🚀 go-pugleaf

On 19/01/2011 8:34 AM, Brad wrote:
> On Jan 18, 10:58 pm, Sylvia Else<syl...@not.here.invalid>  wrote:
>> On 18/01/2011 5:08 PM, LuR wrote:
>>
>>> If you want to live in a flood
>>> area that's the risk YOU take and hopefully you pay the premium for
>>> flood damages too on your insurance. Maybe that should be mandatory for
>>> future floods in known affected areas.
>>
>> That's going a bit far. But people who choose to live in flood prone
>> areas and not insure should be required to sign a statutory declaration
>> to the effect that they won't winge about it if there's a flood, nor
>> ask for, nor even accept, any financial assistance.
>>
>> But the government (state and local councils) have a lot to answer for.
>> Are we so short of land in Australia that we need to resort to building
>> in low lying areas?
>>
>> Sylvia.
>
> Australia as a continent is a low lying area. There are often not a
> lot of choices.

Yet there often are. Grafton, whose levee held, is built just a few 
kilometres north of higher groud. Most of Grantham's buildings seem to 
have been placed at the lowest point available, needlessly occupying 
fertile land, when there is higher ground within a kilometre.

The media have focussed on the flooded parts of Ipswich and Brisbane, 
yet most of those towns have remained above water and only the 
insistance on building on what was clearly a river flood plain has lead 
to flooding of buildings.

When some towns were originally established, getting water from the 
river to buildings situated on higher ground would have been a problem, 
but that's no longer true, and some of the flooded areas have been built 
up in relevatively recent times.

Sylvia.