In the European history of the area of the present Maitland City there have probably been 60 or more of them, of which 51 can be confirmed for the period since 1840. 

What can we tell from these deaths?

There are several patterns, and some lessons. One pattern is that many floods have claimed small numbers of lives rather than large numbers of people dying in a few big events. 

In this sense Maitland is not like Gundagai, where 89 people died in a Murrumbidgee River flood in 1852. 

Nor is it like Queensland’s Lockyer Valley, where more than 20 people were killed in a flood in January 2011.

These were cases of floods invading towns, washing buildings away and killing their occupants in numbers. 

Maitland has only lost about nine people this way in its entire history – three in 1864 when houses were swept into the river, two more in 1893 when people drowned inside their houses and four in 1955. 

In “the 1955”, the greatest of all Maitland floods, a man was washed off a skillion roof, a woman was swept from a tree in which she had taken refuge, a man sheltering in a railway signal box west of Maitland Station was drowned when he jumped as the box threatened to ­collapse, and another man drowned inside his house.

Overwhelmingly, flood deaths in Maitland have been the result not of water invading built-up areas but of ­people entering floods. 

They did so on foot, on horses, in sulkies or in boats. 

Most of them engaged intentionally with the water. 

In a few cases people died in floodwaters they had not intended to enter.

Three Maitland children, for example, drowned when they slipped down the river’s banks. 

In 1955 four people were electrocuted and another died when he fell into the water from a great height while being rescued. 

A few have died while rescuing others or trying to save people’s belongings from inundation.

More than half the deaths were of adult males, a reflection of the tendency for men more than women to indulge in risky behaviour. 

Central Maitland has seen more flood deaths than any other locality within the present city’s limits.

The decline in the numbers of deaths over time is arresting. Of the confirmed flood deaths 34 occurred before 1920 and only 17 thereafter.

Five individual floods in the nineteenth century killed at least four people, but of all the floods of the twentieth century only the 1955 event, which claimed 11, has seen as many or more fatalities. 

And since 1955 only one flood death has been recorded.

A decline in the rate at which floods have killed people has occurred throughout Australia.

But the link between death and the entering of floodwaters has remained: it is people engaging with floods who have dominated the fatalities over the decades. 

This was demonstrated in the Hunter Valley outside Maitland City during the 2007 flood when three people lost their lives.

Two were killed when their car was washed off a road and another was swept bodily into a flooded drain and drowned.

Our lives these days are lived with a greater degree of separation from flooding than they used to be. 

Maitland’s flood mitigation system has promoted this separation, and so far it has prevented floods from invading the built-up areas of the floodplain.

But when the separation disappears, or when people break it, floods can reassert their capacity to kill.

Over the last century floods have killed far fewer people in the Maitland area than road accidents or ­behaviourally-induced cancers like lung cancer.

But floods occur only for short periods of time and are “available” only very briefly as potential causes of death. 

Road accidents and smoking are by contrast always available.

If floods occurred all the time and people regularly engaged them as they tend to do, the rate and number of flood-induced deaths would be much higher than it is.

In the main, preserving our lives and safety during floods is in our own hands.

Very occasionally, in genuinely big floods, as in Queensland’s Lockyer Valley three years ago, substantial numbers of people die when water invades the human domain. 

But much more common is the situation of people dying in small numbers, often in “routine” floods of no great severity, because they take on the water.

Such people fail to understand the risk. Accordingly, they lack respect for the danger that flooding poses. 

Death is the high price some pay.

Chas Keys is a former Deputy Director General of the NSW State Emergency Service.

Flood special part 2

Flood special part 3

Flood special part 4