Below is a very interesting article from the World Socialist Website that examines how "the Australian floods crisis is laying bare a toxic combination of chronic infrastructure decay, government under-funding, and profit-driven development that has become a danger to the lives and well-being of millions of people.". Just like with Black Saturday, the media and politicians don't want to talk about how factors such as climate change or privitisation worsen "natural" disasters.
Serious floods threaten thousands in Australia’s third largest city
By Mike Head 12 January 2011
Australia’s flood crisis has taken a serious turn for the worse, with the official death toll from the wall of water that engulfed towns west of the Queensland state capital of Brisbane during the past two days now at 12 and emergency authorities predicting that it could reach 30. More than 90 people remained unaccounted for this morning. Even worse is to come today and tomorrow as the deluge overtakes Ipswich, on the outskirts of Brisbane, and surges through the capital itself.
Continuing heavy rain from a La Niña weather pattern has led to warnings that the inundation of Australia’s third largest city will exceed the destructive floods that submerged Brisbane in January 1974, killing 14 people and flooding almost 6,000 homes. The Wivenhoe Dam, built to “flood-proof” the city after the 1974 disaster, has proven unable to cope with the sheer volume of water—estimated at the equivalent of two Sydney Harbours per day—surging down its catchment valleys. Releases of water from the dam today will add to the flood heading to Brisbane.
Hundreds of people were evacuated from their homes at Ipswich last night, with about one-third of the city expected to go under water today. Evacuations also commenced in Brisbane, where more than 30 low-lying suburbs have been listed as being at risk. The Brisbane River is expected to peak this afternoon at around 4.5 metres, and to rise above the 1974 peak of 5.45 metres tomorrow morning when a high tide is due at 4 a.m. The flooding in Brisbane is now forecast to last for days, extending a crisis that has already affected large parts of Queensland since mid-December.
Official estimates of the likely damage in Brisbane have been repeatedly upgraded in the past 24 hours. According to the latest warnings today, almost 20,000 homes are set to be inundated, with a further 20,000 properties to be affected to some degree. This represents about 10 percent of the 400,000 buildings and homes in Brisbane, a metropolis of almost two million people.
Other previously flooded towns in Queensland, including Dalby and Condamine, are facing a new deluge, and rivers have risen in numerous parts of northern New South Wales, as well as in western Victoria and northern Western Australia. In some areas of Queensland, serious longer-term health risks are appearing, including snake and crocodile infestation and water-borne and mosquito-borne diseases.
A full picture will only emerge today of the death and devastation in the Lockyer Valley, west of Brisbane, where homes and cars were swept away in several towns and villages, including Grantham, Gatton, Murphys Creek, Withcott, Helidon, Laidley and Forest Hill. Entire families remain missing. Terrible stories have begun to be told of people who were caught completely unawares by Monday’s torrent of water, having received no official warnings.
Les Schultz, a former resident of Grantham, told journalists of screams coming from inside one house ripped off its foundations and hurtling downstream. Quoting a friend, who witnessed the scene, he said: “This home just floated past his house with people yelling out for help. But no one could help them.”
Rescue crew officer David Turnbull from Queensland Emergency Services said it was “so frustrating” that more people could not be saved by the two emergency helicopters that winched people to safety from rooftops in Grantham and Helidon. “They were everywhere, entire families had climbed up on their roofs—they had no alternative.”
These events, and the looming disaster in Brisbane, amount to a colossal failure by governments and the private profit system, which have proven incapable of forewarning and protecting ordinary people from the catastrophe. Families and entire communities have been left to fend for themselves. Today’s Australian carries a photograph of a distressed mother and her children pleading for help as floodwaters poured through Burpengary on Brisbane’s northern outskirts. Their hand-painted sign said: “NO PHONE NO POWER”.
Basic infrastructure, including electricity, mobile and landline telephone services, transport and emergency services, have either collapsed or been cut off. Thousands of residents of low-lying areas of Ipswich and Brisbane had their electricity turned off today. Many people have been stranded, isolated from official evacuation sites. Rescue and search agencies, which depend heavily on volunteers, have been swamped and unable to help many victims.
Tens of thousands of people received no flood warnings or were sent government emergency messages hours after their areas had been submerged in water. The first SMS text and phone voice messages from the National Emergency Warning System (NEWS) were sent after 8 p.m. on Monday, six hours after the rural city of Toowoomba had been swamped by water and too late to alert Lockyer Valley residents. The NEWS was created after Victoria’s bushfire emergency in 2009, designed to give people more warning of disasters. Yesterday, Queensland Premier Ann Bligh confirmed that Toowoomba residents received no government warning, but defended the failure. “This was purely an emergency response situation with no warning at all, basically, to emergency services. We simply had to react the best way we could,” she said.
