Managing Floods in a Volunteer Agency

Considerations Relating to Training, Planning and Response Activities in New South Wales, Australia: Keys, C (2003) Presented at the International Disaster and Emergency Readiness (IDER) Conference, London, 2003

Flooding is the planet's most costly natural disaster agent, and many jurisdictions have devised management structures and arrangements to deal with it. In the Australian state of New South Wales (NSW), councils of local government are charged with making decisions about development on floodplains and applying measures to mitigate the impacts of floods, but a volunteer agency is responsible for the coordination of community responses when flooding actually occurs. This paper focuses on the challenges related to managing floods when volunteers are in the front line of the management and are responsible for performing many of the tasks which must be undertaken. Difficulties emerge when flooding occurs only infrequently, as is the norm at the local level, and a number of strategies are being developed to help overcome the problems caused by lack of experience and practice in real-time flood management.

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