Lismore flood leaves a town asking if they keep the CBD where it is, or shift it elsewhere
Much of the CBD is still uninhabitable, shops are boarded up and the grief is palpable. The city of Lismore’s future now hangs in the balance as residents confront the reality that serious flooding will happen again and more often.
NSW
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Walking around Lismore’s CBD feels eerily like being on a movie set closed down after filming.
More than four months after the unprecedented rain event brought a tsunami of flood water 14m high smashing the town’s central business district and inundating thousands of houses, most of the shops remain shuttered.
For Lease signs are everywhere, indicating some businesses will never return, and only a handful of businesses have reopened.
Every few metres, the smell of mould punches through the chilly winter air as it seeps from the walls of the once vibrant town.
In the words of Lismore resident Mackayla Chalmers, whose South Lismore home was inundated, there is a collective grief for the lost town.
“It just feels empty, strange. It feels lost and sad and displaced.”
Despite Lismore’s extensive history of flooding, the February 28 event that killed five people and destroyed the homes and livelihoods of thousands caught everyone off guard.
It is estimated more than 3000 businesses across Lismore were impacted, affecting more than 18,000 jobs. Nearly 1400 sustained major damage with at least 37 destroyed completely. 70,000 tonnes of flood waste was removed.
Hundreds of millions of dollars have been granted to help people get back to home and business, but there is one irrefutable fact that can no longer be ignored – it will happen again.
With a rebuild cost of an estimated $1bn, the big question is can government continue to bail out a regional city built on a flood plain, surrounded by mountains at the convergence of two rivers?
Under consideration is moving parts of north and south Lismore, with Lismore City Council pushing for a state and federal government-funded land swap arrangement to allow residents to move to higher ground.
Similar to the Grantham land swap, which saw more than 90 homeowners moved to higher ground after the 2011 floods claimed 12 lives in the small Queensland town in the Lockyer Valley, residents in flood-prone streets could be moved.
The Land Management discussion paper put forward by council has also mooted a new commercial hub on land at the East Lismore golf course to which existing tenants in the CBD could move.
Lismore City Council general manager John Walker says engineering to protect the CBD means depopulating North and South Lismore.
“Because that is where the water flows, so we have to look at whether we want the CBD to stay where it is or move it to higher ground.
“Do people prefer to leave the CBD where it is and work flood mitigation around that, or should we look at relocation?” he says.
“If the CBD stays we have to look at raising buildings with car parking at ground level, and design elements and use of flood resistant materials, and we have a lot of heritage buildings, you don’t want to lose your heritage by moving away,” he says.
The Insurance Council of Australia has indicated that insurance is unlikely to be available to large areas of Lismore unless there are strategies to mitigate the risks.
“I think flood mitigation is the key,” Walker says.
While these ideas hang in the air, some business people are just getting on with it, but with the inevitable factored in.
At Brand’s Pharmacy, which has occupied its site on Molesworth St since 1915, third-generation pharmacist Greg Brand is back at work in a shop that is still a construction site.
But the shop fitout is different this time. Aluminium batons are being fixed to the brick walls and aluminium slat cladding attached. Like an old, tiled pub, Brand hopes this fitout will allow him just to hose out the mess next time.
“The batons are run vertically and I can get up and put a hose in behind the slat wall to hose behind it. (The builders) have left the slat wall about 100mm off the bottom so I can get in and hose out the mud from the bottom.
“I’ve done it because of the inevitable, it is now part of business, if you have a business on a flood plain, you have to be prepared to accept there is going to be a flood and there is no way it is possible to relocate the town,” he says.
Beautician Nikki Stevens has done the same with her Le Petite Salon.
“We can’t just sit around and wait, so we had to address our flood plan,” she says.
“Everything is now on casters, all the cabinets are on casters so we can easily move them out. The walls are now flood proof with cement sheeting Hardiplank so next time we will just hose it out,” she says.
Sheila Turner, who runs a picture framing business in the Strand Arcade would happily move to a new CBD.
On the night of the flood she opted to stay in her shop, as she has done before, because it was predicted that access to her home in Georgica, 25km northwest of Lismore, would be cut off. But water rapidly swamped the arcade, and Turner and her business neighbour, hairdresser Nick Wright, were stranded for four days upstairs on the second level landing of the arcade.
They had water and apples, and the horror of it still brings tears to Turner’s eyes.
“I think (moving) would stop my stress,” she says. “Every time it rains my stomach turns into a knot. If the CBD moves I’ll go with them because I don’t want to do this again, it is not a one-off, it happens every couple of years.
Matthew Healy, who owns Daleys Homewares, a Lismore institution of 33 years, is not budging.
“This building is over 100 years old and it’s seen over 100 floods,” Healy says.
“I’m not interested in moving, it’s my home town, I’m a Lismore boy and unless it is compulsory and they force me out, I’m not going. Rather than spending billions moving the town, spend a tiny portion of that on proper flood mitigation, they always talk about it but it never eventuates,” he says.
