Summer of fury exposes planning failures

A SUMMER of calamity has been compounded by poor planning decisions and unheeded warnings, an investigation by The Weekend Australian shows.

A SUMMER of calamity without precedent has been compounded by poor planning decisions and unheeded warnings about the menace of extreme weather and natural disasters, an investigation by The Weekend Australian shows.

As the Insurance Council yesterday released new costings placing the damage from flooding and cyclones in Queensland alone at $2 billion -- with the federal government bracing for a further bill of $5.6bn -- modelling emerged to show how vulnerable the country is to extreme weather.

The scenarios were a blueprint for the massive emergency response that swung into action in December when regional Queensland flooded in the first of the "disaster dominoes" to topple under the weight of the most lethal La Nina weather system to roar out of the Pacific Ocean for a century.

As of last night, 35 deaths had been confirmed in Queensland, mostly in flash flooding that ripped through Toowoomba and the Lockyer Valley, west of Brisbane, on January 10. Hope was fading for the seven people listed as missing.

More than 5900 insured homes were inundated in Brisbane and Ipswich when rivers erupted on January 12-13 before an estimated $67 million worth of damage was inflicted on farms and communities in country Victoria by record flooding. Across Queensland, up to 15,000 homes are estimated to have been damaged by floodwater since December.

Emergency services, stretched to the limit nationally, barely had time to draw breath before heatwave conditions outside Perth gave rise to bushfires that burned down 72 homes last Sunday and damaged many more.

About 16,000 homes were still without power in north Queensland yesterday, 10 days after category 5 Cyclone Yasi slammed into the coast south of Cairns with winds of up to 290km/h.

Australian Local Government Association president Genia McCaffery said the telescoping of so many natural disasters into a single summer had never before happened in settled history.

"I don't remember a summer like it -- everything about it has set records," she said yesterday.

Research scientist Kevin Walsh, of Melbourne University's School of Earth Sciences, said the floods and bushfires of this year would eclipse those of the next worst known La Nina year in 1974, when three people drowned in Brisbane's floods, 71 died in Cyclone Tracy's strike on Darwin, and western NSW went up in flames.

But a secret 2005 evaluation of the nation's capacity to manage catastrophes -- including a category 4 cyclone hitting Cairns, the scenario that was only narrowly averted when Yasi veered south last week, crossing the coast near the lightly populated Mission Beach -- details how ill-prepared Australia was for the chain of disaster.

The report by the federal government's Australian Emergency Management Committee, which also helped draft the national disaster resilience strategy to go to tomorrow's Council of Australian Governments meeting, found severe limitations in the capacity to cope with a natural or technological disaster, as well as a major terrorist attack.

The emergency management committee modelled the impact of four hypothetical disasters: a category 4 cyclone hitting Cairns, a major earthquake near Perth, a tsunami in Wollongong in NSW and an influenza pandemic.

It concluded that "Cyclone Cyclops" would drown 1702 people and injure 1318 others as it hit Cairns's northern beaches. The storm would whip up 5m waves, crashing into seafront properties before washing 500m inland in a half-metre high surge that would destroy 312 homes and damage 10 times that number.

The Cyclops scenario had clear lessons for the response to Yasi: taking no chances, the Queensland government issued mandatory evacuation orders last week for 75,000 people living in low-lying areas in the cyclone's path between Cairns and Townsville. While Cairns was spared the predicted storm surge, walls of water up to 1.5m hit coastal communities near the eye of the cyclone, including Cardwell, neighbouring Port Hinchinbrook and Tully Heads.

The state government shut down Cairns airport and evacuated to Brisbane patients from the city's two hospitals, which the 2005 report had predicted would flood.

But the response to Yasi also demonstrated how much longstanding advice was ignored.

The 2005 review had recommended that large emergency relief centres be established and that the states and territories plan to accommodate people's pets.

Yet, by the time Yasi blasted out of the Coral Sea, only three of the 20 cyclone refuges that would shelter 11,000 evacuees in north Queensland had been cyclone-rated. The 2005 report had also cautioned the states and territories that access to defence resources "cannot be guaranteed".

