A report on devastating New South Wales floods in 2022 highlights a recurring problem: the dangers of being unprepared.
An investigation conducted by Mary O'Kane AC and former Police Commissioner Michael Fuller worked to find out what went wrong during the floods that killed nine people.
The request resulted in 28 amendments, all of which were approved by the state government.
The 335-page report covers a wide range of topics, but here are her five key findings.
SES was not ready
A study found that the State Emergency Services (SES) has limited capacity to respond to large-scale disasters "at best."
Its response to the floods fell short because it did not "go early and go big" — throw as many resources as possible at a disaster in the early stages.
This was because they were unable to deploy assets in a timely fashion and were "unprepared for events of the scale...seen in 2022", according to the report. "This was demonstrated by the many failures to give timely public warnings which led to the need for a high number of rescues, especially in the Northern Rivers, where community rescues significantly outnumbered SES rescues."
The SES had a limited emphasis on flood mitigation as, according to the inquiry, the organisation didn't have an adequate culture around emergency planning.
The SES told the inquiry that their poor preparation and response was due to unreliable forecasts, however, the inquiry hit back at this excuse.
"It is the inquiry's view that NSW cannot predict its way out of flooding events."
Other issues identified by the inquiry included:
Lack of training for volunteers, with members raising concerns about the usefulness of computer-based learning
Insufficient flood rescue technicians to service high-risk catchments
The SES didn't know it could call on certain government resources, including the Defence Force
Flood plans for the Northern Rivers area were not reviewed after the 2021 flood event. This is the responsibility of the SES Commission and the Local SES Controller. However, SES proved to be underfunded to achieve the same performance results as institutions such as the Rural Fire Service (RFS), which receives four times the funding of SES.
For this reason, he recommended providing additional funding to his SES and consolidating operational functions into his RFS.
Read more: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-08-17/key-takeaways-from-2022-nsw-flood-inquiry/101342094
