We need a blueprint for resilience
If the definition of insanity is to do the same thing over and over expecting a different result, there is a hint of madness in the way this country excels in disaster recovery. Brisbane is a case in point.
Understandably, those whose homes were flooded wanted nothing more than to clean up, get the insurance sorted – assuming they could afford it – and fix the damage. Tomorrow, please. You wouldn’t want to wait either if your life was left a sodden, reeking mess by floodwaters.
But let’s draw breath for a moment, as hard as it is at a fraught time such as this, with nearly 10 million Australians under the lash of the “rain bomb” low-pressure system deluging the eastern seaboard, from Maryborough on Queensland’s Fraser Coast south to the Victorian border.
This rolling disaster has brought to the fore a discussion that has been put off too long.
Yes, the scale is epic, the tragedy all-consuming: 15 dead to date; at least 15,000 homes in Brisbane alone inundated; hundreds rescued from rooftops in the stricken northern NSW centre of Lismore, sadly too late for four people; drama in Ballina; Sydney menaced as the rain continued to fall in grey sheets into Friday, smashing weather records; the NSW south coast awash only two years after it was blackened by bushfire.
The loss and trauma people are enduring as well as the toll on emergency personnel demand the utmost consideration. But if we don’t talk now about what comes next, when do we? When the rebuilding is under way, helter skelter? When it’s too late to redirect the money train that Australia sets in motion so often, at such colossal expense each time disaster strikes?
Nowhere is the issue more acute than in Brisbane, Australia’s most flood-prone capital. Environmental historian Margaret Cook dubbed it A River with a City Problem, the deliciously ironic title of her 2019 book.
Brisbane is built on a vast flood plain and the problems date back to its settlement as a penal colony in the 1830s. The 1841 flood is reputed to have been the mother of them all, followed by 1893 when the river broke its banks twice in a fortnight at 8m-plus. The giant Wivenhoe Dam was fast-tracked to tame the beast after the disastrous onslaught in 1974, when Brisbane River peaked at 5.45m.
They were called one-in-100 year events, and if you were unlucky enough to experience a citywide flood, there was some comfort in knowing you would probably not see another one for at least a generation. No longer. The scars of the 2011 flood were still raw when the river reared up last Sunday, just as it had 11 years earlier.
But that wasn’t all that happened. Creeks crisscrossing the suburbs also flooded in an echo of 1974. Such was the intensity of the rain and the saturation of catchments, storm drains were overwhelmed and “overland flows” cascaded through properties not known to have previously gone under. The scene was confounding and in some cases lethal.
In Rocklea, a working-class neighbourhood nestled in a crook of the Brisbane River on the city’s southside, homes hit in 1974 (5.45m) and 2011 (4.46m) flooded again on Sunday (3.85m). Galah St is notoriously vulnerable. It backs on to Stable Swamp Creek and has been cleared out by local government buybacks: three home lots were turned into a children’s playground after the previous flood, a sorry sight now, coated in putrid mud. Brisbane City Council spent $58m to purchase 112 at-risk properties in the decade to 2016.
At No.8, first homebuyers Alice Nicholson and Louis Couttes, both 30, knew the mid-set weatherboard cottage they bought in 2016 had flooded before. But it was a stepping stone and they were to go on to bigger and better things by the time the next flood washed through. Or so they thought.
“It’s not that we didn’t think it would happen, it was more the case we didn’t expect it to in our time here,” the young woman says. “Even watching the waters, Louis and I were both saying, ‘It won’t come up to the house.’ We had no way of expecting that it would have … in the way that it did.”
At the height of the emergency, the flood surged over the 1.6m stumps and poured calf-deep through the house. The new kitchen and bathroom were written off, flooring ruined. The couple pay $1200 a month in home and contents insurance, so most of the damage is covered. Yet the question arises: how to rebuild with the next, inevitable flood in mind?
Next door at No.6, Henry Kernaghan lifted his home after waist-deep water went through in 2011 and flood-proofed it as much as he could with tiles and cement sheeting. He’s glad he did, after riding out Sunday’s inundation.
Around the corner in Leeds St, Scott Louden-Walker is hosing out his flooded bungalow. Again. Uninsured in 2011, he put an investment property on the market to pay for the repairs.
Holding a half-empty bottle of rum, one of the few items retrieved from the wrecked kitchen, where the fridge lies on its side ready to be put out, he laughs when reminded of what he told Inquirer when we caught up with him last year for the 10th anniversary of the 2011 flood. Asked if he had considered raising the house off its ground-level slab, he said back then: “If it happened again I’d swear about it and then do it all again.”
