King Street Pakenham was one of the worst-hit areas over the weekend.By Melissa Meehan
DESPERATE King Street residents barricaded their street from sightseers on Friday night as they protected their homes from flood waters.
Tam Murphy’s Pakenham home was one of the lucky ones, but the majority of homes in the street were submerged in water for the majority of the weekend.
“We were one of the bad areas,” Ms Murphy said. “My house was spared by the smallest of margins but all of my neighbours are flooded.”
On her way home from visiting her mother in hospital, Ms Murphy was receiving panicked calls from neighbours saying the street was flooding.
“When I got back we were all trying to sweep water out of houses inundated by water,” she said. “But so many people were sticky-beaking and as they drove past they would push the water back in.”
So residents took it upon themselves to close the road. “We stood up the top of the road and diverted traffic, before we finally bailed up the shire guy who got ‘road closed’ signs for us,” she said.
She said there was such a torrent of water that residents ended up getting beams from garden bed partitions to stop traffic from the other end of the street.
On Sunday residents again came together to clear the water from the street with buckets and bins – anything they could do to send the water down unblocked drains.
“There were people of all ages helping out, a 12-year-old boy to a 70-year-old woman,” she said. “People who had never spoken before.”
Ms Murphy, who has lived in the street for her entire life, said she had never seen anything like that in 37 years.
