There are several lessons embedded in the Lismore floods story that warn of our future. But also some lessons in creative solutions that might in the end benefit many more people much further afield.
When Elizabeth Mossop took on the job of leading part of the Living Lab Northern Rivers, a think tank at Lismore, in northern New South Wales, she had a fair idea of what lay ahead.
The town had been devasted in 2022 by a double bout of intense flooding that reached two stories.
As a landscape architect and professor of urban resilience at UTS, she had the academic background to tackle the work.
But in her earlier career she’d also been deeply involved in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina when it hit New Orleans in the US in 2005.
So, when she ran into Dan Etheridge, a colleague from those days, while he was hosing the mud out of his house at Lismore after the floods, agreeing to the job was pretty much sealed. Etheridge for his part is now engagement director at the lab.
The first lesson, she knew, would be that reconstruction would be slow and painful.
Four years later at Lismore just a handful of houses have started construction but are not yet complete.
There’s a buy back program implemented by the NSW government for properties affected by the floods that cannot be rebuilt – in North Lismore that’s an offer made to 90 per cent of residents.
And a few hundred houses have been reclaimed from those sites and sold at auction, fetching anything from a few hundred dollars to a few thousand.
But as for the town looking anything like its former self, that’s a long way off.
Yet another lesson is the immense attachment to place that locals have expressed. People cling to their location, Mossop says. Some residents won’t move because these at-risk properties are cheap and it’s all they can afford.
But others are simply rusted on.
“This is such an important dynamic,” she tells our podcast, How to Build a Better World.
“It doesn’t matter if it’s a flood or if it’s a fire or whatever the disaster is, we are inclined always to underestimate the power of people’s attachment to place.
“It’s a really strong force for many, many people, and particularly in neighbourhoods and communities that are stable over time.”
Some of the worst affected areas she said are neighbourhoods that families have lived in for generations, “and they have been through things together as communities. There are strong social network.”
“People say, well, Lismore should just disappear, in the way that they said New Orleans needs to go away.”
But by the same token New York is equally under threat from hurricanes and storms, she notes wryly. Yet people don’t seem to expect the same response for people living there.
In fact, it’s the community bonds and the depth of local knowledge that is key to the reconstruction work, Mossop says. It’s this that’s been the most effective so far in dealing with the floods.
“It’s really been community organisations who have been at the forefront of providing help and support in the post-disaster environment,” she says.
And it’s the community that needs to drive its own future.
Lessons for housing stress elsewhere
But among the difficulties there’s rays of hope. And not just for the locals. Landcom for instance, the state government’s land development agencies, is working on some highly innovative solutions that may well be useful for other communities suffering housing stress.
Mossop says a site slated for 400 new homes may yet yield closer to 700 if some of the ideas in play now make it to full term completion, over the next few years.
What’s interesting is the creative solutions emerging. The project is turning an intense gaze to smaller dwellings, with one or two bedrooms and small footprints.
“There’s no point in building million dollar houses when nobody in Lismore is going to be able to afford to buy them, so they are working hard to drive those costs down … by mass customisation, by prefabrication, by really working hard with good materials that are relatively low cost.
“One of the issues in this part of the world is that the vast majority of new houses that are built are four bedrooms or bigger, but the majority of households are one and two people.”
Mossop expanded on this idea in an OpEd for The Sydney Morning Herald, just before we spoke.
“People are ready for new kinds of housing. Sadly, when people are living in caravans, garages, and other people’s living rooms, they have proved that they can be flexible and open to change. In talking to people about housing, they continually express interest in town houses, co-housing, intergenerational housing, apartments, tiny homes, shared facilities, and any kind of housing that would be available to them in a way they could afford.
There’s also been lessons in the type of fabric that’s resilient to flooding.
It’s not plasterboard, at least of the modern kind, and it’s not carpet.
“It’s nothing soft, it’s concrete, it’s masonry, it’s tiles, it’s beautiful old hardwood timber,” and surprisingly perhaps, “old-fashioned plaster is resilient so too tin ceilings.”
Downtown, she says, the library, gallery, and conservatorium have all been retrofitted for resilience.
Slow progress
But why is progress so slow? And what can we learn about mitigation for future similar events?
Yet another big lesson is the grinding, slow and painful recovery process that relies on government to pull together a plan and an implementation process.
At Lismore it needed to be brought to life from scratch, like some creature of many parts.
According to Mossop, a full 97 per cent of government funds that have been committed to the area have been devoted to the aftermath operations, and just 3 per cent to preventative measures.
“In the immediate aftermath of disaster, nobody’s thinking about planning, nobody’s thinking in a calm and collected way about the future.”
Flood resilience for landscape around the region though is an even tougher challenge. The thinking that tends to predominate is about “hard engineering solutions” instead of green infrastructure, land management, and behaviour solutions with “community-centric initiatives that have proved to be the most effective at assisting people in imminent danger”, Mossop says.
And there’s the importance of engagement with local people, which always provides a “shortcut to getting good outcomes”.