Well, the humid air has been blue all week as Louden-Walker and friends hauled his ruined possessions away. He managed a wan smile and a few words when we called. Was he OK? “Oh yeah, definitely,” he said, vowing to rebuild.
If Einstein’s reputed definition of insanity was to do the same thing over and over expecting a different result, there is a hint of madness in the way this country excels in disaster recovery. This is not to be critical of the individuals concerned. Replacing damaged property and goods on a like-for-like basis makes perfect sense when the imperative is to get affected people back on their feet, back home ASAP.
Governments are under pressure to provide disaster relief payments, insurers to cut the red tape and finalise claims.
But the financial cost is stupendous, as the federal budget at the end of the month will show. The impact on victims’ physical, emotional and mental wellbeing is harder to quantify but no less real. A 2015 report by the Productivity Commission nailed the issue: only 3c on the taxpayer dollar devoted to disaster-related spending by local, state and federal governments went to preventive works. The insurers have argued long and loud that the balance is wrong. But they would, wouldn’t they, a cynic might say.
Increasingly, though, others are taking up the cause. Former Northern Territory chief minister and Liberal Party mover and shaker Shane Stone, the man who picks up the pieces after cyclones, floods and bushfires as co-ordinator-general of the National Recovery and Resilience Agency, tells Inquirer: “The first thing people, businesses, government have to accept is that we must build back better. That costs money.
“But you have got to incentivise all the parties to do it because if it’s like for like – whether you’re talking about infrastructure damaged by flooding or homes lost in a bushfire – if you put them back as they were, well, it’s just going to happen all over again.”
Architect James Davidson, who oversees Brisbane City Council’s Flood Resilient Homes Program, says small changes can make a big difference: polished concrete instead of carpet on ground floors; chipboard swapped out for water-resistant composites in cabinetry; electrical fittings fixed at shoulder height rather than conventional ankle level; airconditioning units on stands, not slab-to-the-ground. The insurers profess to be on board.
Yet as he discovered to his dismay this week, advising a client whose home was inundated on Brisbane’s northside, at least one provider is still demanding like-for-like replacement, even though that defies common sense and sensible commercial practice. “It’s just throwing money away,” Davidson complains.
Insurance Council of Australia chief executive Andrew Hall says this was an anomaly, possibly a mistake by an inexperienced or overworked assessor.
In a federal election wishlist, the $55bn-a-year industry is pitching both sides of national politics to double spending on disaster resilience to $1bn across five years for flood levees, bushfire fuel reduction and other big-ticket items, with the states and territories matching the outlay. Taxes including GST and state stamp duty that add up to 40 per cent to the cost of home cover should be axed to boost insurance take-up, the ICA policy platform says.
Suncorp Group boss Steve Johnston says the Brisbane-based insurer kicks in up to $10,000 on settlements of more than $50,000 if the customer is willing to invest in disaster-resilient repairs. In his 16 years with the company, the natural hazard allowance has increased 13-fold to just shy of $1bn a year while annual reinsurance costs tripled to about $1.2bn, feeding into higher premium prices. He maintains that Suncorp has lost money on home cover for the past five years.
The insurer is now bracing for upward of 20,000 claims from the east coast deluge, another big hit. So far, the carrot has been used to push resilience. But as Johnston points out, Suncorp also wielded the stick when it stopped writing home policies in the southwest Queensland town of Roma for 18 months until the council and state government invested in flood levees. Premium costs plummeted as a result. “If we don’t do it, then the taxpayer ends up wearing the cost,” he says.
When people say they have never seen the like of this week’s rain bomb it’s true. Ask Cook. Her gracious, 140-year-old Queenslander, high on a hill overlooking the Ipswich CBD, 45 minutes’ west of Brisbane, flooded for the first time before her disbelieving eyes when water burst out of a storm drain in the street and also poured in from the chimney. “The rain came from every direction and it didn’t stop,” the writer says.
She will leave the why of it to others to argue over. What’s inescapable is that severe floods are happening more frequently than ever before and doing unprecedented harm in the process. One way or another, something has to change.
ADDITIONAL REPORTING: MACKENZIE SCOTT
Heartache and frustration were running high in Galah St, Rocklea, just like the river. For the second time in 11 years the coffee-coloured waterway snaking through Brisbane had erupted, visiting death and destruction on the nation’s third largest city.