Anne Blume, manager of RSL Lifecare’s Fromelles Manor in Lismore, in Far North NSW, has told how she spent seven hours fruitlessly trying to call emergency services and the State Emergency Service helpline as floodwaters filled the aged care home with 63 residents inside.
She told Nine Entertainment she made her first call to Triple Zero before dawn on 28 February, as she was still trying to reach the nursing home on foot, after the registered nurse on night duty at the facility rang her and said “Anne, we’ve got water coming through the door”.
She said her calls to the emergency services and the SES either rang out or were engaged. In desperation, she called her brother-in-law, a Lismore firefighter. His unit told her they would contact the SES on her behalf.
Nothing happened until Anne finally got through to Triple Zero at 1.30pm. The SES told Nine Entertainment that was the first knowledge of Fromelles Manor’s emergency and it responded immediately with other emergency services.
Anne had earlier asked a staff member to use social networking site Facebook to ask off-duty staff to come in and help move its 32 ground-floor residents to the first floor. Six staff arrived in kayaks.
The lift was not working and the staff had to carry the residents up the staircase.
“By the time we got everyone upstairs, (the water) would have been up to our hips. It was unbelievable. Everyone was safe, and there was no panic, but it was just happening very quickly. I’d say we got everyone up in half an hour,” she said.
Emergency services reached Fromelles Manor within 15 minutes of taking Anne’s call and helped the evacuation of the 63 residents.
With the water almost up to the ceilings of the ground floor, the residents had to be passed out a window on the first floor, over an awning and down a metre into rescue boats, where they were transported to dry land and carried off the boats by Fijian abattoir workers.
“[Physical] inability is difficult to manage when doing an evacuation like that, but it was well planned,” Anne said.
“We knew our residents and had a plan in place for disasters, and we just followed it … Everyone had a plan, a job and just did it.”
Residents and the staff are now in nearby aged care homes.
Fromelles Manor was extensively damaged and remains closed.
