By Abbey Halter, Hannah Walsh and Maddelin McCosker, ABC
Kilometres of infrastructure on Louise Hoch's cattle station is damaged due to flooding in Western Queensland. Photo: ABC /.Supplied / Louise Hoch
Warning: This story contains an image some readers may find distressing.
The sun is shining on Queensland grazier Louise Hoch's cattle station, but after weeks of record-breaking floods, the damage is hard to fathom.
After surveying the once bone-dry country in a canoe this week, Hoch found 85 percent of fences on her property had been wrecked by walls of water and were completely unsalvageable.
"It's sort of like, where do you start?" Hoch said.
Graziers have said the floodwaters were moving at an unbelievable speed and caused widespread destruction. Photo: ABC / Supplied / Louise Hoch
"Costs are going to be massive … we haven't really worked it out, but it will be in the hundreds of thousands [of dollars].
"It's taken us five years to build all the fences … just devastating to see it all wrecked and gone."
Alongside fences come banks, and Hoch said it had taken two years to build them on her property - over 100km worth.
Stock losses in the region are expected to be over 100,000. Photo: ABC / Supplied / Louise Hoch
"Most of them are just washed away, gone, all broken out … so that will be another big cost," she said.
But despite the heartache, Hoch said seeing the sun after weeks of grey clouds has been a godsend.
"The livestock have just been too wet, too cold, for too long," she said.
"We can see a little bit of a green tinge starting to come in some spots, but we really needed the sun and some warmer days to get it going."
On a property near Quilpie the Hochs have begun a mammoth clean-up. Photo: ABC / Supplied / Louise Hoch
Long road ahead to repair damage
The mammoth mission ahead involves taking stock of the animals lost in the disaster, but Hoch said the number was likely to be in the thousands on her property.
"It's just day by day," she said.
Simone Seidel and her husband fear not being able to return to their property south-west of Charleville for weeks. Photo: ABC / Supplied / Simone Seidel
Not far from Hoch, grazier Andy Picone's property is once again turning green and he is breathing a sigh of relief, but the ordeal is far from over.
On his station northwest of Quilpie, he doesn't know how many of his livestock have perished, but regardless, he is revelling in some positive signs for the future as the land begins to dry.
"It could have been a hell of a lot worse," he said.
Picone estimates it will take a long, gruelling six months to piece his property back together, including 30km of damaged, broken fencing.
"It's not fun at all … there's a lot of rubbish and debris on the fence and under silt, it's going to be a slow process," he said.
But the next hurdle awaiting the outback grazier is literally a roadblock.
The remnants of a fence on Andy Picone's Western Queensland property. Photo: ABC / Supplied / Andy Picone
"In the short-term, we won't be able to get any materials in," he said.
"We'll have material ordered already and hopefully it lines up with when we need it."
Help not too far away
The recovery job might be too big for small Western Queensland communities alone, but hundreds of gumboot-clad volunteers wait in the wings to get their hands dirty.
BlazeAid chief executive Melissa Jones's parents, Kevin and Rhonda, founded the organisation in 2009. Photo: ABC / Supplied / Melissa Jones
Melissa Jones, the chief executive of BlazeAid, a charity organisation that mobilises volunteers after natural disasters, said the tyranny of distance in the outback region had put a spanner in the works.
But her phone has been "ringing off the hook" with people offering to help.
She said initial estimates indicated 3,500km of fencing was gone, but she believed the amount was double that.
"The way things are looking at the moment, we will be there till Christmas, if not longer," she said.
"We're having lots of phone calls from farmers who are wanting to register already and they're not even back on their own properties yet.
"That tells me that we're going to have a big job ahead of us."
Picone said he already had a handful of people ready to lend him a hand who were not expecting payment for their labour.
Hoch said she had been overwhelmed by support for the bush.
"We need people with machinery and people that build fences to come and help because we just don't have all the resources ourselves to actually rebuild everything that's been lost," she said.
BlazeAid is ready to mobilise volunteers for the flood clean-up. Photo: ABC / Supplied / Melissa Jones
Burning holes in wallets
ANZ associate director of agribusiness research, Madeleine Swan, said a major financial hit for flood-affected producers would be in rebuilding infrastructure.
"It's difficult, particularly with some of the vast properties in these areas, to insure for fencing … so if they're uninsured, it would definitely have a financial impact," Swan said.
"Not only the infrastructure that's been lost but the infrastructure that can't be used because of the supply chain distribution."
While the impact in the short-term is evident, Swan expects there will be major long-term impacts from livestock losses, including an increase in prices.
- ABC
