NSLA Disaster Preparedness Seminar: Disaster's impact on ... · The others were two un-named...
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Beyond Disaster Cardwell & District Historical Society The Cost of Recovery
NSLA Disaster Preparedness Seminar: Disaster's impact on ... · The others were two un-named 對cyclones in 1918. One lashed Mackay in January, and the other devastated Innisfail,
The Elite Bracket • 1899 Princess Charlotte Bay ‘Mahina’
• 1918 Mackay (January)
• 1918 Innisfail (March)
• 2011 Cardwell (February) ‘Yasi’
Bureau of Meteorology
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Cyclone Yasi is one of the four most intense storms recorded in Queensland, according to the Australian Bureau of Meteorology. The first of these was cyclone Mahina which hit Princess Charlotte Bay north of Cooktown in 1899. The others were two un-named cyclones in 1918. One lashed Mackay in January, and the other devastated Innisfail, and Cardwell on March 10, 1918. My family, descended from Cardwell’s white settlers in the 1860s, often recalled how, in that 1918 cyclone, the sea washed into town. With that in mind, I began preparing to evacuate three days before Yasi arrived, and drove out of Cardwell 24 hours prior. Most people in Australia’s tropical north understand and respect the awesome power of cyclones, and generally apply the lessons of history well. However the ferocity of Yasi was beyond the experience of virtually everyone still living, and most who stayed to confront the storm, now say they would not have done so, had they realised its frightening power.
My 1912 home
A rapid ocean surge of 5 metres
Predicted tide
Actual tide around 1.00 am
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In addition to wind gusts approaching 300 kilometres per hour, Yasi generated an ocean surge officially measured at more than five metres. The surge washed into Cardwell around One AM, on Thursday, February Three. One elderly gentleman, Theo Chrisohos, barricaded inside the remains of his wrecked home, described how the water rose above his waist, and how he was frightened by the speed with which the sea raced in and then retreated. This chart, recorded by Queensland’s Department of Environment and Resource Management, via a buoy in Hinchinbrook Channel off Cardwell, supports Theo’s description of a tsunami-like wave. It also shows what few except Theo realised, that at the time of the scheduled high tide more than three hours earlier, the ocean even then, was entering parts of the town and submerging the highway. During the major surge, a total of around two kilometres of Australia’s main coastal highway - Highway One - was flooded by the sea.
Height of the surge
The power of the surge
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Debris on embankments showed where the ocean rose more than two metres above the highway. The fortunate aspect, is that this main surge arrived near to the predicted low tide. Had Yasi’s centre hit the coast three to four hours earlier, on the normal high tide, the ocean levels would likely have been two metres higher. The scale of devastation in Cardwell would have been magnified beyond imagination.
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Our museum is on Victoria Street, Cardwell’s main street which also doubles as Highway One. It was the worst damaged of all buildings in Cardwell’s historic precinct. It’s not clear how much water damage was caused by the ocean surge and how much by rain.
Museum
CWA
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Part of the CWA building three doors away, was torn off and flung into the roof of the J. C. Hubinger Museum. Part of the museum’s verandah roof was torn away and its heavy wooden front doors and a number windows blown in. Piles of debris washed into the front of the museum, and the surrounding precinct.
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Virtually everything inside our Museum was left exposed. Irreplaceable exhibits lay under a chaos of debris, and were soaked by constant rain.
Inside the Hubinger Museum
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The majority of Cardwell residents evacuated, and most were not allowed to return until the fourth day after the cyclone. Everyone’s initial focus was on survival. It was exhausting. Distressing. Residents helped one another. Officially organised help was overwhelmingly lacking. The SES heroes we’d heard about in the Brisbane floods never arrived in Cardwell. A handful of SES volunteers did excellent work, but in general the organisation was disorganised, unhelpful and unfriendly. Army personnel had more empathy with, understanding of, and respect for our desperate situation. But inexplicably, the Army was forced to leave town before its work was completed. Teams from volunteer organisations like Lions and the churches arrived from other towns but were confronted by government bureaucratic barriers. Often they were told they weren’t qualified to offer help and ordered to leave. Cardwell residents relied heavily on one another, and on visiting relatives and friends, for the enormous physical efforts required.
Where to start!
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Members of the Cardwell and District Historical Society, and other residents, put their own shattered lives on hold and regrouped a fortnight after Yasi, to begin a salvage at our museum. There was no power, a limited water supply, and it was still raining.
