Washed-out Home 'drew The Tourists'

Illawarra Mercury

Thursday August 14, 2008

By BRETT COX

WEEKS after the night the Douglas family house filled with water, cars still stopped outside the Thirroul residence and people would stare and point.

"We were like a bit of a tourist attraction for a while," Carol Douglas said.

What happened to the family - how they lost their home and struggled for an insurance payout - became well known.

The challenge they faced when an overflowing creek devastated their Virginia Terrace home in 1998 was great, but the Douglas family still look back on the experience with a sense of humour - and gratitude they got through.

Jim Douglas was washed through the house to the backyard when water broke down the front door that night.

Those inside the house at the time - his wife and their four children, plus two children of their friends, the Loves - became separated for terrifying moments as the water rose.

The deluge that broke down the front door and knocked out a side wall stemmed from a whirlpool of stormwater that formed around blocked drains on their street.

Ten years on, drainage repairs the family believes necessary have not been done.

All eight managed to escape through a window, but the flood impacted on the family directly for at least another year.

Their home was condemned by Wollongong City Council and, after he was retrenched from Helensburgh's Metropolitan Colliery a week before the disaster, Mr Douglas knew his only hope was his insurer of 30 years, QBE.

Having worked for the company as an assessor he knew the difference between flood and stormwater damage and was confident his former employer would pay.

After a long battle the insurance company paid only half of the $100,000 claim.

The company argued that, at 6.30pm, a storm had damaged the house, but by 7.30pm it had become a flood - and the house wasn't covered for that.

There were holes in that story: the insurer of the house next door, a different company, classified the whole event as a storm and paid the claim.

During a public protest against insurers that September, after many others were also left stranded, 15-year-old Joanne Douglas clambered onto the back of a ute and told 500 people the insurance company had turned its back on her family.

"On the day the claim was rejected mum had a car accident, which wrote off our last remaining asset," she said at the time.

"QBE sponsors the Sydney Swans but they can't afford to pay a family of six who have lost everything."

The Loves, not much more than acquaintances at the time, took the Douglas family into their home for three months - 10 people in a three-bedroom home.

Now the two families are the warmest friends.

After weeks shacked up at the Novotel Northbeach, the Douglas family returned home - to spend months living on the first floor, above the flood level.

"We were like nomads for a while there," Mrs Douglas said.

"We bought a washing basket for everyone and filled them with clothes - that was all we had.

"But the community was very generous. We have replaced most things but we had just renovated at the time and had a lot of new things which were destroyed."

Two years after the flood, as their pool was finally being repaired, Carol found pieces of her Royal Albert china buried in the mud which had filled it. The company sent her some freebies after she wrote and told them how tough their product was.

Family trophies were found on Thirroul Beach, hundreds of metres away.

But a sense of humour that runs through the family means they don't look back on the time with tears.

They laugh at Mrs Douglas' demand they build a dam with sandbags when it rained a few months after the initial storms. Or at how that night they ran out onto the street in pyjamas.

"On reflection, I don't know why it happened to us," Mrs Douglas says. "But ... it gave a lot of good people an opportunity to do a lot of good deeds."

© 2008 Illawarra Mercury

Back to News Index | Back to Home