And it's the third one he has written about in his recently released book Maitland Speaks: The Experience of Floods.

While the book is largely the personal expriences of some of Mailtand's well known citizens and families during past floods, Mr Keys goes on to make some very important observations.

An expert on the subject of flooding in Maitland, he maintains the city - from council right down to local residents - is ill prepared for what is a future reality.

Mr Keys questions council's eagerness to build up the residential population in central Maitland which, he says, is totally flood prone including the whole CBD, and believes the city's levees have given locals the feeling of being impregnable to future flooding - which, he stresses, is most certainly not the case.

Here are some lightly edited extracts from the book (RRP $35), which is available at McDonald's Bookstore in The Levee, and Harry Hartog at Green Hills.

Central Maitland

The council, it must be said, has a 'wicked problem' here, that is, a problem with no simple or comfortable solution or with solutions that compound other problems. Understandably it wishes to preserve and promote the CBD, which contains an architecturally outstanding streetscape but which has suffered from the reduction of its market partly as a result of the decline in the nearby residential population.

In recent times the council, helped by federal funding, has invested millions of dollars to boost the amenity and drawing power of the CBD. But one of the means the council proposes to bolster High St - the encouragement of residential development nearby - will increase the numbers of people and properties at risk from floods.

With as many as 1700 new dwellings expected to be needed to meet the goal of tripling the population of the inner city, this could amount to the largest single residential development of urbanised floodplain land in Australian history.

The consequences, when next a big flood strikes, might be disastrous.

Indeed it can be argued that the policy of increasing the inner city's population to the level of 1954 will result in restoring the level of community flood vulnerability - at least when vulnerability is measured as the size of the population and the value of private assets that are exposed to the risk of flooding.

An increased population, too, will require additional supporting public infrastructure which will itself need costly restoration or replacement after floods.

Worse yet, from a community safety standpoint, engineering investigations have shown that the Long Bridge, a critical element of the evacuation route from Lorn and central Maitland to the west, might not withstand a big flood. The potential for the bridge to be compromised while there are still people seeking to evacuate is a serious matter but one which is not necessarily well understood in the community.

Construction work to raise west High St, leading to a higher and more secure roadway across Veterans Flat, is needed - but it will not come cheaply. Nor is it likely to be provided in the very near future.

The perception of flood risk in Maitland

The fact that for many years no flood has overtopped the ring levee, let alone the High St and Lorn levees, has led some residents to the erroneous belief that the levees were actually 'designed' to keep out all floods, even floods bigger than 1955's. People who hold this view are unlikely to be concerned about flooding as a threat to their interests. The likelihood is that they will not take notice of flood warnings and will do little to protect their belonging when a big flood is approaching.

Doubtless some will refuse to heed the call to evacuate as well.

The sad truth must be reiterated because it is critical to an understanding of Maitland's flood vulnerability.

The ring levee at South Maitland is designed to keep out floods only up to a level substantially lower than was reached in 1955. The High St and Lorn levees are intended to exclude up to about the level that occurred that year. Thus floods considerably smaller than what was experienced in 1955 will invade the protected area by overtopping the ring levee and entering South Maitland, Maitland Park and lower Elgin St before crossing the railway line into Maitland proper.

The educational task

The SES has offered flood management workshops to Maitland residents. These, however, have not generally been well subscribed: in 2015, on the occasion of the 60^th anniversary of the 1955 flood, three well-advertised workshops attracted little interest.

In the end two were cancelled and only nine people attended the one that was held. Worse still, only two of those nine were floodplain residents.

Learning about planning for what will need to be done during times of flooding, it seems, is no more popular in Maitland than is evacuating in the face of floodwaters. People who live or otherwise have interests in flood-prone locations are not enthusiastic about finding out how to prepare for and manage a risk that many believe is too remote to worry about ...

The residents are more difficult to engage than the business people. There are about 4000 people in the Maitland Council Area who live on the floodplain (some behind town-protecting levees and some on farms), but many in the built-up areas appear to believe that the levees have solved the problem which their community suffered from for so long, or alternatively they have made flooding so infrequent that it need not be worried about.

The odds make ignoring the issue seem to some a reasonable stance to adopt.

Others simply believe that the levees are impregnable and cite the fact they have kept the built up areas inundation-free for more than half a century. For these people the issue is not a matter of odds; they think that knowledge about flooding, and personal action in response, are no longer needed because flooding has been defeated. To them flooding is yesterday's issue and now irrelevant except for its historical interest.

Last word

Given the past there is plenty of reason to believe that floods will continue to be seen in times to come. Moreover Australian specialists in the field of climate change have suggested that big floods are likely to become more frequent in a warmer future while small floods become fewer.

Whether this turns out to be so - and we may not know for certain for decades - it must be expected that some of the floods of the future will be big ones. A few, no doubt, will be bigger than the great flood of 1955. No rainfall or flood record is unsurpassable: rainfall and flood height records are frequently beaten in Australia.

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