Inspired by the Harper’s Index, Crikey takes a look at the numbers behind the devastating flooding in Queensland and New South Wales.
Mean annual rainfall in Brisbane: 1011.5mm
Rainfall recorded in the four days prior to 28 February 2022: 741mm
Brisbane River CBD peak height during the 2022 floods: 3.85m
Brisbane River CBD peak height during the 2011 floods: 4.46m
Brisbane River CBD peak height during the 1974 floods: 5.5m
Lives lost in the 2022 Queensland floods to date: 12
Lives lost in the 2011 floods: 33
Lives lost in the 1974 floods: 13
Homes requiring rebuilding in 2011: 28,000
Estimated damage according to the Insurance Council of Australia in 2011: $2.38 billion.
Change in property prices in Brisbane in the year following the 2011 floods: -6.1%
Brisbane quarterly property price growth prior to the 2022 floods: 8.5%
Current dam levels in the QLD network: 91.1%
Percentage change in QLD dam levels in the past seven days: -6.5%
QLD dams overflowing: 18 out of 25
QLD dams releasing water: 2 out of 25
Current dam levels in Greater Sydney network: 99.9%
Percentage change in Greater Sydney dam levels in the past seven days: 2.8%
NSW dams overflowing: 7 out of 18
Sign-ups to contribute to the clean-up efforts in QLD, aka “the mud army”: over 10,000
Calls to NSW SES for emergency assistance since the start of flooding: 16,219
Flood rescues completed by NSW SES since the start of flooding: 1761
NSW homes declared “unlivable” since the start of flooding: Over 2000
Brisbane River CBD peak height during the 2022 floods: 3.85m
Brisbane River CBD peak height during the 2011 floods: 4.46m
Brisbane River CBD peak height during the 1974 floods: 5.5m
Each one lower than the previous. See, things are getting better not worse. All this climate change talk is nonsense. Can I have my job on Sky After Dark now please?
Citation needed.
A good laugh Jackson. Wivenhoe Dam was built post 1974 for flood mitigation so I guess you can say it is working. With all this type of comparison the major problem is that there are no two floods the same – water does not fall in the same place and with the same consistency every time.
In “74” I left the floods in Brisbane (Have some photos of relatives houses at Fairfield with water half way up the roof) to arrive in Mt Isa (Have photos of newly completed spillway at Lake Moondarra expected to take up to 10 years to fill at the time, well and truly under.)
Most recent rather mild in my area (no probs) but check out Alexandra Headlands 2013 on Youtube. Same area, lot of difference and some areas nearby copped it worse than 13.
Development is also an additional problem.
So for all the armchair experts there is a we bit of roulette involved.
That’s right, Jackson, but you should’ve mentioned death toll in bushfires nation-wide in 2019-2020 of 33 but in just one bushfire system in Victoria in 2009 a toll of 173. Obviously the IPCC has got it all wrong; by this trend soon bushfires will entirely vanish and there won’t be enough water to brush our teeth.
Wow an article about flooding in Crikey. Can you spare the column inches? And even then not a word about the absolute tragedy in Lismore! Nothing about this disgrace of a levee, which they knew at time of building wasn’t up to par. After decades of debate and wrangling by govts they finally built the damn thing at the ‘astronomical’ cost of $25M. So four levee ignoring floods (since 2005) later each one costing in the hundreds of millions, here we go again with estimated costs of $240M. Again the promises from the libs of ‘we will spare no expense fixing this!’, just like just a few years ago! A flood two metres higher than expected in their worst scenarios! According to whom? Who’s done the research lately? Even the official reports after the levee was built predicted it would be breached in the future WTF! After the last flood researchers got just $80K instead of the estimated minimum cost of $5M to do serious research into flood mitigation at Lismore.
The local stories are endless. A property owner near Dunoon knew that when his lower paddock went under, the levees would be breached (and the SES were well aware of this). He rang his SES contact at 7.30pm and said the paddock is under, the levees are going, His advice was ignored and locals weren’t advised until early hours of the next morning, not long before the CBD flooding started.
Despite promises of ADF aid, aside of the occasional helicopter, hardly anyone has seen them. It’s not like there are thousands of boots on the ground. Not that I’m blaming the ADF, I’m sure if the pollies told them to go they’d be there within a day. It has to be political inaction. Again!
Once again it’s mostly up to the community and local SES to do the hard yards, and that’s OK and they’ve been brilliant, but even after the last flood, no one bothered to relocate the SES premises to higher ground so it was under as well. Even after all these years there was little co-ordination between people and companies wanting to help and getting the right kind of help to the right places. On the local radio I heard a chef working at ‘the Farm’, a large farm-to-plate resort style restaurant, saying they had the capacity to make enormous amount of food and hundreds of thousands of bread loaves, but lack of official coordination meant their truck had turned up at a location needing aid only to find another truck had already turned up. Another small local restaurant, Bagus, on Byron Bay beach was cooking large amounts curries every day to give away in frozen portions, but, with the phones out, had trouble finding outfits to distribute the food.
Which brings me to communications. I’ve been without telephone or internet services for four days. And so has the entire area from south of Ballina to west of Lismore right up to Tweed and beyond. Not even 000 was working. Thousands of businesses were in cash only mode, but the ATMs were also out. I don’t really expect anything different from Telstra, they’re all about doing it on the cheap for max profits. But the NBN! They’re supposed to be a network. If one cable goes out others should take up the slack. But it seems they’re doing it on the cheap as well. They rented space on the Telstra facility in Woodburn and when it went under the entire NSW Northern Rovers region went with it. Kind of makes a mockery of the word ‘network’ doesn’t it. And why on earth was this facility built on flood prone land. It beggars belief, but I bet it was cheap…
I confirm your final paragraph about being incommunicado & cashless in that wide, generally well heeled region.
A population in excess of 300,000 ‘important’ voters.
How must less affluent areas be faring?
oops, not all of voting age.
With <78K under 19 that is about a quarter million voters.
Whoever would have thought they’d do the NBN “on the cheap”? Especially as Malcolm Turnbull virtually invented the internet?
After the Tathra fire it was recommended that Telstra increase the battery capacity on its mobile phone towers so they could operate without grid power for more than 4 hours… not sure if anything has changed in the last 4 years…