In just over a year, the Clarence Valley and Kempsey have experienced drought, floods, bushfires and now another flood. Many other communities on Australia’s east coast are also dealing with their third or fourth significant natural disaster since 2019.
Before the latest floods, there were signs of recovery. Kempsey officially opened a new university centre on Thursday. The Grafton Regional Gallery in the Clarence Valley reopened the previous week. But these were either shut or empty this week as shops were sandbagged and locals avoided the floods.
The New South Wales government has declared a natural disaster in 24 local government areas that also experienced floods or storms in 2019/20. Six of those areas also had more than 40% of their area burned at the end of 2019.
A Guardian Australia analysis of areas affected by multiple disasters shows that NSW contains 19 of the top 20 Australian local government areas affected by a combination of fire, flood, drought and storms. This is up from 15 in December.
On top of the natural disasters, they had to contend with the effects of the coronavirus pandemic.
“Life was getting back to normal here. We were looking at a pretty good season and [Covid-19] was not really affecting us in the region. The bushfires were still in recovery,” the mayor of Kempsey Shire Council, Liz Campbell, told Guardian Australia.
Five of Kempsey’s wooden bridges were destroyed in the bushfires. Campbell says a few more were destroyed in the latest flooding. As part of ongoing recovery efforts the council received a grant only recently to replace 57 bridges, but this comes on top of all the other work that needs to be done or redone.
“The work all starts all over again. Six months of work on our roads and bridges are just gone. Just vanished. And we can’t see underneath yet to see what’s left,” Campbell says.
The Guardian’s analysis combined measures of drought, area burned in 2019-20, storms and flooding in 2020 and March 2021, Covid-19 cases and job losses to construct a “multiple disaster index” to get a sense of where these events overlapped. Heatwaves have not been included due to difficulties in getting spatial data, but most of Australia experienced significant heatwaves in 2020.
The index does not quantify the overall impact of the disasters (some were far worse than others in terms of lives lost or the damage involved), it only attempts to measure where multiple disasters happened. Many events increased the risk of others, such as droughts leading into bushfires. And finally there are significant limitations to the data, which you can read more about below.
Compounding disasters may become more common, according to the Australian Institute for Disaster Resilience. “We believe that incidents are occurring at a greater intensity and frequency,” AIDR executive director, Amanda Leck, told Guardian Australia.
More frequent and compounding disasters may require rethinking how to respond to events and build resilience.
“We’ve been hit with it all,” says Clarence Valley general manager Ashley Lindsay. “The bushfires were unprecedented, really, whereas the flooding is something that we are used to. It comes and goes. Generally we are prepared.
“A lot of the farmers watch the river heights in the upper catchments and as soon as it gets to a trigger point they know to move their stock to higher ground.”
Both Lindsay and Campbell spoke about the importance of community in recovery. A lot of people have moved to the Clarence Valley since the last major flood in 2013, and Lindsay says efforts will be required to prepare them for future floods.
Campbell is currently touring her municipality of Kempsey, having to reach some areas by boat.
“By talking to the people and hearing their stories and sharing them, that is really important to recovery. You pick up little things that you may not think of, but someone needs to talk about,” Campbell says.
“We live in a floodplain. We’re prepared for floods. After every flood we do debriefs. We make sure people understand about flood plans. We weren’t so good about fires so we didn’t have people doing fire plans. But now we do.
“If it stops raining and the river levels start to recede overnight then we can open the CBD again. But the whole story for here is not just about the CBD ... It’s the downriver properties and our farmers and our isolated villages that are also really, really affected,” Campbell says.
“It’s not all about roads and the rubbish and the water. We do those things. But we also have to care and build our community.”
Notes and methods
The disaster index was constructed using a combination of the following data:
The percentage of each LGA burned in 2019-20 is based on the National Indicative Aggregated Fire Extent Dataset. This data measures fire boundaries, and within those boundaries the severity of the fire can vary, and may contain unburned areas. It also covers northern Australia, where fires in the sparsely populated savannah areas can be considered part of the natural landscape dynamics. The risks posed by these northern fires are very different to the bushfires that occurred in eastern Australia in forested regions near more densely populated areas.
Weekly Payroll Jobs and Wages in Australia from the Australian Bureau of Statistics was converted to LGA areas from SA3 using ABS correspondence files. Job losses are measured as a percentage change since 14 March.
Drought areas are based on whether the government considers an LGA to be eligible for the Drought Communities Program. This excludes areas which had low rainfall, but less economic exposure to the impacts of drought.
2020 storm and flooding areas are based on postcodes declared by the Insurance Council of Australia to be within the February “catastrophe” event. Cyclone areas were those where an emergency situation was declared by the Western Australian government.
Covid case counts come from each state and territory’s health department, however counts by LGA were not available for Western Australia, South Australia, Tasmania and the Australian Capital Territory. For the purposes of the index, cases for each LGA were averaged from total cases in the state.
Overseas-acquired Covid-19 cases were excluded from cumulative counts where possible.
March 2021 flood areas were identified using the New South Wales’ government list of natural disaster declarations. At the time of publication the Queensland government had not added the March 2021 flood areas to its list of disaster activated areas.
Each measure was normalised to create a number between one (the highest number in the dataset) and zero (the lowest). These were then added to make an index representing multiple disasters.
We were unable to obtain heatwave spatial data and haven’t included it in the index, but significant heatwaves occurred in January 2020 and November 2020, affecting most of the continent.
