Thank you to River City Women's Rowing Club and Somerville House community - Help in times of Flood

For the love of the river

Through her exhaustion, Angela Nowland from the River City Women’s Rowing Club shares with us a little about the mammoth effort the Club members and Somerville House community have put in to save the boats at the Somerville House Rowing sheds during the 2022 flood event. Photo credits to @baladitrailer and @antonhudak. 

In a combined effort by the Somerville House and RCWRC community, this flood event has been handled with good judgement and forward planning which began as early as Friday, February 25th.

At 5.00am on Saturday, February 26, 2022, while other Brisbane clubs were lifting boats to higher racks, the SH / RCWRC community were evacuating the shed to the car park. 

By early afternoon that day it had been identified we needed to get boats out of the shed vicinity, so we moved them off-site via trailers. Thinking they would be safe; we left many single sculls on the tarmac outside the upstairs facilities.

By Sunday afternoon with water getting higher and being about 50cm from the top deck, those singles were carried across the road and placed on the grounds of the Yeronga Junior AFC field.

On Monday, a few Somerville House community members collected sand bags, found a tinnie and water secured the upstairs doors. We watched and waited over Monday and Tuesday. In the end, the upstairs facility was safe by centimetres!

On Wednesday, March 2 the boats were safe from flooding – but then came the weather forecast of a storm with damaging hail.

The next plan begins to form - our club chatter was busy trying to work out where to safety store 2 trailers loaded with boats, plus boats on a club member’s lawn, plus the boats that were on the Aussie rules field.

Yeronga State High School came to the rescue.  They allowed us to store many boats on their new undercover multipurpose courts, while Yeronga Junior AFC welcomed us to store all the singles in their undercover area. So again the SH / RCWRC community were called to action.

Clean up… Planning for this had begun days prior. Initially on Friday, March 4th heavy equipment and SH parents / staff began the clean up,  namely removing the mud.

On Saturday, March 5th approximately 50 helpers from across the RCWRC /  SH community (staff,  parents, students, RCWRC members and family and friends from both communities  sorted, cleaned and hosed, then hosed and cleaned some more.  Everyone got in to help.

By Saturday afternoon everything destroyed was on the footpath for collection and the mud was nearly all hosed away, except in the pontoon area where the tide had other ideas.  By end of day EVERYTHING was cleaned and stored away.

During all this - the boats were returned from Yeronga SHS and the club member’s yard and left on the trailers outside.  The singles have been left undercover at the Aussie Rules field for the moment.

Because the downstairs of the boat shed area needs some repairs this week, we left on the SH trailer and the RCWRC trailer as many boats as they would hold, while the excess boats were placed on stretchers beside the trailers.

We finally thought we could get a rest.  But the weather had other ideas.  On Sunday, March 6 a storm was predicted with large hail.  The SH / RCWRC community again rallied, returning to the shed at 8.30am and carried all the boats that were on stretchers down to be racked.  We took the top rack and boats off the SH trailer and pushed it into the shed, then we took the boats off the top of the RCWRC trailer and pushed it into the shed. Luckily, there was about 10cm all around between the trailers, the walls and the roller door top.  We moved all the oars off the apron area and pushed them into the shed too.

Our current club membership still includes Old Girls, past parents and current parents.  During the last week RCWRC club member / Director of Rowing / Old Girl Samara Quinlan (Martin) has been an inspiring leader.

This has been a massive co-ordinated / co-operative effort between the RCWRC and Somerville House community – with everyone pitching in to do a job – no matter how dirty they got.  Our club committee have been proactive and supportive.

Many RCWRC club members and SH community members who we were around for the 2011 flood have pooled knowledge and experience - this combined with thoughtful forward planning over the past week will ensure both RCWRC and SH are back on the water as soon as possible.

River City Women’s Rowing Club was established in 2005, a year after the Somerville House Rowing Shed was opened. It was envisaged the club would be a connection between the SH Rowing Community and Old Girls and Parents (past and current) and local community.

We currently have foundation members still in the club – some of whom are Old Girls.

One club member from that foundation year is the mother of the 2006 rowing captain - the year Somerville won Head of the River. We did a beautiful Instagram post about this on 7 September 2021 – inspired because we recently renovated the winning boat from this race and now use her again.  We received a lot of interaction from that winning crew and their coach -  we have offered them a row in the renovated boat any time they like!

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