Australia’s flood management has improved. It’s still not good enough |
Australia has made big strides in flood warnings, levees and planning rules – but too often the message still doesn’t land. The next step is practical community engagement that builds real understanding, trust and safer decisions.
Floods have long assailed community interests in Australia, as have the other elements of severe weather which lead to damage and loss – heatwaves, bush fires, tropical cyclones, droughts and storms. No part of the country is ever far from being beset by one or other of these hazards of nature, often at great cost.
For each hazard, one can construct a history of how people, communities and governments have responded over the decades since European occupation in order to reduce the harm done. That history can be encapsulated in a series of stages.
Take flooding, the most expensive of the natural hazards Australians face as far as financial costs are concerned, although heatwaves and bush fires kill more individuals. Taking all the hazards together, the financial costs run into billions of dollars annually along with dozens of deaths. Always there is the possibility of large death tolls extending into the hundreds in individual events.
Phase 1: Individual and community self-help
In the 1800s many farmers on Australia’s east coast co-operated in building embankments (levees) to keep floodwaters off their farms. Along the Hunter River in New South Wales there were more than 20 local ‘embankment committees’ whose members built banks from local soil.
Councils of local government also built levees, using day........