Floods in Victoria the State

Floods in Victoria

The State of Victoria in Australia suffered serious flooding in the month of September, 2010, causing "hundreds of millions of dollars in lost crops," according to the Age newspaper report. There was a great deal of other damage as well from the torrent of water that poured down, including the loss of about 100 sheep and 22 homes at Campbell's Creek and Chalton. The Deputy Premier Peter Ryan of Victoria said the state is facing "…tens of thousands of acres of cropping country being under water, the destruction of the crops for practical purposes and…hundreds of millions of dollars of loss, no doubt" (http://news.theage.com.au).

The rain didn't stop in September -- it continued raining (not nonstop but a lot of rain) into November, according to the Australian newspaper. After fourteen years of drought, the communities were certainly not ready for all the rain, Karl Braganza reported. In the last week of November, the Victorian community of Kilmore, north of Melbourne, reported receiving 160mm over a 4-day period. Valuable cheery crops have been damaged according to the secretary of the Victorian Cherry Association, John Wilson; some farmers lost "their entire crops" because the heavy rainwater caused the berries to split (www.theaustralian.com.au).

The flood damage was due in part to the long drought; the land was parched and bone dry, and a sudden influx of millions of gallons of water had no where to go but over the banks of the once-dry river beds and into homes and fields.

An article in Google.com quotes Victorian Premier John Brumby saying the "there will be roads, there will be bridges" and "community infrastructure" that will be damaged due to the downpour. But he said, because of the drought that lasted 14 years, the benefits from the rains in the "predominantly farming regions" (that have borne the brunt of the drought) "far outweighs the damage that's occurred" (www.google.com). The reason that Brumby was able to find something positive in the midst of an environmental disaster is that "The Lower Lakes of the Murray River will be full of water in just over a month," according to Peter Ker, writing in the Age (Ker, 2010, p. 1).

Ker mentions that the benefit is that the rivers that flooded northern Victoria will flow into the Murray and send "…at lease 900 billion litres of water across the border into South Australia" (p. 1). In addition, the surge of rainwater will "slake Victoria's Red Gum forests, spark native fish breeding, fill the Threatened Lower Lakes and cause a rare natural flow…into the sea near Adelaide" (Ker, p. 1). Those lakes have not been full for five years; workers have been dredging the mouth of the Murray River (for important environmental health reasons) and the hope is that the surge of water arriving at the mouth of the Murray River will be strong enough to "flush accumulated sands out of the Murray" and back into the sea.

There were many emergency actions that were taken, and emergency service assets were used in the area in response to the floods. The Australian Defence Force helped residents evacuate their homes in some communities (Gippsland, Benalla and Wagaratta) and six relief centers were set up to provide food and shelter for those that were evacuated (www.abc.net.au). Many people were issue emergency grants of about $1,000, to lessen the impact of having one's home flooded. The grants actually run up to $26,000, according to Bloom Businessweek (Scott, 2010), for those whose homes are severely damaged.