Ex-Newport mum watched as home filled with water

Friday 14th January 2011, 11:29AM GMT.

Helen Dargan, husband Matt Connors and daughter Audrey

A former Shropshire woman has been forced from her newly refurbished home just three months after the birth of her child after the building succumbed to the Australian floods.

Helen Dargan, who lived in Newport before emigrating with her Australian husband in 1995, said she felt “fantastically lucky” despite seeing her home in the Brisbane suburbs filled with floodwater half a metre deep.

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The family is now staying with relatives and expect it will be months before they can move back.

Parts of Australia’s third-largest city reopened today as the deadly floodwaters receded.

Weeks of flooding across the northeast have caused 25 deaths, and 55 people are still missing.

The waters from the Brisbane River swamped 30,000 homes and businesses in Brisbane.

Helen, 36, said that despite the damage to their home, her family believed they were lucky.

“We’ve got friends whose houses are a couple of metres under water,” she said.

The flooding, which peaked on Wednesday, came just weeks after Helen and husband Matt finished a year of renovation work on their home and three months after the birth of their second child.

Helen said: “It’s a bit like a tale of two cities at the moment. Some parts are submerged and will be a muddied wasteland, but in other parts it’s like nothing’s happened.”

Meanwhile, floods in Brazil have claimed at least 500 lives after torrential rains unleashed mudslides in the pre-dawn hours, burying people alive as they slept.

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Simon

January 14, 2011 at 22:24

I have every sympathy for this family and others affected by the Queensland floods. I also wish them well. I do question the local link though. These people are Australians not English. For her own reasons Helen has left this country and become a citizen of another land with her husband and family(good luck to them). As such they cease to be “local” news as far as I am concerned. I find it sad that disasters elsewhere in the world only really interest a local or regional paper if there is a potential local link. Much better that such disasters should be of interest because of the human tragedy regardless of where some of the victims were born.

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