NOW the hue and cry from the flooding has died down and the recovery processes are in train in Bundaberg and elsewhere, the debate has shifted to the question of what should be done to alleviate Queensland's flood problem.
Four successive summers of severe floods have pushed the political system to begin thinking about the long term.
There is a way forward.
Queensland needs an agreement between the federal, state and local governments about mitigation - in other words about what should be done to manage flooding in the future and how the very big dollars required should be found.
There is a blueprint. NSW was badly affected by flooding during the mid-1950s, when almost all of the state's rivers had very bad floods. There were more than 50 deaths and the damage to houses and businesses, including farms, was colossal. Many flood-height records established then have not been challenged since.
The flooding was so bad and so widespread that political action simply had to be taken. What emerged was a significant flood mitigation effort, funded largely on a 2:2:1 (federal:state:council) basis.
Over a period of decades, levee protection was provided for more than 40 towns, floodway bypasses were fashioned to direct floods away from built-up areas, retention basins were built so that water could be ponded during a flood and released slowly afterwards, houses were raised so that they would not be affected except in huge floods, and dwellings in the lowest-lying areas were bought at market prices and removed.
Importantly, councils were given incentives to not allow homes to be built on flood-prone land.
All this was based on careful flood studies. Floodplains were mapped to show which areas could be expected to be inundated in floods of different severities. The maps informed the property buy-backs, house-raising and land use planning.
Between 1960 and 2007, about $1.3 billion in today's money was spent in NSW on flood mitigation.
Queensland did not take this route. Very little flood mapping was done (so councils were not able to comprehend properly the flood risk), few towns were leveed and there was little attempt to restrict urban development on floodplains.
The result is what we have seen in the past few years, new houses, in large numbers, inundated.
Several dams (including Wivenhoe) were built, with flood storage capacities incorporated in their designs. Unfortunately, in Wivenhoe's case, the Bjelke-Petersen government touted the dam as being the solution to Brisbane's flood problem.
It could never have been, of course. Several major watercourses enter the Brisbane River below Wivenhoe, some of which (including the Bremer River and Lockyer and Oxley creeks) had big floods two years ago.
But the message that the dam could only alleviate the problem somewhat did not get out and in 2011 many more Brisbane houses were flooded than in the higher flood of 1974.
The nature of Brisbane's development after 1974 was a looming disaster born of dreadful state government leadership.
Flood damage costs in Queensland have risen much more steeply over the past few decades than they have in NSW.
The experience of Grafton last week was instructive. A record flood was kept out by levees. In fact, since 1970, when the current levees were completed, no fewer than 11 floods have been excluded that would otherwise have entered the town. Last week's flood would have inundated almost all of Grafton.
And the cost? Probably of the order of $30 million if the levees were built today, plus an annual maintenance cost of a few hundred thousand dollars.
For that, Grafton may have been saved something like $800 million in damage to houses, businesses and roads in four significant floods since the turn of the century.
The ratio of benefit to cost is large, not to mention avoiding the emotional trauma that so many Queensland communities have experienced lately - some of them repetitively. And there will be more monetary cost and more trauma until it is recognised that mitigation and sensible land use management must be adopted.
It's a no-brainer, really.
Queensland is seeing severe, repeated flooding just as NSW did in the mid-1950s. We should hope that a national agreement focused on mitigation is developed that will do for this state what was done for its neighbour all those years ago.
source: http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au