Some devastated residents have started to speak out against the lack of official warnings and assistance. Mardi Neilson, whose young family was finally rescued by an army helicopter from Forest Hill, told the Australian the experience was “utterly terrifying”. She said the family did not receive an emergency warning until 11 a.m. yesterday, almost two hours after the deluge hit and they had been stranded on their top-floor balcony. “There was absolutely no warning, we just had no idea it would be this bad,” she said. “Surely someone would have known the water was going to hit as hard as it did, but there was no loudspeaker, no doorknock, nothing to tell us to get out.”
On the northern outskirts of Brisbane, particularly in the low-lying areas of Caboolture and Strathpine, families were simply told yesterday to leave as quickly as possible, with no time to pack up valuables or move belongings to higher ground. Chris Shears of Caboolture said: “We’re just so helpless. The SES [State Emergency Service] won’t come, the police won’t come. We don’t know what we’re going to do.”
Prime Minister Julia Gillard has displayed indifference to the plight of the flood victims, many of whom live in poorer areas on flood plains. Yesterday, she claimed that her federal government was “doing all it can to help people affected by the flooding”. She referred to $13 million being paid out for 10,000 claims under a government scheme that offers subsistence-level payments to those who can prove that they have lost their sources of income. Beyond that, the Labor government has deployed military resources and personnel, which only underscores the inadequacy of civil emergency services.
Gillard has ruled out any substantial government spending for relief, recovery or rebuilding programs, despite the immense social cost of the floods and the widespread destruction of roads, bridges, railway lines and other essential infrastructure. Yesterday, she insisted there would be no deviation from her government’s pledge to the financial markets to eliminate the budget deficit produced by the global financial crisis by 2012-13. “We will bring the budget to surplus in 2012-13, and yes that will entail some tough choices,” she said, warning that any spending on flood damage would have to be offset by cuts elsewhere.
Earlier in the week, Gillard spoke of having already contributed the small sum of $40 million to efforts to flood-proof the Bruce Highway. Large areas of Queensland remain isolated because the road, the main route between Brisbane and the north of the state, has been cut for days near the flooded regional cities of Rockhampton and Maryborough. Gillard refused to make any specific commitments, saying only that the flood-proofing would be “re-prioritised”.
Both Gillard and Bligh have depicted the floods as simply freakish acts of nature. The truth is that, as meteorologists and flood management experts have explained, the La Niña weather pattern and the flood disaster were both predictable. The Labor leaders are seeking to divert attention away from the systemic factors that have magnified the disaster—such as the cutting back of flood mitigation programs, the under-funding of civil emergency services, the approval of housing estates in flood-prone areas, the commercialisation or privatisation of basic infrastructure such as water supply, roads and railways, and the deforestation of catchment areas (see: “Queensland crisis points to lack of flood mitigation and basic infrastructure”).
In the face of the growing evidence of official neglect and indifference, today’s Australian editorial urged the nation to “stick together” and “not flinch in the face of floods of an almost unimaginable extent”. It declared that it would be a mistake to “jump to conclusions” and attribute the disaster to “climate change, inadequate urban planning or emergency service shortcomings”. But, just as the Hurricane Katrina catastrophe did in the United States in 2005, the Australian floods crisis is laying bare a toxic combination of chronic infrastructure decay, government under-funding, and profit-driven development that has become a danger to the lives and well-being of millions of people.
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Another WSWS article on the floods
Australia: Floods engulf Brisbane as reports reveal authorities rejected warning measures
By Richard Phillips
13 January 2011
The Queensland state capital was hit by massive floods yesterday when the Brisbane River burst its banks and flooded the central business district and surrounding suburbs. While the river peaked at 4.46 metres—one metre below yesterday’s predicted peak of 5.5 metres—the damage to Brisbane is devastating. Serious flooding is predicted to continue in the capital for weeks.
The official number of people killed by the floods in south east Queensland this week now stands at 15. But the toll is expected to rise as more bodies are found in Toowoomba, Grantham, Murphys Creek and the Lockyer Valley areas, which were hit by flash flooding on Monday. To date, more than 40 people are listed as missing, feared dead, from that catastrophe.
The Queensland and federal Labor governments and the media continue to insist that the events unfolding in the Queensland capital and throughout the state are a “freak” of nature.
But the devastation is a direct result of government neglect of basic infrastructure, emergency services, flood management and mitigation measures—decisions determined by the short-term profit demands of property developers and other business interests. According to the Insurance Council of Australia, only eight percent of water catchment areas in Queensland have adequate flood mapping.
