She (Jenny Hill) obviously hardly slept and she said what she said without a lot of the bulldust politicians like to carry on with during natural disasters. It was all factual, without the platitudes.
FLOODWATER is floodwater. Right? No, not always if you are in the insurance game. The Eskimos have 50 different words for snow and the insurance industry has about the same number for floodwater.
People who have been through the Townsville floods are about to find out how many word definitions there are for the water that invaded Townsville homes and businesses.
If you haven’t got flood insurance you might be in for a battle. In many cases even with flood insurance, policy holders could find themselves in a stand-off situation with those they thought were there to look after their better interests.
You can bet insurance companies will be calling in hydrologists to give them an overview situation of what happened in Townsville.
Hydrologists will also be asked to advise on individual claims.
Let me tell you about David and Kim Scott who live at Macknade near Ingham. Their house was flooded after Cyclone Ellie in 2009.
They lodged a claim with their insurer and were astonished when a hydrologist arrived on their doorstep to determine if the floodwater which invaded their home was rising or escaping. Sounds bizarre, but that is what happened. David d asked the hydrologist to explain n the difference between n rising and escaping floodwater. “He back- pedalled and said he couldn’t. My point of view is that it’s all floodwater regardless s if it’s coming in or escaping,’’ David said.
In the end David told the insurance representative e he was going to the media.
“He said: ‘you d don’t ’ want to go to the media’ and I said ‘no, it’s you who doesn’t want me to go to the media’,’’ David said at the time.
The upshot was the insurance company didn’t pay up. David and Kim cancelled their policy. When I spoke to them this week, they were once again watching Herbert River floodwaters rise up their front steps steps.
They keep the doors shut to keep the crocs out of the house.
Lawyers sure to leap in
THE likelihood is that what happened in Townsville will turn into a lawyer’s free-for-all once the insurance companies start sorting through claims.
I spoke to geohydrologist Dr Chris Cuff from C&R Consulting Pty Ltd in Townsville yesterday. Like oth other hydrology firms, his com company is undertaking a for forensic analysis of the flo flood. He told me there we were terms like “riverine flow flow, overland flow, back flow flow, afflux (backwards flow flow) that describe the pat paths water chooses to follow follow. These are legal definitions and no doubt they will be trotted out when disputes inevitably arise over claims. For example, there is a difference between a house being flooded in North Ward by water running off Castle Hill and a house being flooded in Railway Estate by floodwater from Ross River and the Ross Dam.
Dr Cuff: “This flood is unique in that it dumped more than 1.15m of rain on Townsville in only 11 days. In 1999-2000 the city copped 1.9m of rain, but it was over the duration of an entire wet season.
“The Night of Noah in 1998 saw 0.8m of rainfall on the city in about 15 hours.”
If you are like most people you will be confused by this one-in-100year flood the city just had when there was another similarly titled flood in 1998. The helpful Dr Cuff explained it does not mean this is a flood that could happen only once every 100 years. It means there is a 1 per cent chance of a flood like this occurring in any given year.
Freakishly, Central Queensland had seven “one-in-100-year” floods over a 10-year period in the early 20th century.
I asked Dr Cuff why South Townsville escaped a dunking.