It's a scene of devastation at the south end of Dee Why beach on Tuesday morning, after a king tide followed the maelstrom over the weekend.
John Svinos, who own the Beach Shed cafe, is starting to pick up the pieces after his business was literally washed away over the past few days.
![Damage to the Beach Shed cafe.](/web/20170405110118im_/http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/g/p/d/c/e/w/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gpdchh.png/1465441788424.jpg)
"It's shocking, really, it looks like a cyclone has been through," he says. "We put in an insurance claim yesterday and we're just waiting for the assessor to come today. I'm hoping he will say we can go ahead and start rebuilding. There are concrete slabs that landed metres away and the damage has destroyed the business."
Svinos' experience makes mine pale in comparison. I wrote much of this story perched on a chair in a local library, doggedly guarding the power point to which my computer and mobile phone were attached, recharging away.
![Damage to the Beach Shed cafe.](/web/20170405110118im_/http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/g/p/d/c/6/3/image.related.articleLeadNarrow.300x0.gpdchh.png/1465441788424.jpg)
I was without power for a couple of days thanks to the weekend's storms. It's a situation that brought home to me how tough it is to run a home-based business without basic infrastructure such as power. But it's nothing compared to what happened to the Beach Shed.
With no power, I relied on my phone as my external modem yesterday for as long as I could, before retiring to the library. I had started the day at home with my laptop battery full – I had been sporadically recharging my phone over the weekend in my car. But I finally bit the bullet and went to the library in the middle of the day after admitting that yelling "let there be light" at the ceiling wasn't going to magically bring back the power.
Turns out other people must have had a similar idea. I got to the library only to find that every spare seat was taken and many others were jealously guarding their own power point. They were obviously on the same mission I was on to recharge and power up.
So I went to another, slightly larger library, which was also chockas. I did laps of the room until I finally spied a spare point and ran to get a chair so I could use it.
![Damage to the Beach Shed cafe.](/web/20170405110118im_/http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/g/p/d/c/4/t/image.related.articleLeadNarrow.300x0.gpdchh.png/1465441788424.jpg)
The upshot was I spent the bulk of yesterday tapping away, perched on a seat without a desk, hoping desperately the estimated time of 6pm Ausgrid had indicted the power would be back on was going to be accurate – in fact it was back on by about 5pm. Hats off to all the electricity workers.
All this brings into focus how self-reliant you need to be if you work for yourself and don't have back up IT support, or really any support at all. At one stage I left the library so I could do a phone interview quietly in my "car office".
While it's a slight inconvenience to have to work from the library, it actually makes a nice change of scene. And it amazes me, really, that working life is now set up so that you can still get the job done even if there is something that challenges your ability to work from your preferred location.
Unless of course you're John Svinos or any of the multitude of other businesses destroyed by this storm. For them, it will be months before normalcy returns.
Has your small business been destroyed by the storm? Tell your story in the comments below.
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