Queensland city’s flood-prone suburbs in spotlight as geoscientist warns worst yet to come
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Three months on from Cairns’ worst floods in recorded history, Donna Jardine and her neighbours still find themselves living on an “island” on the city’s northern beaches.
The sheer deluge of water down the Barron River on December 17 tore through a beachfront street, isolating dozens of residents as others desperately pleaded for help.
“When we realised we couldn’t get to people because [the road had gone], that’s where the panic set in,” Ms Jardine, a Holloways Beach resident, said.
The flooding and heavy rain that day damaged nearly 1,000 homes across the Cairns local government area, according to figures from the Queensland Reconstruction Authority.
Much of the damage in Cairns centred on suburbs north of the city — Machans Beach and Holloways Beach — near where the Barron River meets the sea.
Bigger floods ‘will happen’
The scale of the devastation sparked debate during this month’s local government election campaign — and continues to in the lead up to the October state election — about the future of the low-lying beachside suburbs.
People began settling in the area during the 1920s but there was a sharp rise in residential development in the 1960s and 70s.
The median house price is about $540,000.
Former Shire of Mulgrave councillor Ross Parisi said land on the beachfront was very expensive but the cheapest land available on the northern beaches was the Barron River delta because it was flood-bound.
He is one of many who believe the council and state government should stop approving any development on the Barron River flood plain, arguing newer construction and earthworks have exacerbated the risk residents face.
Geo scientist Jonathan Nott, who specialises in natural hazards, said he had been warning about Cairns’s vulnerability to catastrophic disasters for decades.
The James Cook University academic said while December’s flood was the largest since accurate records in Cairns began, “it wasn’t that big in terms of what we could get”.
Professor Nott said geological evidence pointed to at least one flood at an unknown time in the past that was at least double the size of what happened in December 2023.
“They can occur, they have occurred, and presumably they will again,” he said.
Driving up premiums
Professor Nott said the increasing monetary value of homes and other structures in the path of potential floods had consequences, even for people who lived in safer suburbs, because it affected insurers’ abilities to cover losses, therefore driving up premiums.
Like many affected by December’s floods, Holloways Beach resident Danny O’Shane, 80, had already dropped his insurance cover as it became unaffordable.
“About two years ago I stopped paying it, and when I stopped, we got the flood,” the Kuku Yalanji man said.
“I don’t feel sorry for myself. I think of a lot of other people who are in the same boat, you know.”
Professor Nott said councils and governments might find future natural disasters more expensive if they did not become more restrictive about development in natural disaster-prone areas.
He said authorities had often been “willing to take the risk” of dealing with floods “every 40 or 50 years” in order to satisfy housing demand.
“There will be litigation occurring in the courts because people will say, ‘You allowed me to build here. You really didn’t warn me how dangerous it was’,” Professor Nott said.
Council’s $1.8m ‘defence’ bill
One new structure set to be built in the northern beaches flood zone is a $25.5-million bridge, due to replace the causeway that leads to the now semi-isolated part of Holloways Beach where Ms Jardine lives.
She said she had previously been unaware of the risk of the road collapsing.
Representatives of a handful of northern beaches community groups recently met Queensland Disaster Recovery Minister Nikki Boyd, pleading for action to mitigate the flood risk.
Some decisions will also fall to the newly elected members of the Cairns Regional Council.
“It’s going to be difficult for council to try and wind [development] back,” said Machans Beach resident Deryck Thompson.
“At the very least, there should be a moratorium.”
Cairns Regional Council chief executive Mica Martin said it had already spent $1.8 million over the past five years defending decisions to refuse development applications in flood-prone areas.
She said development proposals were subject to “rigorous assessment” based on modelling to ensure resilience against one-in-100-year floods.
Flood mapping for the Barron River was most recently updated in 2017 and was due to be updated again with modelling from the December event.
The state development code and Cairns planning scheme contain construction standards for flood-prone areas that are meant to stop developments from worsening flooding for neighbouring properties.
“Many houses recently impacted by flooding were constructed before these requirements were in place,” Ms Martin said.
No money yet for retrofits, buybacks
With potential storm surges posing a much greater risk to the Far North Queensland coast than riverine flooding, Professor Nott said Tropical Cyclone Jasper should be treated as a warning.
He pointed to the Sunshine Coast as a region that had done a better job at restricting development along high-risk parts of its coastline compared to the rest of the state.
The Queensland government has not yet offered Far North residents grants to raise or retrofit their homes to be more flood-resistant following Tropical Cyclone Jasper.
Craig Crawford, a government MP whose electorate of Barron River includes the entire delta, believes there should be a scheme like the one in the state’s south-east after the 2021 and 2022 floods, which included voluntary buybacks.
Mr Crawford expected the number of properties needing to be raised, upgraded or bought back would be small, but with benefits for many.
“It means that everyone gets lower risk assigned to the area from the insurers,” he said.
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