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Flooded streets in Brisbane (Photo: BBC TV)

Aid workers in the Australian state of Queensland are scrambling to provide assistance to the victims of torrential rains. Jacqueline Pascarl of the aid group Operation Angel tells host Lisa Mullins about needs of survivors that are often overlooked. Download MP3

• Jacqueline Pascarl

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LISA MULLINS: In Australia flood waters are still causing havoc on the city of Brisbane and nearby towns. Aid groups are scrambling to provide assistance. Jacqueline Pascarl directs the relief group operation Angel. She is coordinating aid to one of the hardest hit towns Toowoomba from her home in Melbourne. She tries to fill those niches in emergency care that other aid groups don’t target.

JACQUELINE PASCARL: For example we mean to get gumboots out to people.

MULLINS: The big boots like thigh high?

PASCARL: Yeah like fishermen’s boots. It’s currently summer and so those are out of stock. So I’ve contacted a girlfriend in New Zealand and she’s managed to secure 1,600 pairs, because with the snakes that have come to the surface with the rains, and the floods, and the debris, and the raw sewage, and the mosquitoes and lord only knows what’s in the muddy waters that have been flowing through 75 percent of the state of Queensland, they need to be wearing gumboots. So that’s my desperate thing at the moment. The other thing I’m searching for is mosquitoes netting because we do have a public health warning out now that we will be facing dengue fever which is on par with malaria.

MULLINS: Yeah Jacqueline give me another example of something, a product in need that you’re trying to fulfill.

PASCARL: Lisa I’ve got pallets and pallet loads of feminine hygiene products going up for the ladies who will need them. It’s things that people don’t think of necessarily. When you’re running from a 10 meter high flood planes you don’t take both things with you but you still need them.

MULLINS: Oh I bet there are a lot of women in Australia who are extraordinarily grateful to you even if they don’t think it’s coming to you. How have you been able to supply these women and also the children, because I know that you’re particularly interested in their plight and the needs as you say that don’t often get met by the military that’s mobilized now and also by other humanitarian aid groups.

PASCARL: How you fill these needs and how you find these products is simply getting on the telephone with absolutely no shame whatsoever. Tomorrow we’re going after masses and masses of towels, used towels so that people can have showers. Also we are going to the underwear manufacturers of Australia and asking them for the – we call them seconds in Australia which means manufactured goods that may not be quite perfect but are still totally wearable. At least is that they can have a shower and sleep on some clean underwear, it goes the way to feeling human again [?], and giving some of their dignity. And so we are going after new underwear and brassieres and things like that.

MULLINS: Jacqueline I wonder if you could leave us with perhaps with an anecdote from your work that would continue to make real for our listeners what these weeks of heavy rain have meant for individual Australians.

PASCARL: Well there are a couple of stories that come to mind. Queensland is a horse country. It’s where we bread our horses but it’s also where our cattlemen live on their horses, and farmers live or die by their livestock. And I have a friend Sarah up in Queensland and she has spent the last two nights out in waist-high water trying to retrieve horses, and she’s been out at the peak of the floods trying to [xx] horses to bring them to safety. Some horses have actually been found on the roofs of homes in the country districts and rescued with terrible gashes on their sides. And I joked to Sarah last night before she went out, “For goodness sake woman, could you please at least this time tie the torch to yourself with a bit of string so a) you don’t lose the torch, and if you do get swept away at least there’s a light popping around, we’ll be able to send a search party for you.” On a more serious note though, one of the terrible stories that have come out today, can you imagine, you are a 9-10 year old young woman and you’re standing on one side of the creek and suddenly an inland tsunami, a flash flood comes rushing down the creek, beside with your parent’s home [xx], you see them in the kitchen window and suddenly the world of water crashes through the back doors and you watch as your parents are taken down the creek and disappear from sight. And all you can see is your brothers pushing through the windows, pushing your younger sister up into the roof to save her live but unable to help your parents. And that’s one of the images that will stay with me from the floods these last 24 hours.

MULLINS: That’s Jacqueline Pascarl who directs operation Angel, a humanitarian group that’s working in the flooded areas of Queensland, Australia. You can find out more online at The World.org.

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