The Queensland government vowed to make the city more ‘resilient’, not flood-proof, after 2022. But new developments are still being built in flood zones
David and Sheridan Skinner’s old Queenslander near Norman Creek on Brisbane’s south side bears the marks of the city’s floods, going back more than 50 years.
The pillars holding up the home show where the water came in 1974, 2011, 2022 and again last week, when ex-Tropical Cyclone Alfred dumped more than 274mm of rain in a single day on the flood-prone suburbs and creeks.
The property floods regularly, but the couple plans to cancel their flood insurance. They say they don’t need it.
About 20 years ago, David and Sheridan raised the weatherboard house about three metres off the ground. Underneath is a car park, plus storage for some tools and a few shelves. Anything valuable can be taken upstairs.
“After a flood, just get the Gerni [pressure washer] out as it’s drying off, and clean it off nice and easy,” David says.
“We know we flood … we usually call it a spring clean.”
For thousands of Brisbane residents, the past week has brought a familiar anxiety. The rising rivers and creeks flooded many of the same houses as three years ago, and eight years before that.
With each flood event, the tricky reality of Brisbane’s geography becomes more clear. Much of the city is built on floodplain and insurance is becoming increasingly unaffordable.
But the idea of abandoning large suburbs and communities is, for many, still unthinkable.
After the 2022 floods the state took steps it said would make the city more resilient – not flood-proof, but better able to cope with a climate where flood waters rise with increasing intensity and frequency.
That includes designing new builds and modifications to existing homes to better withstand flooding. More than $1bn of state and commonwealth funding has been put toward retrofitting, raising, or buying back homes in flood-prone areas.
Andrew Gissing, the chief executive officer of Natural Hazards Research Australia, says while it’s not enough to retrofit every home, it can help reduce insurance premiums in some cases.
“Insurance is clearly an issue being spoken about within the community, it’s a stress,” he says. “Because insurance is based on the risk, these things can ultimately [reduce the risk].”
The Queensland government has also been identifying ‘no-go zones’ for future development under an update to regional planning guidelines, but the guidelines are yet to be implemented.
University of Queensland professor of urban planning, Dorina Pojani, says the city ought to undertake a “strategic retreat” from the worst-affected areas.
The state has adopted a buyback scheme, which targets residential land identified as of “extreme” flood risk for conversion from housing.
Nicole Bennetts, Queensland and Northern Territory manager for the Planning Institute of Australia, says it was time to talk about what she called “back zoning” more of the city.
“It’s a really tricky topic, because it means taking away development rights, or property rights from people that have held property for a long time,” she says.
“So within that process, we need to talk about compensation … because it’s not simply planners changing the colour on a map. It has signifiant ramifications, so we need to do it with communities.”
In some areas, she says, resilient design is not enough. “Just because we can engineer and plan our way around it, can those occupants get insurance?”
Natalie Rayment, the co-founder of Yimby Queensland and director of developer Therefor group, said the city needed to “allow more people to live on good land” by rejecting complaints in high-cost, high-amenity suburbs.
“Why should we be blocking everyone else when we’re all sitting here literally high and dry?” she says.
The Brisbane City council’s plan for what it calls “urban consolidation” relies on a small number of carefully chosen sites rather than spreading medium-density development through more suburbs.
Pojani says the selection criteria often rests more on avoiding community opposition than considering flood risk. It often involves areas that were once industrial estates, such as the Kurilpa development in South Brisbane; a riverfront area which regularly floods.
“It’s easy to upzone a place where no one is living, but there might have been a reason why no one was living there historically,” she says. “It might be that people, starting with Indigenous people, and then the earlier settlers, they realise that those areas flood. And that’s why no one went to live there in the first place”.
Greater Brisbane urbanists organiser Rob Lucas said restricting development in wealthy suburbs through character protections and a ban on new townhouses forced new developments into higher-risk areas.
“If the council wanted to flood-proof our city, they’d think long and hard about how we get apartments built up in Paddington, Ascot and Highgate Hill as well as down near the river,” he says.
Even the newest estates aren’t free from the risk of flood.
The newly built estate of Yarrabilba in Logan – a community of about 12,000 people master-planned by the state government to eventually house about 50,000 – regularly becomes an island when the one road in is cut off. The estate itself has never flooded.
Logan mayor Jon Raven says people moving to the area often aren’t aware of the risk. While flood-risk maps for properties are disclosed to new homeowners, the vulnerabilities of the road access may not be as obvious.
“They knew it wasn’t flood-proof when they did it,” Raven says. “It runs through some very low-lying areas, very scenic, beautiful low-lying areas along the Logan River.”
Yarrabilba was approved in 2010 and the road plan did not change after the 2011 floods. The developer plans to add two additional exits to the suburb, both of which feed into roads that also get cut off in a flood.
Last week the Queensland health department posted paramedics in the community, lest it was cut off. Locals were advised to stockpile about five days’ worth of supplies and that State Emergency Service boats would be used to resupply essentials in case of a longer disaster.
“But once you get a lot of people in there – say 20,000 or 30,000 people – you’re not going to be able to use flood boats from SES to take in top-notch supplies,” says Raven.
Siobhan McCafferty’s home in Wooloongabba flooded in 2022 and again this month.
Her house is a traditional Queenslander – a timber home built on posts, designed in part to allow flood water to flow below. Like many similar places over the years, McCafferty’s home was “built under” by a previous owner.
The retrofitted ground floor was “built really shoddily … it’s got a low ceiling, so there’s not a lot of airflow going through, so it’s gonna take two weeks for that to dry out,” she says. “We’ve got a lot of long-term water damage that is really hard to repair.”
McCafferty applied for a rebuilding grant after the 2022 floods but was not immediately eligible because the downstairs floor was not up to code.
“We’ve got plans to raise the house, but that’s going to cost us three and a half to four hundred thousand dollars,” she says.
Gissing says every dollar spent retrofitting, raising or buying-back homes saves $5 in potential response and recovery costs.
“South-east Queensland and Northern New South Wales in the last five years have taken a battering of different events,” he says. “And we’re going to see these sorts of things happen more and more into the future.”