AAP General News (Australia)
02-10-2011
FED:Australia's summer of flooding rains
By Megan Neil
MELBOURNE, Feb 10 AAP - As Dudley Maslen watched in horror TV footage of the deadly
'inland tsunami' raging across southeast Queensland, it reminded him of September 11.
"To me, it was a bit like watching that 9/11," he recalls.
"You're watching it and it's real but it's just unbelievable. It's just staggering,
the absolute tragedy of it."
Mr Maslen was far from Toowoomba - about 3800km away, in the small West Australian
town of Carnarvon - where he is shire president.
At the time, Carnarvon was still reeling from its own devastating floods.
From WA's Gascoyne region to most of Queensland, from central Australia to Tasmania,
the summer in the "Sunburnt Country" has been a story of rainfall of almost biblical intensity.
Along the Gascoyne River in northwestern WA, half a dozen homesteads that had stood
for 120 years on pastoral stations couldn't withstand the December floods.
Some parts of the region had their average annual rainfall - 200 to 300mm - in the
space of one or two days, swamping irrigation equipment and vegetable crops.
The iconic local pub at Gascoyne Junction, a "great watering hole in the middle of
the desert", was engulfed by floodwater.
"There's been a lot of tears shed because it's gone. It's a real outback pub and it's
been destroyed," said Mr Maslen.
A month after a deadly wall of water cascaded through Toowoomba and the Lockyer Valley
in Queensland, the nation's floods crisis isn't over yet.
Last weekend, Victoria copped its fourth major flood since September, courtesy of moisture
from Tropical Cyclone Yasi and her predecessor Anthony.
As well as the flood-weary northwest of the state, Melbourne's southeastern suburbs
and parts of Gippsland were swamped.
Thanks to Yasi's remnants, homesteads and communities in South Australia's north were
cut off and even Alice Springs copped a drenching.
Yasi compounded the problems in Queensland, where residents have lived through five
weeks of flooding and then cyclones.
"The worst floods in our history across three-quarters of the state followed by the
worst cyclone, over a huge area, in almost a century," Queensland Premier Anna Bligh said.
The state, as Ms Bligh has said, faces a reconstruction task of post-war proportions.
The flash flooding that hit Toowoomba and the Lockyer Valley on January 10 was "a complete
freak of nature, an extraordinary deluge that almost came out of nowhere", Ms Bligh said
on the day.
It was, Queensland Police Commissioner Bob Atkinson said, an "instant inland tsunami".
A month on, and the main road into Grantham, the Lockyer Valley town dubbed the "epicentre"
of the southeast Queensland disaster, has only just been re-opened.
The road into the southern Queensland border town of Dirranbandi has also been re-opened,
although the township of Hebel, home to about 30 people, remains cut off by floodwaters.
Dirranbandi had been isolated since the beginning of January, and affected by flooding
since the start of December.
Flood levels there are continuing to slowly fall but the effects of the flood will
still be felt until the end of February, said Balonne Shire Mayor Donna Stewart.
The shire was still trying to recover from record floods last March.
"We haven't even touched the tip of the iceberg in getting the road networks back into
order," Ms Stewart said.
"We've had continual rain since then and we've just barely touched the edges."
At St George, though, half a dozen homes were saved this time around by "very enterprising"
residents who built their own dirt levees to hold back the floodwaters. Only one of the
levees failed.
"The engineering that was applied was of a very high degree, I think, even though none
of them are engineers. They're just bush people. But you do things that way out here,"
Ms Stewart said.
At Clarence Valley in northern NSW, people were "kind of used to" floods, living beside
a major river system like the Clarence.
While the river didn't reach the record level of 8.13 metres, it did peak at 7.68 metres.
"It really is an awesome spectacle to witness but it's also very devastating as well,"
Clarence Valley Mayor Richie Williamson said.
Mr Williamson estimates it will take years for the shire to recover, with some bridges
that had stood the test of time completely washed away and private infrastructure wiped
out, including $1 million in crop, pasture and fence losses at one cattle property alone.
"There's no doubt that there are some people in the community who are suffering still
at this time," he said.
"The community has banded together and the community is getting on with the job of
cleaning up this mess."
Flooding in rivers in several catchments across northwestern and southern NSW - caused
by heavy rainfall in early January - is expected to continue for several weeks as the
floodwaters slowly move through outback NSW, the State Emergency Service said.
As floodwaters elsewhere recede and the clean-up and recovery efforts continue, the
risk of further flooding remains due to a strong La Nina event in the Pacific Ocean which
is associated with heavy rainfall.
It's the strongest La Nina - the cooling of the central and eastern Pacific Ocean,
which pushes warm water in the western Pacific and around Australia - since at least the
mid-1970s, the Bureau of Meteorology's National Climate Centre says.
Blair Trewin, a climatologist at the centre, said the risk of flooding remained high
through the next couple of months although the expectation for above-average rainfall
had shifted more into northern Australia.
