Seriously! I really hope this isn’t a new normal, but climate scientists would suggest it is.
That rain event in the wee hours of Saturday, 9th April saw my driveway become a level 3 rapid complete with wheelie bin white-water rafters from the neighbours across the road. Going to sleep the night before, I mistakenly thought somehow that we had escaped the brunt of it and it was all a furphy made up by the BoM.
5:30am and the sound of a tsunami from the skies woke me up. Worried about my infamous flooding basement, I moved downstairs to check out how my thousands of dollars of drainage works were holding out. Outside of a couple of leaks, lucky enough – the drainage system worked! Money well spent. To be honest, I was almost disappointed when the BoM were suggesting El Niño was coming back last Summer due to the coin I dropped on aforementioned drainage works. I thought they’d never see any action!
Outside of my personal Niagara Falls – and much more seriously, 31 homes in the Illawarra area were inundated with 14 left uninhabitable. Hopefully, these properties were insured. It’s probable that some weren’t. I’ve been told by a friend of mine that due to their home being flood affected, to insure their property, it would cost more than $3000/year!
So if more intense and unpredictable weather is a by-product of climate change and that we can expect the same if not worse than our most recent deluge. Outside of designing our houses like Noah’s Ark, what can we do to help our homes become more resilient? And should we even bother if the extremes are going to get more extreme?
I would suggest the current construction requirements to improve bushfire resilience in homes is pretty good. It’s not a panacea, but if all homes in bushfire-affected areas were built to the current code, there would be fewer houses lost during bushfire events.
Flooding, however, is a different beast altogether. Whilst we have good knowledge of flood-affected areas from our past historical records and can pinpoint areas that shouldn’t be built on. Extreme localised events like we saw on the 9th of April can affect homes that are, in terms of planning/historical records, not flood affected.
Does this mean we have to build Queenslander-style homes to account for these events?
Certainly, your classic Queenslander is a tried and true resilient flood design, but there are some simple things that we can implement in our own homes to make them a little bit more flood resilient and after a history of extreme events, Queensland are leading the way.
The Queensland Government have released a very informative document on some simple things we can implement in our homes that will assist both during and in the clean-up after a flood. Simple things like raising the height of air-conditioning units, leaving bottom treads of stairs open, selection of ground-floor materials. Check out the following document for informative tips.
Some little inner voice of me is hoping for an El Niño year to come back and dry things out for a while, but we all know what that entails. Either way, what we do know is that if we build resilience into our homes, we are in a better place to confront the potential perils of a changing climate.
Whilst we prepare our own circles of influence, I can only hope that we can address the main cause of climate change being our carbon footprints. The more we have to rebuild from disaster, the more carbon footprint we cause and the more we get stuck in that terrible self-fulfilling spiral.
