos of the life we had built, but it would be a start to help us with the basics.