Chade on 16/1/2011 at 22:10

---

I felt a bit embarrassed about posting here before, as the floods basically came and went and didn't affect me or anyone else I knew at all (excepting Scots Taffer and Shug, of course). I mean, it was a bit of an adventure getting home after the CBD was evacuated. The bus station I was waiting at became surrounded by water. But in a perverse way the trip was actually quite fun.

I got off the train early today and walked to work through the Auchenflower and Milton suburbs, which were hit quite badly by flooding, to try and get at least a little exposure to what other people had gone through. A great deal of mess has been cleaned up by now, but there is still debris, dirt, and stench around every corner. The power is still off. Quite a sobering sight ...

SubJeff on 17/1/2011 at 00:03

---

Can you get insured for this kind of stuff? Act of God is it or what?

Scots Taffer on 17/1/2011 at 03:40

---

You can get insured, however most domestic insurance policies in Queensland exclude flood as standard and you either have to opt-in for it, pay more for it, etc. And in some locations known to be extremely exposed to 1 in 100 year events you cannot get insurance, or the cost of it is so prohibitive that people don't take it.

Martin, your point is an interesting one that will likely get airplay in coming months as we actually have council limitations on the heights of buildings and this seems mostly to limit the proliferation of high-rise buildings in suburban areas where they want to minimise urban density and control the area due to its historical value. However, this restriction means "raising" your house to protect against flood would require it to exceed the maximum limit currently allowed, so there will have to be some revision of this unless they wish to see entire suburbs become ghost towns.

Scots Taffer on 17/1/2011 at 10:42

---

Yeah, saw that today. It really makes the scale of the flooding quite clear.

On your other comment, that's the problem with all of this - it's not unexpected. It's perhaps not likely we would have experienced another (statistically-named) 1-in-100 year event so soon after 1974 but we are in a sub-tropical climate with a known history of flooding currently enduring La Niña.

So it's not exactly unexpected, however there are a great many reasons for people's complacency.

Firstly there was general overconfidence in the flood-mitigation provided by the main dam and the questions arise over how to effectively manage that dam system when the threat of flood is present, when to release water, how much to release, what is true capacity vs theoretical. That's one big kettle of fish that's definitely going to get looked at when the official inquiry starts and will be an interesting point of contention.

There's also the complication that Brisbane has gone through an intrastate/migrant population boom and many of the people here simply did not know whether or not they lived in flood plains. Furthermore, those who did know weren't concerned about it because it had happened "over thirty years ago". Ask any Queenslander of an age to have experienced the floods why houses here are often built on stilts and you'll hear about floods, others will talk about raising the house to catch the breezes. Collective memory is short.

This was something we heard a lot when we were buying our house, the notion that such an event wasn't even worth considering when purchasing property, but my wife stuck doggedly to the non-flood zones when we were property searching.

The population growth urged population density along and houses were built in tracts of land that probably never should have been released for domestic construction. Part of the blame here can surely be laid at the feet of the council for allowing development, but most of the blame has to lie with the people actually buying these properties and encouraging greedy developers to do it more often and this, of course, led to higher price tags.

During the greed of the real estate boom, conventional wisdom on property valuations went out of the window as the market forces of supply and demand dictated that the prices, regardless of the property's potential for flooding, became overinflated and the flooding plains weren't considered enough as part of the overall property value. Not surprisingly, riverfront/waterfront property was incredibly fashionable during this boom and they hold some of the most inflated property markets in Brisbane.

This too compounds the insurance problem and why it wasn't covered for so long, only recently being re-introduced by a minimal number of players (however one of those is admittedly the biggest player in Queensland).

Imagine you're the insurer consider offering cover for a moderate frequency (flooding in its many forms isn't that rare) and high severity (houses that go under often need completely renovated or worse, demolished and started over) event. How do you do it?

Sure, you can offset the good years with the bad and look at the profitability of such a product over a longer term scale (10 year loss ratio of earned premiums to incurred losses, say), but this doesn't escape the fact that you're going to be selected against. The only flood insurer in Queensland will have an unbalanced portfolio of risks because only those likely to experience flooding will purchase flood insurance, therefore you're 100% exposed (to extremely high value risks) and unlikely to collect enough premiums to pay for the eventual total loss scenario that it is only a matter of time away!

the_grip on 17/1/2011 at 18:56

---

Somewhat off topic but flood related... (http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_thelookout/20110117/us_yblog_thelookout/scientists-warn-california-could-be-struck-by-winter-superstorm) California at risk for massive superstorm