Pharmacy Daily | Boots on the ground – Katherine flood diary

PHARMACIST Evan Walters is currently in flood-ravaged Katherine, NT. Both pharmacies have suffered damage and one is still closed; the hospital is closed with patients having been evacuated to Darwin; and the Stuart Highway is closed in both directions. With the town now in recovery mode, he shares his story.

When people talk about the Northern Territory wet season, it sounds abstract - heavy rain, closed roads.

But when the Katherine River peaked at 19.2 metres, that abstraction disappeared.

I'm a senior pharmacist locuming in Katherine, and over the past few days this town shifted from business as usual to emergency footing almost overnight.

Friday morning brought a message from Discovery Parks advising residents not to evacuate.

Five minutes later, a second message advised the opposite.

By 1pm the pharmacy had closed.

I'd already decided not to risk the roads - I'd watched 4WDs with water up to their headlights and figured a car becomes a cork in floodwater pretty quickly.

In a rural town, the pharmacy becomes more than a dispensary when roads start closing.

Patients were checking on early repeats, asking the same quiet question: how bad is this going to get?

The tension was everywhere, and in the local supermarket, when the power briefly dipped mid-afternoon, an audible gasp moved through the aisles.

It wasn't just the lights - it was a town on edge.

With the Stuart Highway closed and the Katherine Bridge at major flood level, my world shrank to a motel room and a dwindling phone charge.

Family, clients, recruiters, accommodation providers - everyone wanted updates, certainty, firm plans, but you can offer none.

Everything depends on how fast the water drains against how fast new rain replaces it.

On Saturday evening the flood indicator switched to 'steady' - short-lived relief.

The power cut not long after, and around 9pm I noticed a thin trickle of water spreading across the motel entrance.

I watched from my window, half-convinced it was receding - but it wasn't.

By the time I looked again, the water was almost at my front tyres.

Sunday morning I checked the river level - it had barely moved from the steady mark.

There had been a slim chance of making my Monday flight for my next locum position in Alice Springs, but one look at the gauge and that was gone.

During COVID, people assumed that because we stood behind a counter and wore a uniform of authority, we must have had a wire in our ear - some special briefing the rest of the town wasn't privy to.

We didn't then, and I didn't in this.

I was just another person watching the water rise, working with the same information as everyone else (probably less, as the internet never went down even though the power did).

Our patients look to us for certainty, and it's a privilege to be trusted in that way.

But the reality is that we're all just doing our best with what we have - which, in a natural disaster, isn't much.

The difference is that we keep showing up anyway.

Evan Walters is a senior pharmacist with extensive experience in rural and remote communities.