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‘High risk practice’: Council approves DAs on flood-threatened properties
By Max Maddison
Hawkesbury Council has continued approving development applications for potentially uninsurable properties at serious risk of flooding, as it waits for the government to grant funding to upgrade evacuation routes.
Questions about the liveability of areas of the Hawkesbury-Nepean Valley, extending about 63 kilometres from Lower Portland to Emu Plains, have been raised after insurers began rejecting homeowners reapplications or pricing most households out of the market.
The damage caused when Pitt Town was flooded in July 2022. Credit: Oscar Colman
Successive state governments have allowed widespread development on the Hawkesbury-Nepean Valley, despite the region having one of the greatest flood risks in NSW, placing thousands of homeowners at risk of inundation.
The independent inquiry into the catastrophic 2022 NSW floods said the “single largest driver” of flood risk in the Hawkesbury-Nepean Valley was ongoing development on the floodplain. If a one-in-100-year flood struck today, 55,000 people would be forced to evacuate.
An insurance industry source, who spoke on condition of anonymity for commercial reasons, said properties along Cleary Drive in Pitt Town, 60 kilometres north-west of Sydney, may face steep insurance premiums, if they can obtain a policy at all, given the significant risk of flooding.
One property on the street sold for $2.4 million in July, just a month after a $645,000 development application was approved by the council despite the area being hit by four floods in three years.
Hemmed in on both sides by the Hawkesbury River, many of the Cleary Drive properties lie on the one-in-20-year flood level, but a hill running away from the river takes a sliver of the block to above the one-in-100-year level required for DAs to be approved.
Hawkesbury Council requires DAs to have extensive mitigation requirements for fire risk, but not the same consideration for flooding.
In response to questions from The Sun-Herald, Hawkesbury Council development approvals manager Steven Chong said development consent for Cleary Drive had been issued in 2009, based on a determination by the department a year before that still applied today.
Asked whether council accounted for the increasing severity and frequency of extreme weather events as part of the DA approval process, Chong said the council had adopted a “flood policy and schedule of flood-related development controls to guide subdivision and development”.
The known risk is likely to be compounded by climate change, with the Insurance Council of Australia warning the increasing frequency and severity of extreme events would detrimentally affect the affordability and availability of insurance in vulnerable areas.
ICA chief executive Andrew Hall said he felt a deep sense of frustration at the circular discussion within Australia after natural disasters hit: communities are impacted, massive associated costs, claims are settled, and the government pays off massive bills.
“We just continue to repeat the mistakes of past planning decisions,” Hall said.
While there had been positive movement on bushfire risk, properties washed away by flooding could be rebuilt without modification, he said.
Evacuation routes were considered as part of the DPE’s 2008 plan approval, but funding to improve those routes had not been provided, despite a recommendation by a NSW parliamentary committee in 2022.
The July 2022 flood reached 13.93 metres, the highest level since 1978, but remained well short of the worst recorded flood on record of 19.6 metres in 1867.
Heavy flooding in Mawson Place, Pitt Town. Water reached the first level in every house on the street in 2022.Credit: Brook Mitchell
University of NSW flood expert Stuart Khan said building more homes in flood-threatened areas was a “high-risk practice”, particularly with climate change increasing the risk of flooding along the Hawkesbury.
“We should be wide-eyed about increasing the real impacts of flood events by squeezing more people into these areas,” said Khan, noting the one-in-100 year flood planning levels used by councils failed to account for the increased severity of inundation.
“So you’re going to put more pressure on the evacuation routes and community when these extreme events occur.”
The Department of Planning and Environment declined to comment.
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