We’re not ready for another flood, Lower Murray irrigators warn

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Kathryn Rothe still shudders when she thinks about the impact the River Murray floods of a year ago have had on her Murray Bridge farm.

Her family were forced to sell the cattle they had kept for 30 years when their floodplain property was submerged under three metres of water.

Within months, the trees and shrubs they had so carefully planted and nurtured, 30,000 of them, were almost all dead.

In Mrs Rothe’s mind, it all could have been avoided.

The floodwater came not over the private levee which protected her property from the swollen river, but over the boundary from the former SA Water treatment plant next door.

“The exact spots we identified with the laser leveller are the exact spots where the water came in,” she said.

“They should have listened to us.

“We had solutions, we had ideas.”

Instead of helping her through the biggest natural disaster in a generation, dealing with the authorities proved endlessly frustrating.

She and her husband were threatened with legal action if they touched any of the embankments around their farm owned by state government agencies or the Murray Bridge council.

When they asked State Emergency Service volunteers at the local showground for extra sandbags, they were accused of reselling them online and had their car photographed.

The whole period had been “completely draining”, she said.

Yet the Rothes’ experience has proven typical of irrigators up and down the Lower Murray, many of whom found themselves sidelined, disbelieved and left at the mercy of a dysfunctional Department for Environment and Water during the floods, according to testimony given to an inquiry in Murray Bridge last week.

Worse still, witnesses said, authorities had not yet learned the lessons of 2022-23, leaving the Murraylands at risk of another disaster.

‘We need to act immediately’

The irrigated floodplains along the River Murray between Mannum and Wellington include some of South Australia’s most valuable and productive farmland.

The plains are usually protected from flooding by 110 kilometres of levees, most of which failed during the 2022-23 floods.

Just last month, the federal and South Australian governments promised $31.3 million for much-needed repairs to the levee system.

But at last Thursday’s parliamentary hearing in Murray Bridge, irrigators said that money couldn’t be spent soon enough.

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Another flood could come at any time, Riverglen farmer Ian Mueller said, given how much water was already sitting in dams and lakes upstream.

But if the levees weren’t fixed by mid-April, when the opening rains of winter came, it would be too wet for any repairs to take hold.

In that case, work would have to wait until spring or summer – and that could be too late.

The red clay used to hold together many levees over the past year would simply “slump away” if the river rose again, warned Wall Flat irrigator Daniel Martin, who lost hundreds of thousands of dollars during the floods.

The biggest levees on the Lower Murray, those at Jervois and Mypolonga, were in no state to withstand another high river, other speakers said.

The cost of bringing them up to scratch could ultimately reach something like $200 million, Murray Bridge producer Richard Reedy estimated, and irrigators could not be expected to foot the bill.

Long Flat irrigator Joanne Pfeiffer agreed, saying her farm had produced no income for 15 months after her family had been forced to sell most of their 250 cattle.

“We farm on a floodplain,” she said.

“We have to accept that sometimes that river is going to take back what is its.

“However, if we were better prepared, and the government worked with us, and there was sufficient funding on the table to do what’s necessary, a lot of (what happened in 2022-23) could be avoided.”

Speakers at the hearing suggested:

• Installing more turn-out points along the levees, so trucks would not have to reverse for kilometres if repairs were needed
• Increasing the height of roads which ran alongside irrigated areas, including Ferry Road at Wellington East
• Installing gates which would allow the levees to be breached, deliberately, in the event of a flood, instead of having them fail in difficult-to-reach places
• Planting Kikuyu grass over levees to hold them together

What other lessons does the state government need to learn?

Speakers at the hearing had plenty more advice for the state government, too:

• Decentralise the response: The appointment of a single coordinator to direct the flood recovery had proven “completely inadequate”, Regional Development Australia executive Ben Fee said. The tactic had worked for bushfires in the Adelaide Hills and on Kangaroo Island; but a flood affected an area, and a population, 10 times bigger, and for much longer. Coordinator Alex Zimmerman had done great work, but could never have been expected to keep up to speed with everything happening across the Murraylands and Riverland.
• Listen to locals: Irrigators with lived experience of previous floods, including 1956, were disregarded by engineers and contractors who thought they knew better. A contractor had tried to tell Mypolonga dairy producer David Smart the river was flowing north, not south. Jervois irrigator Dino Gazzola sent his son, in his family’s truck, to get levee repair material from Mypolonga to Jervois because contractors couldn’t figure out the logistics. “In 1956, with their old technology, with a cable-driven dredge, they fixed it,” he said. “Here, today, with our modern technology – remote control, hydraulics and everything else, drones – they can’t even plug a hole.”

• Let farmers protect their properties: Irrigators who wanted to keep strengthening levees as the flood approached were told to stay away or face legal action. In one case, the police were called to stop residents working at Jervois. Locals patrolled the bank there three times a day and laid sandbags into the night while DEW staff took Christmas holidays.
• Give local staff authority to make decisions: During the Millennium Drought, managers within the public service had made decisions and worn the consequences, Mr Reedy told the hearing. But so much experience had since been lost within the Department for Environment and Water that staff were no longer able to make decisions, if they were allowed to do so at all.

MPs Nicola Centofanti, Jing Lee, Russell Wortley and Reggie Martin spent almost six hours listening to people’s testimony and asking questions.

They heard from buffalo farmer Corey Jones, who said “it almost broke me in half” training his herd to use a new dairy after having evacuated his family home just in time for Christmas, then endured the Mypolonga levee breaking on Boxing Day.

They heard from Wellington East grower Bardy McFarlane, who spent up to $500,000 pumping water off his property, and had lost “well over quarter of a million dollars” worth of production.

They heard from Mr Smart, who spent “an arm and a leg” pulling out and reinstalling his robotic dairy, but whose sons had since got nine-to-five jobs and might never return to the industry.

The MPs agreed to return to the Murraylands for a visit to some of the affected farms in the coming months.

The parliamentary inquiry into the state government’s flood response is due to wrap up later this year.

Disclosure: The author made a submission to the inquiry, based on his reporting on the flood emergency throughout 2022-23.