LOOKING at the receding river, parched paddocks and tropical temperatures, it's hard to believe that this time last year, the town was ravaged with raging floodwaters.
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On November, 14, 2022, flood waters peaked at 6.64 metres in Bathurst, severing the Great Western Highway at Stockland Drive Kelso, and leaving Hereford Street wholly underwater.
And there was one organisation that was almost rendered redundant due to an inundation of floodwater.
Hope Church, which runs the charity HopeCare, sustained enormous losses to its sorting facility.
Supplies were destroyed, foundations were damaged and workers were left questioning whether the extent of the flooding would lead to demolition.
It took a long time for things to settle after the crisis, but according to HopeCare services manager Elliot Redwin, the team has been able to turn a lemon of a situation into proverbial lemonade.
"We had water up about 1.5 metres all throughout the house, so it managed to get through all our freezers, destroy our freezers that we have that we store food in for our pantry and our cafe," he said.
"It took all our stock, all our clothes sorting, our rag cutting, and it did a significant amount of damage to the house structure as well, it broke windows, all the walls, the carpet, the kitchen cupboards, everything was pretty much dusted."
Since then, the business underwent a massive clean-up operation, and has transformed the space into a youth hall, and the sorting space has been moved to a temporary facility.
But as of February 2024, all that's about to change.
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"We've got enough room there to accommodate them, so we will be out of our temporary facility soon and we're hoping that by February we'll be all set up in our main warehouse in Kelso."
This move will be made for a variety of reasons, one being the accessibility of trucks and large vehicles for the transportation of products, another being the fear of future flooding.
"We can't guarantee that it won't happen again, so we're trying to avoid that," Mr Redwin said.
Facing another crisis at this point in time could prove detrimental for the business, that helps some of Bathurst's most vulnerable people through some of the toughest of times.
And these punches have been landing since well before the flooding incident.
"I feel like it's all been rolling on from the drought. I think the drought that peaked in 2019, we were really seeing the economic impacts of that in the welfare centre," Mr Redwin said.
"We got over that, then it was the flooding and then this huge peak in cost of living and everything else that's going on, so it's been a little difficult.
"We have more and more people approaching us for food and electricity bills and other stuff like that, but we're managing for now and the flood certainly didn't help."
But through it all, the Bathurst community has done its utmost to help the service continue to provide for those in need.
"We got lots of support and lots of donations following the flooding incident," he said.
And for this, Mr Redwin said that he and the HopeCare team would be forever grateful.
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