HopeCare Bathurst's storage house has been destroyed by flood water

Flood waters peaked at 6.64m at 3pm on Monday, severing the Great Western Highway at Stockland Drive Kelso, damaging roads across the region, sporting fields across the city and businesses in Perthville.

Hope Church, which runs the charity HopeCare and a cafe which provides meals for people who are struggling has sustained enormous losses.

These losses have resulted in damaged goods being piled out the front of the Hereford Street church as volunteers begin the big clean up.

"On the church block, we own a small house on the corner that we utilise for a number of things related to our HopeCare operations, and it was damaged by the flood," operations and welfare services manager at HopeCare Bathurst Elliot Redwin said on Wednesday.

This flood damage has resulted in a massive amount of donated items becoming sodden and unsalvageable.

"The damage to the house is quite significant ... it's not going to be usable for an extended period of time, whether it's even usable after what has gone through in there," Mr Redwin said.

"In terms of what we've lost; we've lost our stock, our clothing that has been donated and sorted which goes to the Bargain Centre, as well as our linen.

"We have commercial freezers in the house for our community cafe, our soup kitchen, and that was full of meat that we are ready to get out there."

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Though the damage to the donated stock has been quite extensive, Mr Redwin said the major issue for HopeCare, is that of the property damage.

This damage has resulted in the inability to accept donations for HopeCare affiliated businesses, including The Bargain Centre and The Junktion, until a suitable premises has been acquired.

"The biggest issue that we have is not the stock that we've lost, it's the premises, because we can't process donations, so we've had to stop taking donations of clothing at the Bargain Centre, because we've got no premises to be able to process them," he said.

"Our priority is trying to find a suitable premises that we can get into, sooner rather than later, and once we have a building that we can do that in, then we can start accepting donations again.

"The community donate some amazing stuff and it sucks that we have to dispose of anything that is kindly donated to us, but just the biggest issue from an operational perspective is the fact that it's actually knocked out one of our sites."

Despite the damage, Mr Redwin said that he was trying to remain hopeful, and was calling for any donations to replace the stocks of food that have been lost.

"It sucks, but we'll work it out, we're pretty good at working things through," he said.

"We're just looking at how we're going to replace the lost stock of meat for the cafe," Mr Redwin said.

This cafe runs four days a week, and provides hot, nutritious meals free of charge for those in need in the Bathurst community.

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