THE roar of the water sounded “like a jet” and it was all Michael Maytom could do to stay afloat.
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Struggling through the surging and swirling water, he managed to find the fence circling Stroud Showground and, using it as a guide, made his way towards the highest point on the ground, the historic grandstand.
The time was 4.15am on Tuesday morning, April 21.
Fifteen minutes earlier, Mr Maytom had arrived in Stroud after working the night shift at the nearby Duralie coal mine.
Turning down Millbrook Rd in the hope of reaching his home about a kilometre further on, he found his way blocked by rising floodwaters.
After backtracking and turning into the town showground nearby, Mr Maytom made his way slowly around the main ring and back onto Cowper St, noticing in the process several caravans scattered about the grounds.
He drove up the main street towards the town ambulance station and found floodwaters had cut the road there too.
Realising the water was rising fast, Mr Maytom spoke to a local council worker erecting flood barriers and urged him to warn residents at Stroud Lodge that they may have to evacuate.
He told the council worker he would head back to the showground to warn the campers that they needed to get out.
Water had already begun to lap at the edges of the grounds when he arrived back at the showground and, realising time was running out, Mr Maytom started beeping his horn in the hope of alerting the campers to the impending danger.
He stopped by a large campervan parked just to the north of the grandstand and urged them to seek safety before heading back towards the rodeo ring and two other caravans set up nearby.
Banging on the door of the first he managed to rouse the occupants and, without waiting for them to emerge, he moved on to the next van, banging on the walls and accidentally breaking a window in a desperate attempt to wake the elderly man inside.
“My feet were dry when I got to the caravan, but by the time I’d managed to wake him, which was probably only a few seconds, I was standing in a foot of water,” Mr Maytom said.
As he turned his ute around to head back to the campervan, Mr Maytom suddenly lost traction.
“I was still driving but the ute was bouncing. By the time I got to the chook pavilion I was floating,” Mr Maytom said.
Realising he could not stay in the vehicle any longer, Mr Maytom grabbed his wallet and threw his phone into his tucker bag, then squeezed out the passenger side door.
“By that stage the water was probably waist high. I got to the fence around the main ring and started walking around towards the grandstand,” he said.
By the time he reached the grandstand the water was chest high and rising ever faster.
From his vantage point high up in the stand he could see the couple from the campervan trying to get away in their own vehicle as the waters rose.
“The noise of the water was so loud you couldn’t hear a thing,” Mr Maytom said.
“I was screaming at them to move, shining the light on my phone at them trying to direct them towards the grandstand.”
The couple managed to get their vehicle started but almost immediately got into trouble when they hit a drain and the car started to float.
While that drama was unfolding, Mr Maytom suddenly heard a voice from the darkness calling out.
“It was the old bloke from the caravan. He was floating on his back, calling out ‘help me’,” Mr Maytom said.
“He was stuffed, could barely move. The water was like the ice in an esky. I started shining my torch in his direction to guide him towards the grandstand and, somehow, he managed to make it.
“I grabbed him and pulled him up and he just lay there. He had no energy left.”
Meanwhile, the couple who owned the campervan had managed to get out of their own car and had started to float towards the Mill Creek Bridge, less than 100m away.
“I started screaming at them again. I was screaming ‘you’ve got to find some backwater or you’re dead’. They floated past and I lost sight of them. I was sure they’d gone,” Mr Maytom said.
“A couple of minutes later I heard them calling out again. Somehow they’d managed to make it around to the back of the toilet block and they were clinging on to the air vents near the top of the roof.
“The husband somehow managed to lift himself on to the roof of the toilet block, but his wife couldn’t get up.”
At the urging of Mr Maytom, the man removed both skylight covers from the toilet block roof.
“I wanted the woman to have something to hold onto should her grip break,” Mr Maytom said.
The woman remained clinging onto the toilet block wall for the next two hours waiting for help to arrive.
“The whole time I was talking to her. She kept saying she couldn’t hang on. I told her she had to - that she had two options. She could hold on, or die,” Mr Maytom said.
“I asked her about her kids, her grandkids, anything that would give her that little bit of strength to keep holding on.”
Finally, about 6.30am, two police officers managed to make their way to the grandstand in a borrowed boat. The floodwaters had begun to recede and the couple were rescued a short time later.
Mr Maytom and the elderly gentleman managed to wade across the showground and back towards the Stroud pool where they were met by members of the Gloucester SES.
Despite the ordeal, Mr Maytom escaped with only a strained calf while the elderly couple trapped on the toilet block were taken to Gloucester Soldiers Memorial Hospital suffering from hypothermia.
The elderly gentleman who rode out the flood on the grandstand with Mr Maytom lost both his car and caravan to the floodwaters - both ended up in a tree 100m downstream of the showground.
The second couple in the caravan Mr Maytom warned before the floodwaters inundated the showground somehow managed to drive both their car and their caravan to safety.
“It’s a miracle no-one was killed. I can’t explain how we all survived,” Mr Maytom said.