Facebook Page Instrumental In Finding Lost Things

One Hawkesbury resident was a hop, skip and a jump down the road at his folks’ place when he noticed a few interesting items floating past with the flood waters.

“Mum and dad’s place was flooded” Mr Benson said. “I saw a lot of possessions floating past, caravans, boats, pontoons, lots of fridges from the caravan parks, shipping containers, cool room panels and annexes.”

It was after he rescued a child’s kayak and boogie board that Mr Benson decided to start a social media group in an effort to help people find the possessions they’d lost.

“I did look on facebook first to see if anyone else had created something we could piggyback off,” Mr Benson said.

“I started up the Hawkesbury Floods Lost and Found group and invited friends which lived along the river”. On the first night there were a thousand people on the group.

“There were lots of photos of processions they’d lost, found, or things they’d seen but hadn’t been able to get.”

Mr Benson received many messages thanking him for starting the page. He responded by asking people to update him on their situations and whether they had found their possessions.

Two weeks after starting the page, Mr Benson had a message from a woman who had been hit quite hard by the flood and had lost a lot of her stuff. She said that she had received 95 percent of her belongings because of the group.

“There were a lot of simple things listed, things that had a lot of value to the people that owned them, that might have been difficult to find,” Mr Benson said. One recently wed couple’s canvas wedding photos washed up in Spencer.

Mr Benson said that while Hawkesbury residents were appreciative of the work that Clean4Shore does cleaning up our waterways, there were some tense moments when locals recognised their belongings in the photos the other group posted.

He said he would like to negotiate some form of agreement with Clean4Shore in which they agreed to set aside things they found that may be of value to locals before tossing them into the rubbish.

• Topics:

• Floods
• Community
• People