While flooding in Western Australia is continuing to make headlines, evidence of the chaos caused by incessant deluges over weeks and months in the east is still plain to see.
The Guardian newspaper reports that many caravan parks, and more than 100 national parks remain closed across New South Wales and Victoria after widespread flooding damaged infrastructure, and filled waterholes with debris.
As of Thursday, 86 national parks were closed across NSW, and 29 were closed in Victoria, with a further 48 having partial closures in place.
And riverside caravan parks all along the Murray River have had their business models turned on their heads, as visitors have been kept away.
Heavy rains have caused major issues. PIC: Benfe / Pixabay
In November, the McLean Beach holiday park in Deniliquin, in the NSW Riverina region, was inundated by the Edward River in the biggest flood to hit the town since 1956.
The Guardian reports that only six cabins, which sit on stilts, escaped damage.
“It feels like quite a disaster zone, doesn’t it?” co-owner Jacquie Mealing told the newspaper. “It’s not something that we’re going to come back from quickly.”
In a normal year, Ms Mealing said the park would see thousands of people over the holiday season but now there were just a handful, most of whom are permanent residents. The caravan park is still not open to casual holidaymakers.
Ms Mealing told the Guardian that she and her team spent the weeks after the flood cancelling holiday bookings. They had been completely booked out over Christmas.
The revenue loss is about $230,000, but once you add in the cost of rebuilding and broader business impacts, that loss has tripled.
“So, it’s a very big cost,” Ms Mealing said.
And she said that it wasn’t just caravan parks and accommodation providers that were hit hard by tourists staying away.
“Because they’re right here in town, they’re always spending money in town at the pubs and the cafes, and the shops,” she told the Guardian. “That business has gone, so it’s impacted all of the tourism and that has a very, very big impact on the local economy.”
The other factor which could have a long-term impact on caravan park visibility is how the flooding will affect sales of annual sites. The Guardian reports that many parks rely on the sale of year-long leases of powered caravan sites or cabins, but months of closures due to flooding has made those arrangements impossible.
“It’s the death of annual parks in rural Australia,” Ms Mealing told the newspaper. “There are parks in Nagambie with 200 to 300 annual sites and they’re closing all of their annual sites … we have another park at Lake Eildon that wasn’t impacted by the floods … but, all around us, all the camping places, anything lower on the Goulburn we’re either closed or badly impacted because of the floods.”
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