Australia has made big strides in flood warnings, levees and planning rules – but too often the message still doesn’t land. The next step is practical community engagement that builds real understanding, trust and safer decisions.

Floods have long assailed community interests in Australia, as have the other elements of severe weather which lead to damage and loss – heatwaves, bush fires, tropical cyclones, droughts and storms. No part of the country is ever far from being beset by one or other of these hazards of nature, often at great cost.

For each hazard, one can construct a history of how people, communities and governments have responded over the decades since European occupation in order to reduce the harm done. That history can be encapsulated in a series of stages.

Take flooding, the most expensive of the natural hazards Australians face as far as financial costs are concerned, although heatwaves and bush fires kill more individuals. Taking all the hazards together, the financial costs run into billions of dollars annually along with dozens of deaths. Always there is the possibility of large death tolls extending into the hundreds in individual events.

Phase 1: Individual and community self-help

In the 1800s many farmers on Australia’s east coast co-operated in building embankments (levees) to keep floodwaters off their farms. Along the Hunter River in New South Wales there were more than 20 local ‘embankment committees’ whose members built banks from local soil.

Councils of local government also built levees, using day labour, to protect flood-prone parts of towns.

At the same time, people along the rivers developed methods by which floods could be understood and their dangers communicated in real time. Flood levels were measured at gauges and communicated to downstream interests by telegraph and eventually radio. In addition, people in flood-prone areas helped each other to raise belongings in houses. Farm livestock in huge numbers were moved to higher ground. Financial costs were to a degree contained.

The work done was technically simple, not government-led, small of scale and had high local ownership. It was understood by community members, who came to trust and rely on it.

Phase 2: The incorporation of science, procedure and government

The levee-building and flood warning initiatives were imperfect in operation. The banks were not built to any engineering standards and they often failed or were overtopped, leading to inundation of the areas they were intended to protect. Meanwhile upstream gauge heights gave only rough indications of what was coming to communities further downstream, and forecasting was primitive and generalised.

What was needed was appropriate engineering standards applied to the building of levees and the development of modelling to permit accurate forecasting of the severity of coming floods. These things were achieved, at different times in different areas, through government involvement in levee construction along with flood forecasting using hydrological modelling and telemetry and led by the Bureau of Meteorology. Building regulations for floodplains were developed by state governments and applied by local councils: these specified areas that could not be built upon and mandated minimum flood levels for new dwellings in flood-liable areas. Typically, the adopted standard meant that floor levels had to be at or above the level of the 1 per cent (so-called one-in-100 years) Annual Exceedance Probability flood at a location.

Some effort was made to educate people about the flood management measures that were put in place. In some areas this included simple brochures designed to ‘demystify’ flood warnings and to scotch the myth that existing levees had rendered ‘protected’ areas immune from future inundation. But still, the myth of levee invincibility persisted and many people took little notice of flood warnings. Financial losses from floods continued to mount, even though flood deaths declined substantially.

Phase 3: Community and individual ownership via engagement

Elements of this phase exist, but only in partial and limited form. Its achievement will be marked by the re-development of the community ownership of Phase 1 while maintaining the science and the governmental involvement of Phase 2. It will address the top-down bias of current approaches, which tend to ‘instruct’ people in the warning context rather than ensuring they comprehend the instructions and are motivated to utilise them in their own interests. Too often the instructions are not understood, and often they are ignored.

A particular case here is the problem of people driving into floodwaters: public messaging has for years implored people not to do this, but many still do and every year some die as a consequence. The messaging, clearly, has not had the desired impact. More flood deaths occur in Australia because of motorists driving into floods than from any other reason.

Currently, flood education is shallow; it does not really penetrate minds. People need to be allowed to talk through their individual flood situations and to be involved in linking their situations to flood warnings and supported in making their own real-time flood decisions. Instruction from remote sources alone does not create ownership of a problem or bolster an individual’s management of it: it is impersonal and involves a whiff of control being imposed which discourages acceptance.

Meanwhile local communities can be involved in the clean-up phase, as is happening with the ‘mud armies’ of casual volunteers which increasingly are being formed after floods. In NSW these are being taken under the wing of the State Emergency Service for safety and insurance purposes.

Engagement is an investment in community safety and harm minimisation. Preferably it will be undertaken on an all-hazards basis rather than for individual threats. It will require financial support from federal or state/territory governments but would best be delivered through local councils and local SES, Rural Fire Service and other emergency management personnel and employing ‘mitigation advisers’ as facilitators.

Australian flood management has improved over the decades, but it is not done as well as it could be. There are identifiable next steps to be taken.