Brisbane, Australia
CNN
—
On a fine day, locals arrive on boats that motor up the Hawkesbury River in New South Wales to dine on the back deck of the Paradise Café.
But for the fourth time in 18 months, café owner Darren Osmotherly is rushing to move his equipment to higher ground as floodwater rises across Greater Sydney after days of heavy rain.
“Every six hours to eight hours (we’re) trying to have a hot shower and get changed again and try to have a coffee break room or a short sleep in between,” said Osmotherly, who says he’s barely slept for three days.
When Osmotherly opened the café 15 years ago to give disabled people on houseboats an easy place to moor for lunch, the property in Lower Portland hadn’t flooded in 30 years. But this is the fourth flood since last February, and the most recent since March.
“We built it all floodproof to cop a flood every now and then, but to have four floods…” he said.
Flooding in Australia’s most populous state has become the new normal, as residents in the Greater Sydney area contend with increasingly erratic seasonal swings.
The area, which is home to 8.12 million people, or around a third of the country’s total population, has always experienced some degree of flooding during the early summer months.
But what was previously a once-in-a-generation event has become commonplace, raising questions as to the long term sustainability of flood-prone communities.
More than half a meter of rain (1.6 feet) has drenched parts of eastern New South Wales during the last 48 hours, with spills from numerous dams causing flood warnings across the region.
In western Sydney, the Warragamba Dam – Australia’s largest urban reservoir – started overflowing at 2 a.m. Sunday, and at its peak 515 gigalitres was flooding over its walls – the same amount of water held in Sydney Harbour.
A spokesman for the state’s water authority says the dam doesn’t have a flood mitigation component, so no water was released ahead of the downpour, which came when the state’s dam network was already 97% full. He said the dam wasn’t to blame for the flooding.
“It’s quite an extraordinary weather event. Warragamba does spill into a particular river system for sure, but there are a whole vast areas of Sydney that are flooded that aren’t downstream of Warragamba,” the spokesman said.
It’s a startling turnaround from just 15 years ago when the state decided to build a desalination plant to safeguard Sydney’s water supply after years of drought.
But this year the La Nina weather system generated more rainfall, and the Bureau of Meteorology says there’s a 50-50 chance of it forming later in 2022 – twice the normal likelihood. The climate crisis is expected to increase the frequency and intensity of both La Nina and El Nino, which causes drought – that means, if La Nina does form again this year, there could be yet more rain.
For locals of Greater Sydney, flooding has become a recurring nightmare.
Many are still recovering from the last flood in March, when water swamped many of the same areas, forcing businesses to shutter and rescuers to wade through putrid mud to help trapped residents.
The event caused $4.8 billion in damage, making it the country’s third most expensive disaster ever, according to the Insurance Council of Australia.
Hundreds of millimeters of rain fell over the weekend, and there was still more to come, Carlene York, the New South Wales State…