This week marked the 60th anniversary of the 1955 Maitland flood.
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Chas Keys, a former deputy director general of the NSW SES and honorary associate of Risk Frontiers (Macquarie University), prepared a series of articles about Maitland and its ability to deal with flooding.
In part 3 he looks at the city’s flood markers and signs.
In 1982 the Department of Public Works, builder of the Lower Hunter Flood Mitigation Scheme, fixed more than a hundred flood markers to power poles within the City of Maitland.
They were in central Maitland, South Maitland, Louth Park, Horseshoe Bend, East Maitland, Lorn, Bolwarra, Pitnacree, Phoenix Park and elsewhere, and they indicated the peak level reached by the great flood of 1955.
Their siting was guided by maps made at the flood's peak and they were accurate to within about 150mm. They were important in helping people to understand just where the flood reached and how deep the water was. Some were more than four metres above ground level.
By 2008, about two thirds of the markers had disappeared.
They were the victims of power pole replacement, rusting nails, souvenir hunters and deliberate removal by people concerned about the value of their properties.
Now, in 2015, there are hardly any left.
A simple, inexpensive reminder of flooding and a sense of its potential impacts has virtually been lost. Soon it will have disappeared entirely.
Maitland City Council has been unenthusiastic about the markers and has never sought to maintain them.
Indeed it has passively awaited their disappearance.
It has allowed a few large signs to be erected about the flood mitigation scheme, but these give no sense of actual flooding. They create no impression of how serious a big flood can be.
Like the original large Public Works billboards on the floodplain, they are simply explanations and advertisements for the scheme.
Council's negative attitude toward the markers was sadly unnecessary. Perhaps counter-intuitively, signs about historic flood levels have nowhere been demonstrated to have negative impacts upon property values.
What is undeniable is that floods reduce values - temporarily.
Those values always recover, as they have most recently in Brisbane after the severe flood of January 2011, which saw water enter thousands of houses.
Similar recoveries have been recorded elsewhere in Australia and around the world. But flood education devices do not damage property values.
A different kind of Maitland flood signage dates back to the 19th century, when the gauge at the Belmore Bridge was painted on one of the pylons. People could see the current level of a flood and work out roughly how high it would reach, given known heights upstream, particularly at Singleton.
These markings wore off over time.
At one stage, in 1875, the Maitland Mercury asked plaintively for the gauge to be repainted for the benefit of the residents, for whom a trip to the riverside was a regular thing during floods.
It was part of their working out whether they needed take steps to protect their belongings.
Today, checking the river remains a normal flood-time thing as the crowds lining the Riverside Walk in June 2007 showed.
It would be appropriate if the Belmore Bridge gauge were painted on a pylon, with gauge heights in whole metres and the numbers large enough to be seen from both the Riverside Walk and the Lorn levee.
Thus people would be able to get a picture of the height of the forecast peak and some sense of where inundation is likely to occur. This would aid them in visualising a coming severe flood and sensing its potential impacts.
Sadly, such an educational initiative seems most unlikely to be undertaken. Fear about providing simple flood information remains.
In flood-liable Maitland of all places, that is unfortunate.
Chas Keys is the author of Maitland, City on the Hunter: fighting floods or living with them?