Just a few months after the last floods, it's still the same

The toll of recurring disasters is beginning to be felt among New South Wales residents, many of whom are desperate to escape the overflowing rivers and forest fires.

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< p class= "css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">"Every time it floods it gets higher and higher," said April Harley, 38, a Camden resident who has suffered four floods in the last four month. "It's scary."

The first, in March, flooded a few homes on its street in Sydney's southwestern suburbs. The next one, the following week, went a little higher. The one in April flooded a few more houses. The most recent, which peaked on Tuesday, descended on the entrance to his home.

In March, I wrote about how the Successive floods of the past two years were taking their toll on residents along the Hawkesbury River. Last December, we wrote about how areas that had been hit by the Black Summer bushfires were then battered by floods. Residents were desperate to escape the disaster.

Now I'm in Sydney writing about the latest wave of flooding for an article to be published soon , and I feel like deja vu.

Some things remain the same since I covered the March floods. Around Hawkesbury-Nepean, where I traveled, residents are tired and exhausted again, but they are bouncing back with the no-nonsense attitude they applied to every disaster. Communities mobilized to support each other. Even as locals worry about what the future might bring, they speak of others who have been hit harder and compare each new flood to the worst in the region's history. Essentially, their thinking is: It could always be worse.

But the toll of recurring disasters is starting to take its toll. Some residents have had enough and have decided to sell their house. Others spend hundreds of thousands of dollars raising their homes. And while the prospect of another flood was an ominous but somewhat remote possibility last time around, this time around many seem to be counting the days until the next disaster, with reports of La Niña possibly returning before the end. of the year.

The conversation around disaster mitigation has taken on greater urgency. Some experts are calling on the government to come up with a plan to buy the most flood-prone homes. Approval of future housing developments along floodplains has come under greater scrutiny, particularly in the Hawkesbury-Nepean area, where the population is expected to nearly double over the next 30 years.

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"It's getting really tough," Venecia Wilson said on Friday as she watched rescuers clear water from the Windsor Bridge in Windsor. The "flood proof" bridge has become something of an emblem of poor government disaster planning, having been flooded several times since its completion in 2020.

Like many residents, Mrs . Wilson, who lives in a nearby town, criticized the speed and scale of development in the area, which has increased the number of people while reducing the land's ability to absorb water.