Rochester grapples begins the clean up as flooded streets resurface

Elmore resident Wayne Edwards evacuated his auntie from Rochester on Wednesday and returned on Sunday to inspect the damage to the home.

"My auntie - Bertha - she's safe. She didn't want to leave but she wouldn't have been here if she stayed," Mr Edwards said. "She's better of at my place at Elmore.

"We heard we could get here, so I got the car and came up. The house has had just under a metre of water in it. You can see how high it went on the walls. It only came up to the steps in 2011."

Mrs Brenn's house has been standing for a number of decades after first being built in Corop and moved over.

"She has been here forever and a day," Mr Edwards said.

"The house came out from Corop, it was transported here and put up when (Bertha) and Alan got married."

Elsewhere in Rochester, Georgia Waters was making her way down the middle of a submerged road to her nan's house.

The water was still ankle high but nowhere near as deep as it had been 24 hours earlier, when a Bendigo Advertiser photographer hitched a lift on an SES boat through that part of town.

Back then, extremely strong water currents were converging on a nearby intersection, sucking the water in different directions.

Georgia described Friday night's conditions as "a full-on river" right at her door.

"Between midnight and 2am Friday night was really hairy," she said.

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The home's occupants needed to pump water out of the house when it breached sandbags.

"So it was pretty hectic but we were very lucky to protect the house," Georgia said.

"The house just happens to be a bit higher. There's a lot of concrete and you have to walk up a few steps to get in."

Georgia's nan's house got flooded but she was not in town at the time.

"Once the water starts to disappear here it will be a very large clean up. There's a road nearby where all this rubbish has pooled. We watched it all drift all the way down our street, past our house," Georgia said.

Premier Daniel Andrews said the government was in close contact with agencies about when a safe moment to return might be, and what help might be available from insurance companies and other levels of government.

"There are different phases. There is the active flood, when it is all about safety and providing relief, when we move into a recovery and rebuild phase," he said on Sunday afternoon.

The government yesterday announced an initial round of $500,000 grants for the two dozen local governments now grappling with huge clean up bills.

The government hopes to make a series of announcements about waste, landfills and other issues today, along with more plans for the people hardest hit by flooding.

The rebuild promises to be a massive task and people will need to take responsibility for their own properties too, Mr Andrews said.

"They will need support ... and not everybody will be able to do that work," he said.

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