It’s been 12 months since the most devastating of the three floods to hit the Gympie region last year started to recede, but residents and businesses are still counting the cost.
The total repair bill for the Gympie Regional Council is still being tallied, but to date, the GRC has submitted $52 million dollars of funding applications and applied for an additional $2 million in insurance.
“This is not reflective of the total repair cost as more submissions are to come,” said a spokesman for the council recently.
He said the estimates place the cost to infrastructure over the three floods to be nearly double that at between $90 to $100 million.
During the February Flood, the four evacuation centres overseen by the council provided accommodation to more than 460 people whose home were impacted by the floods or who were stranded in town because of flooding.
That’s because a total of 291 homes were flood impacted in the Gympie region – figures corroborated by the Queensland Reconstruction Authority in March of last year.
Of those, 112 were assessed as having severe damage and that is because of a number of factors including more than 1m of water above the living space flooring, significant damage to roof structures such as roof trusses, walls and ceilings collapsed or unstable, structural damage that requires major repairs and because the structure is not usable or habitable and cannot be secured.
These 112 dwellings were deemed uninhabitable by the council immediately after the flood, but since then some have been demolished and some, which were repairable, are either fixed or in the process of being repaired.
And speaking of repairs, Gympie Regional Council has more than 2100 roads in its road register, and of those, more than a quarter (around 600) have experienced some form of flood event damage, but that number could climb, with a further 400km of road to be assessed, with 1800km already examined.
The clean-up after the February flood, between 1 March, 2022 and 30 April, 2022 added an additional 11,072.61 tonnes of waste to council waste facilities when compared with the same period in 2021.
Sporting and recreational facilities were impacted such as the Gympie Netball courts, polocrosse and pony clubs, the Gympie Gem Club, AFL Grounds, Albert Park precinct, One Mile precinct, River to Rail Trail, Tansey Bowls Club, Gympie Youth Precinct and numerous council owned parks and gardens such as Nelson Reserve, Memorial Park, Leprechaun Park, Jack Stokes Oval and more.
The Gympie Gold Mining and Historical Museum took a massive hit, with a number of their lower lying building completely submerged, and dozens of exhibits, which can never be replaced, were either lost of destroyed.
In some cases, such as for the Gympie Netball Association, those clubs haven’t been able to return to their club houses and are still reliant on other sporting venues such as schools to host their games.
Next week, we will look into the number of Gympie region businesses impacted and the cost the floods contributed to the business economy of this region.
