IT has been a long time coming but Carisbrook’s Britannia Hotel is finally back on its feet.
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The town’s social hub was wiped out in the January 2011 floods and has been closed for 14 months.
But the pub reopens tomorrow, serving up breakfast (from 10am), lunch and dinner – and plenty of beer.
Publicans David Kolevas and Carolyn Trudgeon lost their home in the floods and are still living in a caravan, but were determined to get the hotel back up and running.
“It’s a meeting place,” Mr Kolevas said.
“It’s a shame it wasn’t opened earlier because it would have been a good meeting place for people to come and talk about their problems and all that sort of thing.”
Mr Kolevas initially thought the repair job would only take a few weeks but there were a few headaches along the way.
“The first two to three months we had to battle the insurance company because they told us originally they weren’t going to cover us,” he said.
“We ended up getting covered and then the builder started first week in May but because he had so much work in town it’s been a long process.
“And then when he started pulling things apart he said it was like opening a can of worms.”
Mr Kolevas and his partner Ms Trudgeon evacuated to Maryborough when the flood waters hit Carisbrook last year.
When they returned home they found water had peaked at nearly 3ft in the bar area and the pub was a dirty, smelly mess.
“It just wiped it all out,” Mr Kolevas said.
“All the internal walls, all the bar, they all had to be replaced.
“The bar was just destroyed by the water.
“All the floor – we had to put a whole new floor in right throughout.”
The couple said they had never seen such a huge volume of water and described the recovery effort as “massive”.
“The days prior to the flood we were watching Queensland because they had their terrible floods and we were saying, ‘I hope it doesn’t happen down here’,” Mr Kolevas said.
“We never thought it would. I think everyone in town, when we have heavy rain now, they’re all nervous.
“But the town’s going pretty good now.
“There are still a lot of people that are living in caravans, not in their homes yet ... but the town overall, I think they’re picking up pretty well.”
Carisbrook hairdresser Jacinta Leech said she couldn’t wait for the Britannia Hotel to reopen.
“It’s definitely been missed,” she said. “You can imagine when the floods happened that it was probably the one place where we would have all gone.
“But we didn’t have that.”