‘Frustrating’: Levees not repaired until an emergency

Emergency services in the Lower Murray have been left scrambling to patch gaps in flood levees that have not been maintained since 2016.

As major flooding bears down on the Lower Murray officials have expressed “frustration” a network of levees intended to protect homes and businesses has not been maintained since major flooding in 2016.

State Emergency Services Mildura incident controller Mark Cattrell said work has started to temporarily plug gaps along kilometres of levee banks in Mildura ahead of the largest flood the region has seen since 1956.

“I have expressed my frustration to a number of people, that a flood happened in 2011, a flood happened in 2016, and I don’t want to point the finger at anybody, it’s just … It’s only when the threat of flood comes that everyone goes: ‘we need to do something’,” he said.

Mr Cattrell said emergency services did not have the capacity to do long-term fixes.

“We just don’t have the time to be able to fully engineer and build them and specify a levee to any condition that will be ongoing,” he said.

“So we just do emergency works. That’s the authority that I have.”

A burst levee in Kerang. Picture: Supplied

A rural levee protecting properties west of Kerang on the Loddon River in October burst in four places, inundating homes, more than 1500ha of farmland and telecommunications infrastructure.

Member for Murray Plains Peter Walsh said commonwealth, state and local governments needed to work together to fund ongoing maintenance of levees.

“Commonwealth, state and local government are going to have huge costs in managing the flood recovery and urgent flood mitigation works,” Mr Walsh said.

“It’s far better value for money to actually prepare beforehand, do it properly and not have the situations where work has been done in a rush. This should be prepared for before this.”

In September, the Albanese Government announced the creation of a Disaster Ready Fund, offering $200 million per year to invest in mitigation projects like flood levees, cyclone shelters, fire breaks and evacuation centres around Australia. The funds will be available from July 1 next year.

But there were question marks over who was responsible for levees considered not “under formal management”.

Speaking at a Mildura community flood information session on Sunday, Mildura Rural City council’s works and engineering services manager Daryl Morgan said some levees around the regional town were “in a grey area”.

A burst levee in Kerang put telecommunication infrastructure under water. Picture: Supplied

“There hasn’t been any plans of structural integrity for some time,” he said.

The last published audit of levees in Mildura, which took place almost a decade ago in 2004, found “the existing levees are generally in poor condition”.

In 2011, the council warned seven major levees, totalling 8.7km, would “provide very little, if any, protection to those areas originally envisage (sic) to be protected by the levees”.

It said it could not afford to manage the levees, which were plagued with a litany of problems. They were made of poorly compacted soil and unstable clays, and were riddled with rabbit warrens. Over time informal roads had been formed over the top of some levees, flattening their crests. Some were too close to the river, trees had grown through others, and others were simply not built high enough to withstand a one in one hundred year flood.

A 2016 Victorian flood plain management strategy found it was up to local governments to decide whether levees should be brought under formal management arrangements, which would them allow responsibility to be shared by federal, state and local governments.

Levees on Crown land — the majority of levees in Mildura according to the 2004 audit — “will be allowed to weather away unless those benefiting from them decide to repair and maintain the levee”, the report said.