PRESS RELEASE: Frantic efforts to save Anne and her horses stranded in Grafton flooding. Images – an awful place for a lady to be left.
URGENT CALL TO SAVE ANNE AND HER HORSES STRANDED IN GRAFTON FLOOD
– First burned out, then drought, now flooded
– Stranded with no food and little help
– “Ive been 6 days there is no point going on”
Grafton NSW. A long distance urgent effort has been active to help a lady stranded in the local floods. Anne Hewitt, her 5 horses and 2 dogs have been living on soaking wet old matresses with no food and support for nearly a week as rescuers cannot get in to help.
“Im not leaving without the horses”
The water first started rising last week and immediately wiped out her small onsite caravan and already burned out storage shed. Images show the flood waters well above the Caravan and the rest of the site completely underwater.
Since then Anne has been able to move some of the horses to higher ground however one sick horse and two old dogs remain by her side
“I cant leave them behind, I need help”
Images show the state of the living space she now has. Anne is elderly and frial, coping with environments and workloads well beyond the capacity of any young able bodies person. by herself, in this rain
A frantic response has been coordinated by the ARC teams in association with several volunteers around Australia. “We have some basic funding but we are no where near her and we cant get people on the ground until Sunday, even then that is a stretch”
Ideally a solution could be found where the small number of animals and Anne can be moved to a safe local property to see out the floods and then work out what to do from there, also a couple of volunteers to head to the property and help her move things around and out.
“I have a soaking mattress and I think one dry bit in the van”
If you can help Anne, what she needs is
– 1-2 Volunteers with a Ute and even better a horse float to help at site
– A local place to move her and the animals
– Funds to back her food and materials can be donated to the ARC, a registered charity here https://arcsupport.org.au/donations/annehewitt/
“Anne’s facebook page is not a pretty site, this is watching a disaster from inside the house, no one wants to see a lady go through this, there must be something we can do” Said Alli Cairns for ARC’s Disaster team.
You can see the horror unfolding on her social media feed here, which only works when the signal is there.
https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100011397329688
Anne Hewitt has spent much of her life giving care and shelter to others; she fosters elderly and abandoned animals, and was her late mother’s carer until she passed away in 2018.
It seems a cruel twist of fate that someone so giving can lose everything, but that’s exactly what happened when a bushfire tore through Anne’s property in November last year.
Anne had moved to Upper Fine Flower, a rural area north-west of Grafton, just a few months prior. After her mum passed away she wanted a new start, so she sold her farm, bought a block of land, and moved her animals and two large containers onto the property.
The loss of the shipping containers, van and building materials is a huge blow, there is nothing left but some muddy bedding and the animals. What is truly difficult to deal with is the loss of her mum’s possessions – clothes, photos and other mementoes.
We need to help
