Dubbo local Jennifer Block was in town with her husband grabbing brekkie when she got an unimaginable phone call from her neighbour - "you need to get home, your driveway looks like a river."
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91 millimetres of rain battered Dubbo on the weekend leading to widespread flooding across the already-saturated town. Even with all the wet weather, living kilometres away from the river in Minore, Ms Block never expected her own living room would end up underwater.
"We were just gobsmacked. The water was gushing down our driveway - it was like driving down a river to get into our home. And then it just got worse and worse and worse as the rain kept coming," she told the Daily Liberal.
"Not in a million years I thought that this would have happened. It's very, very devastating. We've had that much rain before but it's never ever come down our driveway the way that it has this time."
Arriving home after the call from her neighbour, Ms Block - the president of the Dubbo and District Kennel Club - found water gushing down her driveway and going through her home, the sheds on her property and her granny flat.
"I grabbed mattresses, dog beds and whatever else I could to barricade the doors to stop the water coming inside the house. My son-in-law went and got his four-wheel motorbike and a tinnie and we were bringing the sandbags down to the house in the tinnie," she said.
"I was so stressed. Our dogs were so stressed, the poor things. The looks on their faces - one of them was sleeping on the dining table to get away from the water."
As the rain cleared up the water disappeared almost as quickly as it came - "now it's just a memory," said Ms Block, who has taken time off work to clean up the property with the help of her friends and family.
"There's so much that needs to be thrown away, it's just terrible. I can't believe it's happened to us. But there's so many beautiful people in the community who've been helping."
Ms Block and her family have been living on the property for 25 years and nothing like this has happened there before.
She attributes the "freak event" this weekend to the blocked and overgrown table drain outside her property - which became even more clogged up with material being carried by the storm water.
"When my daughter got to our house to help clean up she said, 'mum, every bit of water that's coming out of every property is coming down your driveway'. I asked, 'isn't it like this everywhere on the street?' and she said 'no, it's all coming down here'," said Ms Block.
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With more rain predicted later this week and the ground already saturated, Ms Block is working round the clock with the help of her friends to prepare the property for another potential inundation.
They're building a levee bank out of sand and have created a barrier of sandbags around the property - something they've never had to do before.
She has also contacted council to request the drain be cleared as a matter of urgency, but is yet to hear back about when staff might be able to attend to the job.
"I'm really scared about the next inch of rain that's coming. I'm not going to cope when I hear rain next time at all. The table drain is still so full of weeds, the water could come back down my driveway and into my house," she said.
Asked about whose responsibility maintenance of the table drains is and when council might be able to clear the blocked table drain, a spokesperson said they "understand the distress" residents suffering from inundation are feeling and council staff have a huge backlog of cleanup to attend to.
"In the area of Minore Road west of Dubbo's urban area, the extreme nature of the overland flow of water created by the intense rainfall meant table drains on roadways, causeways across waterways as well as natural creek systems were not able to rapidly move water of such scale through the system," the spokesperson said.
"This was an extreme weather event and as such infrastructure across the whole LGA was overwhelmed. Natural creeks systems and drainage lines on rural properties saw large and significant bodies of water moving across them."
With assistance from Rural Fire Service and SES, council commenced a coordinated clean-up of affected areas on Monday. Many roads remain closed.
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