The summer of 2000-2001

One of the great flood periods in the history of NSW Keys, C. (2001) presented at the 41st annual conference of the Floodplain Management Authorities of NSW, Parramatta, 2001

New South Wales (NSW) has just witnessed a summer of unusually widespread and frequent flooding. The time between late October 2000 and late March 2001 was not unprecedented in these terms but the estimates of the costs attributable to flooding in this period suggest that it deserves to be thought of as one of the great flood periods of the State's history. Mercifully, few deaths occurred and only a small number of dwellings were destroyed or had to be condemned, but in purely economic terms the damage was very severe indeed and it is not fanciful in the context of economic losses to regard the summer just gone as being akin to the great flood years of the past. Certainly the damage bill in the state appears to have been substantially higher than in any of the other bad flood years of recent decades - such as 1971, 1974, 1976, 1984, 1986, 1988, 1990 and 1998.

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