COUNCILS along the Murray River are ignoring advice not to approve developments on flood plains, a water chief has told a public meeting.
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The Murray-Darling Basin Authority’s executive director river management David Dreverman said he regularly urged councils to halt works but was overridden.
“You would be surprised at how many letters I write to local government in the Murray imploring them not to approve new developments on flood plains,” Mr Dreverman told Wahgunyah motel owner Terry Young.
“Because one day those businesses are going to get wet and one day you’re going to ask volunteers in your emergency services to go and rescue people who are still in those businesses or residences that are out on the flood plain.
“Yet they ignore what I write and they approve the developments.
“In Brisbane in 1974 a large flood...6000 houses got wet, in 2011 a slightly smaller flood, 20,000 houses got wet.
“Why? Because the planning authorities allowed all those developments to occur on the flood plain.”
Mr Dreverman also told the meeting at Corowa Golf Club on Wednesday night of his belief that Albury was not safe from a record flood.
“The biggest risk on the flood plain is really the city of Albury,” Mr Dreverman said.
“It sits with a levee, it’s very conservatively designed...no flood of record would go over that levee, but there will be one day a flood that is bigger than the flood of record.
“That levee will one day go under and that’s a huge risk.”
Mr Dreverman said the flood mitigation provided by lakes Hume and Dartmouth was allowing greater risks to be taken in riverside areas and suggested there was complacency over the danger.
“This flood plain used to get wet about every two years on average, now it gets wet about every eight years,” he said.
“As a result of that all of you who enjoy this magnificent flood plain have been able to change the risks you take in your enterprise.
“We understand that, but in undertaking those risks you do need to understand that there will always be a flood about 15 in a 100 years which would be of the magnitude of what you have seen.”
Mr Dreverman said the authority itself had infrastructure which it had to assess for flood risk.
“Please don’t get complacent, because what we’ve actually done through operating those dams for irrigation business we’ve taken out all the little ones,” he said.
“The little ones don’t occur any more, you don’t see them, you don’t see it come up and remind you that it is going to happen.
“There comes a time when the flood is so big that no matter what you’ve done at the storage it doesn’t matter.”
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