Kintsugi Heroes
BONUS Preview BTD
A man rebuilt his home after a catastrophic flood, but the invisible work of survival-and the systems that abandoned him-continues two years later.
You don't have to be in crisis to call.
BONUS Preview BTD lived at Walworth, a heritage schoolhouse built in 1859, for twenty years with his wife Karina and son. He knew the Lyonands Creek well, had watched it flood many times, studied its patterns, could read the river like a book. On July 6th, 2022, after heavy rain and a swollen water table, the creek rose faster than he had ever seen it rise. Two metres in two hours. The water came into his house around midday and receded by 11 a.m. the next morning, leaving behind raw sewage that contaminated everything. Two weeks later, tests confirmed E. coli throughout. By then, BONUS Preview BTD and Karina had already been living in a caravan on the roadside, separated when she was moved to emergency accommodation on a remote farm.
No emergency services showed up until two weeks after the flood, not until he posted about it on Facebook. The only people who helped were two young water delivery drivers who waded into the paddock to rescue neighbours' horses and then stayed to help him and Karina. In the months that followed, BONUS Preview BTD worked around the clock: salvaging tools, pressure-cleaning every surface, pulling apart and rebuilding what he could. He fractured three ribs moving debris. He developed infections. He bought a motorcycle to reach his wife at the farmhouse on a muddy road that kept swallowing his car. He hid what was really happening by telling people they had saved a few good things instead of admitting they had lost almost everything.
Two years on, BONUS Preview BTD is still pulling things apart, still trying to fix them, still finding his son's childhood memories in boxes and reliving the entire loss all over again. Home no longer feels like home, though it looks new: freshly painted, new carpet. The area where he and Karina built their life is the same area where catastrophic floods can happen again. He is not the person he was before. He is surviving.
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