Three days before the biggest flood in modern Australian history inundated the Northern Rivers, Lismore City Council was told by the NSW government that its concerns were “premature”.
It was the first in a series of failures. Lismore's worst flood on record killed five people, left more than 4000 homes uninhabitable and wiped out nearly every business in town.
Many thousands of people have left the city over the past year - mostly renters not restricted by mortgages.
What happened here in the Northern Rivers with Lismore as the epicentre has to be recognised as one of the worst disasters the nation has ever seen. Widespread failures were exposed in the aftermath of an unprecedented flood a year ago that had thousands of people fighting for their lives in and around Lismore — but have the lessons been learned?
In an age of technology that can capture the atmosphere of other planets, it can be easy to overestimate our ability to forecast our own weather.
The Bureau of Meteorology says the weather along Australia’s east coast is among the most complex in the world and can change rapidly.
It says the 2022 flood event was the result of both large- and small-scale weather systems combining over an already-saturated landscape, with “each successive storm intensifying the impact of the previous”.
