Father tells of flood ordeal

Paul Beard keeps seeing the boulders, trees and vehicles being tossed around the swirling waters like it is a movie playing over and over in his head.

"I can't believe what I've seen. I go through it all the time."

Mr Beard, his wife, Michele, and their three children - baby Jasmine, Ruby, 2, and Ethan, 13 - spent a terrifying ordeal trapped in the roof of their Matata home after it floated off its foundations last Wednesday.

At the mercy of torrential flooding, the house groaned and creaked under the family as it smashed into cars, logs, boulders and, finally, a neighbouring home.

Over the weekend they made the journey back to see what they could salvage. Mr Beard found the family's insurance policy in a cabinet jammed between two rooms which had been crushed together.

"We had to use a hand-saw to break through.

"We found the cat in there, too. The top of the cabinet had come off and she was sitting in the top drawer." Mr Beard said the damage was so extreme he could put his hand out a window and turn on the shower.

He lost nine cars, a motorbike, jetski and a truck. He had not heard from anyone about what to do next with his home.

"When the water came, it came at hundreds of miles an hour. This was just a blur of brown," he recalled. "We'd take off like a boat and then we'd hit something and would be sprung back ... "

When the house came to a rest, Mr Beard created an escape route for the family by kicking through a kitchen wall into a window at the neighbour's house.

The family was rescued by emergency service workers about 10.30pm but still had to scramble for a couple of hundred metres across boulders and trees to safety.