Peter Gooley from Gooley’s menswear shop has been on Molesworth St for 66 years. His family has two other shops around the corner and they lost 70 per cent of their stock in the flood. With so much history, Gooley also wants to stay.
“Where would they move it to? I don’t want to move, leave it where it is. Fix the problem, dredge the river, dig trenches around the town, that would be cheaper than moving the CBD,” he says.
Lismore was named in 1845 by farmers William and Jane Wilson after a small island in Loch Linnhe on the west coast of Scotland, but when it rains Lismore is more loch than island. It is nicknamed The Wok because of its shape.
Cedar cutters and farmers soon converged around the Wilsons River which became a major trade route to the sea.
Now with an urban population of 29,000, Lismore experiences a moderate to severe flood event three to six times every decade.
Since the flood of 1974, dozens of flood studies have been conducted. A new commercial area was opened in Goonellabah on Lismore’s hilly outskirts well out of the reach of flood waters.
Following the 1989 flood, a levee was mooted to protect the CBD but it was not constructed until 2005. More than 10m high, it did the job until 2017 when flood waters exceeded it by two metres. This year the levee has been breached twice.
On February 28, it was breached by four metres, allowing walls of home-wrecking water to cascade through hundreds of homes to the south and north as well as engulfing the CBD up to ceiling height.
Lismore councillor Vanessa Ekins, who has chaired the Lismore Floodplain Management Committee for many years, says the levee has cost more than $25m but when it breaches, the water is more destructive.
“It comes over with such force and the water hangs around for days because it is trapped,” she says.
In South Lismore, around Engine St and Elliott Rd, a tsunami of water coming over the levee smashed homes off their foundations, she says.
A voluntary house swap to move hundreds of homes on the flood plain to higher ground is under consideration.
Options for a land swap location are Goonellabah and the Lismore Plateau and Council’s general manager John Walker says the idea is to move entire neighbourhoods to keep the community together.
On Union St, South Lismore, Mackayla Chalmers is sanding the walls of her 100-year-old hardwood home that was swamped to the roof. Chalmers had stayed with a friend on the night of the flood but her mother, 86, and brother, 55, had to be rescued from a higher, neighbouring house. Chalmers loves her home, and is happy with the land swap idea, if she can move the house as well. “I feel it’s a really good old house and worth rescuing, but I don’t want to go through another flood and I know it will happen again,” she says.
“I’d love to move the house and have something interesting happen with the land in South Lismore, like pop-up shows and expos.”
Her neighbour Robert Farlow also likes the idea but, at 71, he doesn’t think it will happen in his lifetime.
Tears pool in his eyes as he recounts escaping through his kitchen window with his husband Huey and 13-year-old cavalier dog Molly before waiting in the pouring rain on their roof for six hours. “We made a pact if the dog wasn’t going to make it we would all go,” he says.
Like so many, Farlow was rescued by community members who saved hundreds of lives. And that is the heart of Lismore, he says.
It’s not the buildings, it’s the community and he would prefer to stay and see proper flood mitigation to deal with the problem once and for all. “Dredge the river, or build banks and walls; look at the Netherlands, it’s below sea level and it can be achieved,” Farlow says.
Professor Elizabeth Mossop, Dean of the University of Technology Sydney School of Design, Architecture and Building, and a landscape architect who worked on projects in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, says Lismore needs to look to cities such as Rotterdam in the Netherlands and New Orleans, both built on river deltas, which have systems to manage inevitable floods.
“We need to design our urban spaces around the idea that flooding is inevitable.
“That means not building on flood plains, and thinking creatively about what can be done to create urban ‘sinks’ to hold water when floods strike,” she says.
“In the past, we have treated floods as a one-off, now we are in a situation where we have to think about these as being part of the new normal.
“It is going to flood, the only thing you get to choose is where the flood water goes, because there is no magic way to make the flood water disappear, it has to end up somewhere, so you need to minimise where people are living, and design buildings that water will flow through without that much damage,” she says. Water storage options include sinks and storage beds which can be made in sporting fields.
“We need to create more room for water storage, because levees and flood walls, their effectiveness is very limited as we have seen.
“Where you have open space you can design it to store water, you can lower it and put big water storage beds underneath things.
“(Sydney’s) Moore Park has massive areas of paving but it used to be a swamp, and underneath that is a massive gravel bed that allows water to be stored safely under the ground.”
The CSIRO has been allocated $11.2m to do the modelling of flood mitigation for Lismore followed by $150m to implement the study outcomes.
Dr Chris Chilcott, project director for the Northern Rivers Resilience Initiative at the CSIRO says the catchment will be mapped and modelled using all the options from levees, sinks and other mitigating techniques.
“We’ll build a physical model that will allow us to do very detailed modelling of how the water flows and if you do something different, what the impact will be on mitigating flood and flood height, so if you use a sink, or change the levee or the way it flows around banks, you can describe what can happen in the model,” Chilcott says.
The modelling will take two years to complete.
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