By Mike Haydon
Mike Haydon has been working in designing off-grid homes for a decade.
Mike is certified in passive house design and runs an online educational community teaching and sharing with the community on how to create a sustainable life.
You can connect with Mike Haydon by searching “The Off Grid Shop “ in your App store.
In this article I am going to share with you my perception of sustainability and living through the Lismore floods, experiencing it first hand and living with the trauma.
Hi everyone,
My name is Mike Haydon. For over a decade now I have been designing off-grid homes and mainly focusing on the power systems and LEAH’s (Low Energy Alternative Homes)
I have personally taken 3 homes off-grid and helped over 1000s of people do the same with their dream homes.
Michael asked me to share my story with you from the Lismore floods.
Micheal and I met back in 2014. To be precise it was the 14th of October at 2.49pm that I sent him my first email.
I had taken my house off the grid the year before in Seven Hills in Sydney. I was so excited and someone said to me, have you seen Michael Mobbs’ place. At this time I had never heard of the Sustainable House in Sydney. Click here to see my Sydney home.
I am someone who always wants to do bigger and better things. Having my off-grid project reviewed by a peer in the industry was exciting and nervous all at the same time.
A few years later my wife and I had our first child and we had always said that when we have kids we want them to grow up in the country. After looking around for a few years we chose Lismore. The town had this great vibe to it. We had friends there and a huge demand for off-grid living in the area.
In March 2017 I got the keys to my new warehouse on a Wednesday. That Friday I had water lapping at my warehouse front door. The landlord was very quick to come in and say this is because of the blocked drainage in the street. “Water never gets this high.”
The floor level of that shop was 13 metres. We outgrew that location very fast and we moved to a new location which was the 1st of its kind in South Lismore. It was the 1st of the sheds built above the biggest floods ever.
In January 2022 the landlord gave us all a rent increase by $500 as he said you guys are in a flood free area and should pay more. Well he only had a month of that up his sleeve.
On the 28th of February, the lives of many changed forever for the community of Lismore.
Two things happened that day.
• My son stands beside signs of flood levels on this building in Lismore. The third flood we had last year went up above the second floor almost reaching the third floor.
I forgot to call Mum for her birthday.
And the second I experienced possibly the most stressful thing I have ever had to deal with. I am someone who can endure high levels of stress. And that day sitting at home watching the news and going for a drive every hour seeing the devastation going on down on the water's edge was continual stress. I saw many pictures and some videos and I was looking for my shop to see where the levels had got to. I kept telling myself it will be fine. “You did everything you could do to have the business in a safe spot.”
Two days later the water level was low enough to drive over to my business from my home. And I got to see the carnage that had entered my life.
You can see the aftermath in the shop in this video.
At first I was positive. I thought I had insurance and would get covered as I started the clean up. 80% of our staff lost their homes that night too so they had other things to worry about than their jobs.
• The local state MP’s office in the city centre was flooded
Our Insurance company doesn't want to pay as we didn't have flood insurance, I am arguing that it was stormwater as our street was blocked off days prior to the floods.
How can they tell which water it was that wet the shop?
There was also a story on the ABC and 3 houses same insurance same policies 3 different results. Those 3 houses are behind my shop. One was covered under stormwater.
After 4 long weeks of a gruelling clean up, the town experienced another major flood. The flood waters didn't reach our shop this time. But we were cut off and weren't able to get to the shop.
The biggest lesson I have learnt and watched over the last 12 months is that humans are so focused on their day to day situations the majority of people can't put themselves in the shoes of someone else and truly know what it is they're going through.
One of the biggest challenges I have had is large companies taking me to court because I didn't pay my January bill for my solar panels in March.
So trying to clean up a business with no staff and also between my wife and I looking after the kids as they lost their schools and had nowhere to go has been tough.
It's sad to see how much the majority of humans prioritise getting paid over someone's well being. I even had comments from the staff of my suppliers say, “Don't worry your insurance will cover the cost of the legal fees. You're not paying, mate, it's not personal.”
The last 12 months mentally have been a huge challenge to say the least.
Looking back on the last 12 months I have had the chance to think a lot and my main focus has been how do we as a society design our cities and lives so that we don’t keep creating these situations.
Over the past decade I have helped thousands of people be more sustainable and go off-grid and I feel in one night that in Lismore alone caused more waste and damage than it would take me several lifetimes of doing what I do to make up for all that carnage and waste that ended up in landfill.
As a part of this my son and I rode our bikes around town and counted the business on one of the CBD blocks. It has 116 shop fronts on the lower level and 52 of them are still vacant.
I am actually applauding the 52 businesses that didn't start back up and go back into the flood zone. The others that did are just encouraging the councils and others to do the same as they’ve done before and to set themselves up for more flooding and loss.
• Noah’s ark; see the elephant in the top floor?
We can compost and reduce all we want. But if we keep building and designing our lives to be turned upside down due to nature we are just wasting our time and energy and playing games to keep busy.
All the composting in the world isn't going to make a difference when we're throwing whole families' homes and shopping centres into landfill every 10 years.
Now I am not saying don't compost. I am saying that there are bigger things we need to look at.
I always thought Lismore was a great little sustainable town and after living here and experiencing the reality of how the council focuses on mitigation and minimal damage to floods they focus on minimising the amount of properties affected. (Editors note: See the previous blog about councils, rates and global warming.)
• A kid’s house during the flood
• Flood level inside a house up near the ceiling
• A house after gutting after a flood
• Streets after flood clean up
• My son and I in front of one of many flooded shops after it has been cleaned it up - still vacant this year
The way I think about this is, they’re saying, “It's Ok if we only put 1000's of homes and businesses in landfill every 10 years”.
I really hope someone reading this has the time and energy to work out what it would take from an environmental point of view to make up for the embodied energy of all these buildings that are designed to be put into landfill every ten years.
Moving forward I still see these problems with not only Lismore as while I was living this and going through the traumatic experience for me I know we had these events all over Australia and then months later more and more over the world.
If I was to sum up what the biggest problem we have to solve to create a sustainable future is we have to fix people's problems of how we think about money and the design of our societies.
We want to learn how to work with nature because when we do nature will work with us.
And money is not a part of nature. It is something we humans have created to control and play games with.
The world is going to be a better place when more of us start making decisions on the environmental payback of choice in our lives than what the financial return is going to be.
I am going to share this perspective with you. Right now I can turn left out of my driveway and experience a normal life and not even think about the flood. The minute I turn right and go down the hill I feel as if I live in the aftermath of a warzone of a town. And trust me my wife and I have had the conversation about always going up the hill.
With better design we can fix all these problems.
And we have 650,000 immigrants on their way to Australia.
Better start making better design choices soon.
I hope this has been educational and you have learned something from it. If you would like to keep in touch with and or reach out. You can download our free app in the Apple or Play store. Search the “Off Grid Shop” and you can do our free mini course.
Mike Haydon