The 2011 Brisbane Floods: Causes, Impacts and Implications

Abstract

On 13th January 2011 major flooding occurred throughout most of the Brisbane River catchment, most severely in Toowoomba and the Lockyer Creek catchment (where 23 people drowned), the Bremer River catchment and in Brisbane, the state capital of Queensland. Some 56,200 claims have been received by insurers with payouts totalling $2.55 billion. This paper backgrounds weather and climatic factors implicated in the flooding and the historical flood experience of Brisbane. We examine the time history of water releases from the Wivenhoe dam, which have been accused of aggravating damage downstream. The dam was built in response to even worse flooding in 1974 and now serves as Brisbane's main water supply. In our analysis, the dam operators made sub-optimal decisions by neglecting forecasts of further rainfall and assuming a 'no rainfall' scenario. Questions have also been raised about the availability of insurance cover for riverine flood, and the Queensland government's decision not to insure its infrastructure. These and other questions have led to Federal and State government inquiries. We argue that insurance is a form of risk transfer for the residual risk following risk management efforts and cannot in itself be a solution for poor land-use planning. With this in mind, we discuss the need for risk-related insurance premiums to encourage flood risk mitigating behaviours by all actors, and for transparency in the availability of flood maps. Examples of good flood risk management to arise from this flood are described.

Issues and Challenges in Flood Risk Management—Editorial for the Special Issue on Flood Risk Management

“…Floods that occurred in early 2011 led to substantial damages in the Brisbane region in Australia, and highlighted the challenge engineers have to both balance water resource supply and flood management [1]. The Tohoku earthquake and tsunami that occurred in March of that year affected large parts of the coast of Japan and resulted in more than 15,000 fatalities.…”

A hierarchicalBayesian regional model for nonstationary precipitation extremes inNorthernCalifornia conditioned on tropical moisture exports

“…Recent floods in the United States [Dirmeyer and Kinter, 2010], Pakistan [Houze et al, 2011], China [Zong and Chen, 2000;Lin et al, 2010], Central Europe [Ulbrich et al, 2003], Australia [van den Honert and McAneney, 2011], United Kingdom [Marsh, 2004;Slingo et al, 2014], and Thailand [Komori et al, 2012] have led to an alarming rise in humanitarian crises and societal costs [Munich Re, 2012], underscoring the need to better understand the nonstationary characteristics of these phenomena. The costeffective design of reliable engineering solutions and financial mechanisms (e.g., insurance products) over annual to decadal planning horizons depends on this scientific understanding.…”

Evaluating the Variations in the Flood Susceptibility Maps Accuracies Due to the Alterations in the Type and Extent of the Flood Inventory

“…shtml). Brisbane was one of the most affected citied in Queensland receiving over $500 millions of damage (Chanson et al, 2014;van den Honert and McAneney, 2011) due to this event ( Figure 1). This study focuses on the Brisbane River Catchment in Queensland, Australia.…”