In a sure sign the political circus was in town, emergency service officials placed a speaker's podium in front of a rescue truck. "We've got a cast of thousands but it's wonderful," the local member Janelle Saffin told the gathering, a show of solidarity with State Emergency Service workers in the wake of yet another natural disaster threat in Lismore. Fresh from meeting military personnel at the nearby garrison, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese had arrived with his deputy Richard Marles to thank local emergency workers before fronting the media. These tend to be awkward scenes. So it was for Albanese, who offered prudent but predictable platitudes to frontline workers who've seen a disaster or four. Yes, it had been "tough times", and the "whole of Australia had been holding their breath" and everyone had been "preparing for the worst but hoping for the best". Sporting hiking boots, skinny blue jeans and a windcheater, the prime minister told the SES crews what they all knew — and what he knew they knew. Yes, Lismore, the perennially flooding northern New South Wales town, looked to have been spared the worst from ex-Cyclone Alfred and its bucketing rains, but it wasn't over just yet. But with the rain easing up and NSW State Emergency Commissioner Michael Wassing singling out "slippery roads" as a threat for the public to be mindful of, things were looking better than they had. A few moments of levity intervened, with the petite Saffin promising to stand on her tippy-toes for a photo op beside Albanese and Marles. And then a local identity, SES crew leader Neville "Slim" Graham, asked for a "personal selfie" with the PM, who obliged. Soon, under media questioning about sniping from Opposition Leader Peter Dutton about politicising disaster zone visits, the prime minister responded that he hadn't seen the comments and hadn't "seen any comments from Mr Dutton for a while". "I've been getting on with doing this job. That's what I've been doing, giving support to people in a totally non-political way," he says. Graham wasn't there to hear this. He couldn't stick around for the media conference. He also had a job to get on with. "The jobs we've been doing — you're cutting up trees, standing on a roof, tied on a harness with a chainsaw in your hand, in the rain — it gets pretty dangerous," Graham told the ABC on the way out. At 64, Graham has two years on Albanese, who turned 62 just over a week ago. Soon he was back at a job that had engaged SES workers for three days running, a house up on the hill at Goonellabah, where Alfred's gusts had proven destructive. Two very heavy tree trunks had crashed into two houses, smashing the roofs. Graham, a former police rescue officer who retired with post-traumatic stress disorder two decades ago. In the days before workplace mental health programs, it could be exceptionally grim and affecting work. "I did 11 [deceased] kids in one week," he says. He also bears the scars of being stabbed on the job, including during the 2000 Sydney Olympics. On Saturday night, Graham was supposed to be in Western Sydney at a reunion for his old police rescue unit. "I'd already paid $500 to book accommodation … but I said, 'There's a cyclone, I can't come.'" Instead, he ended up on a roof in the rain until nightfall, cutting up tree trunks. In the end, it took a 50-tonne crane to lift the trunks off the house. It's careful, slippery, pain-staking work by volunteers — and there are little things that make the job easier or more difficult for them. A few years ago, the SES changed procedures for safety harnesses, Graham says, meaning operators now have to tie more knots and different kinds of knots, instead of the simple sling they used to have. "One of the problems is people see it as too difficult so they take shortcuts," he says. Fellow SES worker Brendan Lo walks by: "Come on chatterbox, we're ready to go." With a sweeping view of Lismore before them, Graham's crew make their way onto the roof and start tying down the tarpaulins. How long they stay on before the roof is repaired is anyone's guess. It largely depends on the insurance company, Graham says. "I put one on in Invercauld Road in 2017. It was still there in 2022." With Albanese down at the SES having said his government would hold insurers to account for their response to disaster claims in places such as the flood-prone Northern Rivers, it's the kind of anecdote that could have found its mark.