Consecutive Queensland governments, Labor and Liberal-National alike, claim that they learnt the lessons of the 1974 Brisbane floods and that the Wivenhoe Dam, built in the aftermath of that disaster, would prevent a repeat occurrence.
However, as the Australian newspaper reports today, scientists and engineers have warned the Queensland government and the Brisbane city council over the past decade that major flood destruction would occur unless authorities took serious remedial action.
A Brisbane Flood Study in 1999 criticised the construction of tens of thousands of homes and other properties in flood prone areas in the period since the 1974 floods and warned that future floods would be 1 to 2 metres higher than predictions made by Brisbane council authorities. Likewise, state authorities in 2007 rejected a joint South East Queensland Water Corporation and state government report calling for the capacities of Wivenhoe Dam and Somerset Dam to be increased. The warnings were ignored and the reports buried. (See: “Reports warned of flood dangers to Brisbane”)
The disastrous human consequences of these decisions are now unfolding in the Queensland capital.
Over the last 24 hours, 25,000 Brisbane homes have been flooded, with initial reports estimating that 11,500 of these have been fully swamped. Power has been cut to 80,000 homes in the city, including to the central business district, which has been evacuated and shut down, while basic infrastructure—roads, sewage, water supply, electricity and other facilities—are seriously damaged and expected to take weeks and months to repair.
Thirty-five suburbs were flooded yesterday and more than 1,600 roads and streets inundated. The worst-hit suburbs are Brisbane City, St Lucia, West End, Rocklea and Graceville.
The number of evacuation centres was increased by three yesterday, bring the total number to five, as thousands of residents sought shelter and accommodation. Scores of people in high-rise riverside apartment blocks who failed to evacuate their residences remain inside these buildings, without access to power, fresh water and sewage, and only limited phone communications.
Last night authorities closed Brisbane’s Gateway Bridges, fearing that tonnes of debris racing down the river would cause further damage. At one point a 300-metre concrete section of the RiverWalk—a popular tourist walkway that follows the river—broke away and began hurtling down the river. It eventually broke in two, fortunately narrowly missing the bridges.
Authorities were forced to implode a barge, a wharf and other moorings, fearing they would crash into bridges and inflict even worse destruction. Brisbane’s river ferry service has also been shut down, with all its jetties flooded or badly damaged. Drift, a showcase floating restaurant on the river, broke from its moorings and crashed into the Goodwill Bridge, where it broke to pieces. That no one was killed or any of the city’s bridges seriously damaged by river debris was a miracle.
Floods also engulfed the city of Ipswich (population 168,000 and 40 kilometres south west of Brisbane) yesterday when the Bremer River rose to 19.5 metres, flooding 3,000 homes. Only the roofs of many businesses and homes in the city centre could be seen from the air.
With the flood crisis deepening, Labor Prime Minister Julia Gillard and Queensland Premier Anna Bligh are desperately attempting to create the impression that their governments are “in control” and doing their utmost to assist those most affected by the disaster.
Their efforts are thoroughly disingenuous and part of a desperate effort to cover up obvious government culpability and the fact that the heaviest brunt of the disaster will be borne by working class families and small businesses. Government relief money is a contemptible pittance. It will not even begin to restore the damage or overcome the myriad problems facing the hundreds of thousands of ordinary people and small businesses affected by the floods.
Some of the posturing has been so blatant that a Sydney Morning Herald journalist commented today that Prime Minister Gillard, who has made countless photo-op appearances shaking hands or embracing flood victims at evacuation centres over the past week, “struggles to strike the right note.” The prime minister, the newspaper commented, “seemed wooden and not caring.... she doesn’t appear to care”.
One of the constant refrains of Queensland Premier Anna Bligh and other state government officials has been that Wivenhoe Dam would protect Brisbane residents from future flooding. State officials are also claiming that because the Brisbane River has not reached the 1974 flood peak of 5.45 metres, the city has escaped the worst. These comparisons are aimed at lulling residents into a false sense of security.
In 1974 Brisbane had a population of just 911,000. Today there are more than 2.2 million people, many of them living on low lying flood-plains that were engulfed in 1974. That government and councils have allowed developers to build homes there without serious flood mitigation and management measures is nothing short of criminal.
Calls by government and the media for all layers of society to “pull together” and assist in the flood recovery have not extended to Australia’s rapacious insurance companies, which generally provide no cover for flood damage. It appears that the majority of households in Queensland therefore have no home or contents insurance.
Tens of thousands of Queensland residents are either underinsured or uninsured because they cannot afford the high insurance premiums. Moreover, according to the Queensland Chamber of Commerce and Industry, only 50 percent of businesses in the state have insurance cover for loss of income.