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The Hunter Valley floods impacted on many of the renowned businesses of wine farming and horse breeding. The Hunter Valley area is renowned for its grape/wine farms. Over 1 foot of rain was dumped over the wine growing region over $100,000 was lost in one wine farming business alone, "The entire vineyard was under [4 to 6 feet] of water," said site manager Scott Harrington. The Hunter Valley is also known for the horses they breed (15 different horses). Many farmers were able to herd their horses to dry land but some didn’t make it. Many of these businesses are family run, “The cost from damage will hopefully be covered by insurance”, said wine farm owner. Many of the people will be devastated by the destruction of what the floods have done.Not only has the devastation been within family run businesses but also within the community where lives have been lost.
The Hunter Valley floods caused social, environmental and economical devastation. A number of fatalities occurred during the height of the storms, a family of four was killed as a section of road collapsed under their car as they drove along the Pacific Highway. Two people died when their 4-wheel drive was swept off a flooded bridge. A man died when he was swept into a storm water drain. Altogether the death toll reached 10 by the end of the floods. A bulk carrier, the MV Pasha Bulker was beached at Newcastle as it failed to heed a warning to move out to sea. 22 crew where winched to safety. 15,000 residents were evacuated throughout the Hunter Valley region and only after 7 days were they able to return back to their homes. Some stranded residence needed helicopter food drops. At one point, 105,000 homes were without power.
Overall, there is 1.5 billion dollars worth of damage to the affected areas in environmental, social and economic damage. Unfortunately many of these deaths were caused due to the overconfidence of residents and the ignorance of the warnings and dangers of potential floods with a false sense of security of levee bank protection. The cost of damage is a huge burden to the local governments funds and may take up to 5 years to regain after recovering from the disaster. Although there was an evacuation of 15,000 residents no one was seriously injured. With its massive amounts of damage and loss, the 2007 floods will hopefully provided a learning opportunity for more dangerous floods to come.
Many of these impacts can be prioritized for action but some simply can’t be as nothing can be done. The Hunter Valley flood mitigation scheme resulted in 170 km’s more levees and flood control structures along all the main rivers. This has not been enough to sustain all flood waters so more of these levees and flood control structures should be made along river levees that have proven to be too low. Raising levee heights and building more flood control structures is the only way we can prioritize these impacts. The only impacts that would benefit from these levees and control structures would be the deaths of horses would lower and the death toll would lower as the majority of deaths where by flood waters. Other Impacts such as the beaching of the coal ship and flooding of wine yards do not benefit by these improvements as flooding of rivers do not affect these impacts. Providing the public with necessary information concerning levee bank heights will hopefully help with the construction of levee bank heights around the Hunter Valley. |
