The Brisbane Floods 2011
On Thursday 13th January 2011 Brisbane, the state capital of
Queensland, Australia, experienced its second highest flood since the
beginning of the 20th Century. Major flooding occurred throughout
most of the Brisbane River catchment, most severely in the catchments
of the Lockyer Creek and Bremer River and major tributaries of the
Brisbane River where numerous record flood heights were experienced.
The flooding caused the loss of 23 lives in the Lockyer Valley and one in
Brisbane, and an estimated 18,000 properties were inundated in
metropolitan Brisbane, Ipswich and elsewhere in the Brisbane River
Valley.
The Brisbane River is the longest river (309 km) in southeast
Queensland. Its source is located in the Brisbane Range some 120 km
north west of the city of Brisbane. From there it makes its way south
before meeting the Stanley River, just downstream of Somerset Dam, to
run into Lake Wivenhoe, the main water supply for Brisbane. Lake
Wivenhoe was created by the Wivenhoe Dam completed in 1984 in
response to severe flooding in 1974 and with the principal aim of
protecting Brisbane from future floods. Since its construction many
considered that this dam would eliminate the flood risk to Brisbane,
notwithstanding warnings against this way of thinking. Downstream
from the Wivenhoe dam the river flows eastwards, meeting the Bremer
River near Ipswich before making its way through Brisbane’s western
suburbs towards the Pacific Ocean.
The Brisbane River’s catchment is some 13,570 km2 in area, bounded to
the west by the Great Dividing Range and to the southeast and north by
a number of smaller coastal ranges. Most of the catchment is rural
forestry and grazing land but also includes the major metropolitan areas
of Brisbane and Ipswich, as well as a number of smaller townships. The
city of Brisbane is built on a flood plain
The authorities have done a fine job of Brisbane so far in organising the
cleanup. However, this doesn’t absolve them from their responsibility to
prevent disaster where humanly possible. How could so many houses
were completely flooded up to their roofs, so that everything within
these houses was unsalvageable. In comparison, it is noticeable that in
Rockhampton, where flooding is a fairly regular feature of life, residents
were high and dry in their old Queenslander style houses (those ones
set up on stilts). The worst affected people in Brisbane, however, were
mostly living in ground-level brick bungalows. The solution to this
disaster appears obvious if you are going to build on a floodplain,
ensure that all the living areas are above the level of at least the most
recent severe flood. There probably should not be any houses built on
flood plains at all, but instead they should be covered in parks and
sporting grounds. But this would mean that the Government would have
to reclaim all the houses that were badly affected by the recent floods.
The floods were terrifying, the cleanup has been disgusting, the
community spirit shown astounding and uplifting. But as the hard
questions begin to be asked and some painful answers received, it will
be many people’s livelihoods and professional reputations that may
be the final victims of the Great Flood of 2011. At the end of it all,
though, perhaps a plan will be put in place to ensure that when the
floods hit Queensland next time, as they surely will, people won’t
be losing their treasures or their lives.
By Lara Conyers