"However, because the catchments are so wet in many parts of eastern Australia, the
amount of rain that it takes to start a flood is much less than it would normally be at
this time of year," he said.
"Part of the reason why we've seen such severe flooding in Victoria, for example, is
that the catchments were so much wetter than they usually are at this time of year, that
much more of the rain went into runoff than usual."
Victoria had already experienced its wettest January on record by the halfway mark of the month.
It was the wettest December on record for Queensland (209.5mm) and eastern Australia
(167.2mm), coming after an extremely wet spring.
Even the outback NSW mining town of Broken Hill received half its annual rainfall -
of about 240mm - over a four-day period in January although it was the vast area of land
around the city that was hit by flooding.
"Around Broken Hill the biggest problem we have is that we walk outside and the whole
place looks like a golf course rather than a dry barren desert," Broken Hill Mayor Wincen
Guy said.
La Nina is the dominant driver of the high rainfall but climate scientists aren't excluding
any role for climate change.
"The strong La Nina is the primary cause of this very high rainfall season we've had,"
said Professor Matthew England, co-director of the Climate Change Research Centre at the
University of NSW.
"However, I would argue that the ocean warming trend north of Australia, driven by
climate change, has also played a role, as this region feeds moisture into the atmosphere,
and determines how strong the monsoon rains are."
Experts say more rain and floods will come and thought needs to be given to how we
manage living on floodplains.
Professor Andrew Short, director of the Coastal Studies Unit at the University of Sydney,
said better planning, building codes and river management was required.
"To keep the water out of your house you either don't build on a floodplain, or, if
you do, make sure your floor levels are above the maximum possible flood level, and your
house can withstand flooding currents," he said.
"If you want to keep the water out of towns, then you need levees, good high strong
levees, like those that have protected (the Queensland border town of) Goondiwindi."
Dr Rob Roggema, a research fellow in the climate change adaptation program at RMIT's
Global Cities Research Institute, argues recent planning practice contributed to the magnitude
of the flooding disaster in Queensland.
The amount of concrete pavements and hard surfaces in cities had left less space in
urban areas for water to be stored and less space for it to flow into after heavy rain,
he said.
The "super floods" Australia has experienced seem to be happening every 30 years, said
Professor Richard Kingsford, director of the Australian Wetlands and Rivers Centre at
the University of NSW.
"We built our towns and cities on floodplains near permanent water but as a result
every now and again they're going to be flooded because they're on the floodplain," Prof
Kingsford said.
"We have to get used to, I think, being able to live with these boom and bust periods
with each system."
The 2010/11 floods have, unfortunately, been characterised by a high number of deaths.
Thirty-five people have died in flood-related incidents in Queensland since November
30 - 22 in the southeast Queensland disaster since January 10. Another seven people are
still missing.
In December, a woman's body was found in floodwaters in central-western NSW and in
Victoria in January a seven-year-old boy drowned in a billabong off a swollen Goulburn
River in the state's northwest. Also in mid-January, a three-year-old boy was drowned
in a flooded paddock in central western NSW.
And, a Melbourne man died after falling from a ladder while trying to fix a leaking
roof following last weekend's deluge.
People in Toowoomba - 700 metres above sea level - and the Lockyer Valley got caught
in a flash flood and didn't see it coming.
"Torrential rain over a very short period of time came down two major creeks through
the middle of the city which are normal quiet drainage ways and people had no warning
at all," Toowoomba Mayor Peter Taylor has said.
But before that event, emergency services personnel were becoming increasingly frustrated
at people trying to drive through floodwaters.
Prime Minister Julia Gillard was moved to tears while paying tribute to the flood victims
this week, visibly touched by the story of 13-year-old Jordan Rice.
Jordan and his mother Donna died in the Toowoomba torrent, but not before telling rescuers
to save his younger brother Blake first.
After Cyclone Yasi, Ms Gillard vowed Australia would rebuild.
"We will rebuild from the floods. We will rebuild from the cyclone. We will rebuild
from anything that nature throws at us," she said.
It will be a long and costly process; some economists are estimating the damage bill
and the cost of lost production as high as $30 billion.
Still, there's some upside after a decade-long drought.
Prof Kingsford notes that floods, while devastating, serve an important role in the
natural system.
"The sort of floods that we've seen at top of the Murray Darling have an important
role in filling up groundwater, filling up irrigation areas and sustaining floodplain
downstream, down to the lower lakes."
After 10 years of drought, residents in the southwestern Queensland towns of the Balonne
Shire were remaining upbeat despite going through three major floods in 10 months.
Where "water's our lifeblood", the rains would provide three years of good income for
local irrigation farmers, Ms Stewart said, although, she added residents were tired of
waiting for the water to subside.
"As old farmers always say down in this part of the world, mud means money," she said.
"This will be good times now for us down here. We look forward to the time when we
can get on with our lives."
AAP mn/pmu/vg/it/cdh
KEYWORD: FLOODS AUST (AAP NEWSFEATURE, WITH FACTBOX)
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