Emergency services’ response to the catastrophic flooding in the northern rivers over the past month has been defended by officials including Resilience NSW boss Shane Fitzsimmons.
Speaking at budget estimates in the state’s parliament house on Wednesday, Fitzsimmons said there had been no confusion about who was in charge of responding to the crisis and denied that the government had “dropped the ball” in its response.
It was also revealed that five of the six flood management plans for local government areas in the northern rivers were out of date, having last been updated in 2013.
The Lismore plan was updated in 2018 and is due for review next year.
“Just because it has a past due date doesn’t necessarily mean it is invalid. The data may well still be accurate,” acting State Emergency Service (SES) commissioner Daniel Austin told the hearing.
Reviews are trigged every five years or when new information and data comes to hand, including flooding events and changing circumstances.
Fitzsimmons said the scale of the floods was not predicted because the conditions that led to them had not been accurately forecast. This view was echoed by Austin, who repeatedly pointed to improvements needed in forecasting abilities by the Bureau of Meteorology (BoM).
When asked why Lismore residents were evacuated on 29 March before being told to return home – only to be issued with a second evacuation order in the middle of the night – Austin said the advice had changed.
“The renewed projection was somewhat below the top of the levee, at which point the decision was made that the risk posed by the overtopping of the levee by the Wilsons River no longer existed,” Austin said.
“At that point, the evacuation order for the Lismore CBD was revoked.
“Later that evening, unforecast significant weather hit that area and flooding occurred in the CBD of Lismore. It was not until after that flash flooding occurred that the Wilsons River later that morning finally overtopped the levee and came back up.”
Austin said the government could look at investing more into modelling technology to better predict flash flooding and thunderstorm events.
After the Lismore flood – the second suffered by residents this year – the Guardian revealed two of the BoM’s most sophisticated simulation models showed the storm front, which some forecasts predicted would head out to sea, instead returning inland.
Fitzsimmons told the hearing that the scale of the events had not been predicted.
“It caught all manner of people unawares, and it resulted in extraordinary widespread, unprecedented damage and destruction,” he said.
“In hindsight it would have been great to have all manner of additional things in place if there was a forecast that indicated what ultimately happened – and there wasn’t.”
When asked by opposition MP Walt Secord who had “dropped the ball” – Resilience NSW or the SES, Fitzsimmons said he was “not aware of what ball has been dropped”, insisting the SES was the lead agency “without question, without confusion”.
A focus for his agency – created in the wake of the black summer bushfires – would be getting power back in Lismore by Easter.
Opposition spokesperson Jihad Dib said the government needed to come clean
“What we heard today was the government’s denial of reality,” he said.
“Indeed, when they were questioned, the response was, we haven’t dropped the ball and that’s really hard to believe.”