Queensland Premier Anna Bligh was caught out last week when she publicly requested naval support ships, equipped with hospital facilities and helicopter landing pads, to use as emergency bases after Yasi. Embarrassingly, the three most suitable navy vessels were out of action or unseaworthy.

Scientific opinion continues to be divided over how much the flooding and cyclones -- Yasi followed hard on the heels of category 3 Cyclone Anthony that hit Bowen, between Townsville and Mackay, on January 30 -- owe to the La Nina effect or to the wider impact of global warming.

La Nina conditions are created by sea-surface temperature fluctuations in the eastern central Pacific and bring heavy rain to the seaboard, in a reversal of the drought-inducing El Nino phenomenon.

The CSIRO's climate adaptation unit has predicted that so-called one-in-100-year floods, such as the torrent that caused the Brisbane River to breach, will become more frequent because of climate change. Within 20 years, one-in-100-year events -- those that have a 1 per cent chance of occurring in any given year -- will increase to a one-in-61-year frequency, lifting risk considerably.

The CSIRO has found that 32,500 homes in Queensland's thickly settled southeast are exposed to a 2.5m storm tide, risking damage of $1.1bn. By the time today's babies leave school, in 2030, the number of homes at risk will be 61,500, at a potential cost of of $2bn in today's dollars, the CSIRO's modelling says.

"The world's not going to collapse but we need to be sensible in the way we adapt to bigger events," says CSIRO economist Ryan McAllister, who managed the climate change scenario for southeast Queensland.

Ms McCaffery said councils and state governments had "forgotten about flooding" and permitted too much development in danger zones on the sea front and in flood plains.

"I think that really is bad planning for Australia's east coast," she said. "If these kinds of disasters continue, we might have to start thinking about whether we're living in the right places."

The Planning Institute of Australia's Queensland president, Greg Tupicoff, argued that many of the areas hardest hit by the extraordinary summer of floods, cyclones and bushfires had been settled decades ago.

But he questioned why so much recent housing had been built in flood zones at Emerald, one of the central Queensland towns inundated through December and January.

"Why was the area developed when a lot of people are now saying they knew it was flood-prone?" he said.

"Was there political pressure or pressure from business to get housing so they could get some more workers?"

Dr Walsh said the eastern seaboard was in the grip of one of the strongest La Nina rainfall patterns recorded and "it isn't over yet". This reflects long-range forecasting that Queensland could be hit by another three cyclones before the season ends in April.

David Karoly, also of Melbourne University, said sea temperatures around Australia were higher than for any previous La Nina event, probably due to global warming. However, he agreed no direct link had yet been established between climate change and this summer's extreme weather, although there was evidence of increases in temperature extremes and heavy rainfall in many parts of the world.

To put the summer of 2010-11 into perspective, the 1974 La Nina deluged the Toowong bowls station in Brisbane's west with 1583mm of rain over that year, which opened with Brisbane flooding and ended the following Christmas with the destruction of Darwin by Cyclone Tracy.

For the 12 months to January 1 2011, the Brisbane weather station recorded 1659mm.

In 1893, when successive floods killed at least 10 people in Brisbane, 2663mm was recorded at the Toowong station.

"There are previous years with worse floods in Brisbane (1974, 1893) and heavier individual days of rain," Professor Karoly said. "However, the six months total rainfall for eastern Australia is unprecedented, the December and January rain in Victoria is unprecedented, and many other records have been set, including . . . a record low rainfall in Perth."

The new "disaster resilience" plan to improve disaster mitigation, emergency warnings and insurance coverage was endorsed by the nation's police and emergency services ministers in Canberra yesterday "in light of the unprecedented number, severity and scale of natural disaster events over summer".

The ministers directed Geoscience Australia to map the nation's risk zones for riverine flooding, flash floods, storm surges and coastal inundation.

They agreed to change government programs to "encourage betterment of infrastructure that is regularly damaged by natural disasters".

And they agreed to an insurance shake-up to remove disincentives to governments and individuals taking out private insurance cover.

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