Local authorities faced a sometimes hostile reaction from residents in the Bunbartha area during a community flood meeting on Tuesday, November 8.
Many residents remain unable to access their flooded properties in the Bunbartha area after flooding from Loch Garry inundated large swathes of the district.
Representatives from Greater Shepparton City Council, the State Emergency Service, Agriculture Victoria, Recovery Victoria, Goulburn Murray Catchment Management Authority and Goulburn-Murray Water attended the meeting at the Bunbartha Community Centre to answer questions about the level of flooding, access to assistance and ongoing flood prevention measures.
Much of the questioning was directed at G-MW representative Daniel Irwin and focused on the removal of bars at Loch Garry, which limit the flow of floodwaters beyond the area.
Mr Irwin is general manager strategy services planning and told attendees that staff did what they could to mitigate the level of flooding.
“The sheer magnitude of the event that has been described here tonight meant that our staff, while trying to operate that site, despite all their best efforts and endeavours to want to stay at that site, we had to remove them from that site for safety reasons,” he said.
“They managed to get around 50 per cent of the bars out of the structure at the time and then, as I said, we had to remove them from the site.”
That contribution was challenged outright by some in the room.
“You absolutely did not get 50 per cent of the bars out,” an injector said.
A resident asked why the operation of the loch still relied on old technology that required individual bars to be removed by hand to release water.
“Why haven’t they put an automatic system in so they could be in the Northern Territory and it get to a certain height and they push a button? Why haven’t they done that?” a woman said.
“I do know in the past it was explored and customers expressed some concern about the cost associated with a structure like that to operate in events that may be one in 20, 30, 50 years,” Mr Irwin said.
Many questions also centred on the maintenance and repair of levees in the area.
Council chief executive Peter Harriott said he had been told by government that responsibility for levees fell to the landholder they were on, which in the case around Loch Garry was G-MW.
Mr Irwin said there had been two breaches to its 9km of levee that had already been repaired, but workers had been unable to access other significant breaches, which provided an ongoing threat.
Residents also questioned the support they had been offered by authorities, suggesting cries for help with pumping water from their properties had gone unanswered.
“We were just left to either sink or drown, and at our own financial burden as well as losing our homes,” one resident said.
Mr Harriott said the collective response from authorities to what he described as the region’s “biggest flood” had been huge, but there had been limits to what assistance they could offer.
“When I’ve been to Undera, when I’ve been to Murchison, when I’ve been to Toolamba, when I’ve been to Mooroopna, people say the same thing and, unfortunately, I’ve just got to say, ‘I’m sorry, I haven’t been able to service everybody’,” he said.
“It has been a massive event and I just haven’t had the resources; collectively, we just haven’t had the resources to provide for everybody.”
Goulburn Broken Catchment Management Authority statutory planning and floodplain management manager Guy Tierney also said the scale of the floods was enormous.
“Talking about the magnitude of these floods, they’re not like the one-in-five or one-in-10, they’re more like a one-in-70, pushing to a one-in-a-hundred-year floods,” Mr Tierney said.
With the Bureau of Meteorology forecasting more rain across north-east Victoria towards the end of the week and into next, there are fears more flooding is on its way.
“What capacity is the levee system operating at now? If we get what the BOM is predicting, are we going to flood again?” one resident asked.
“I don’t know that we can answer that question because to answer that question we’d have to understand every breach in the levee,” Mr Irwin said.
Help at hand
Information on services and assistance available for flood victims can be found by contacting the flood recovery helpline on 1800 560 760 or the Greater Shepparton City Council website at greatershepparton.com.au/community/emergencies/flood/flood-recover
The council is also planning mosquito misting in an attempt to control the increasing mosquito problem caused by the flooding, and is working with GV Health to make the Japanese encephalitis vaccine more widely available for people in the Bunbartha area.