Curator Helen
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Our Museum Curator and Council Librarian, Helen Pedley, donned her gloves and worked with us.
Drying out
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The immediate challenge was to retrieve what was left of our collection, attempt to clean and dry items, and find emergency storage for them. That task fell principally on community volunteers, many of whom were living in leaking homes, under tarpaulins, in caravans, with friends, or in other towns.
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Because of the debris, the museum salvage was difficult and dangerous. The building had been officially marked as a ‘No Go’ area.
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We ignored that. Had we not, little if any of our collections would have been saved. Much of the retrieval had to be done via side windows. Wheelie bins were used instead of ladders. Salt and sand had been forced into sealed display cabinets. Furniture was broken, and glass sand-blasted.
Monica’s 1927
wedding dress
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A few exhibits - including this 1927 wedding dress - came through virtually unscathed. Our Society’s operational assets were virtually all destroyed, except for our electronic files. As Yasi approached, our secretary Dianne Smith backed up all computer data at the museum.
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Other computer back-up files were kept off-site and recovered. We had a MobileMe subscription with Apple, so many of our vital records were backed up via its ‘cloud’ computing service. When we are re-established, we will look at extending the scope of our electronic back-up.
Losing their lustre
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Some important items salvaged, which are largely physically intact, have since lost colour and character through the water and wind damage. Electronic images for display or illustration, rather than simple record keeping, are the obvious way of retaining the memory of the original lustre and true style of such items.
Ewen
Phil
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We received valuable help from Ewen McPhee and Sue Valdis from the Museum of Tropical Queensland in Townsville. They worked with us to salvage exhibits, and provided professional advice and a generator to power fans to help dry rain-soaked collections. We continue to work closely with Ewen, who is helping reinstate our Museum.
President Anne
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Our president, Anne Mealing, replaced our missing letterbox.
Built 1892 Cost £273 = $26,500 now
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The Historical Society is lessee of the museum building, which is owned by Cassowary Coast Regional Council. Until Yasi, our museum, erected as Cardwell’s Town Hall in 1892, was the oldest surviving, substantially intact structure built for local government in North Queensland.
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We found a vacant shop to use as a temporary museum - the rent is covered under Council insurance - but we have had to hire additional storage space. Despite major roof damage, the structure of our 120 year old museum was substantially intact after Yasi. Its walls were all standing and their valuable timbers remained in place, despite some staining. By last Christmas, when there was no sign of restoration beginning, and the next cyclone season was upon us, the Historical Society expressed its concerns to our landlord, the Council. Similar concerns were conveyed by the Federation of Australian Historical Societies.
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In the New Year, we received a letter from the Council’s CEO, on behalf of the Mayor, Councillor Bill Shannon, advising: “The Council has reached agreement with its insurers not to demolish the building but instead to reinstate it to its former condition utilizing as much of the original building materials as possible.” The president of the Federation of Australian Historical Societies, Associate Professor Don Garden, received a similar assurance. Those assurances were hollow. On January 17, our members discovered that the two side walls of the museum had been pulled down that day...and dumped.
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The facade remained. Shocked and angered Historical Society members, led by president, Anne Mealing, made an agreement with representatives of Council, the Project Manager Lend Lease, and the builder, Ambrose, to meet on site early next morning to discuss saving the facade. By the time our members arrived for that meeting at 8.00 am, workmen had pulled down the facade. Community anger erupted.
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Our Mayor, Councillor Bill Shannon, defended what had taken place, claiming the Council was advised that the museum could not be saved. With the museum lying in the town dump, the Mayor made the inexplicable public statement that: “Cardwell’s J C Hubinger Museum will be restored to its former glory.” He also announced that Council officers had arranged for members of our Historical Society to go to the Council dump - if we wished - to retrieve useful pieces of our Museum building.
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The sad truth is that our president had to intervene to stop the last of three piles of dumped museum timbers being bull-dozed, so volunteers could salvage a single trailer load from this rare and precious corpse.
Court House repairs
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Later, in a meeting with the Historical Society, a lower ranked Council officer admitted and I quote: “The easy way out was to demolish the whole thing and rebuild.” We’ve since seen an assessment by heritage building experts for the Queensland Department of Environment and Resource Management, recommending the museum be repaired, and stating that demolition should be a ‘last resort’. The builder, Ambrose, acknowledged that because the stumps and the original floor joists were left, the project could be called a ‘repair’. This also allowed for ‘like for like’ replacement of materials, avoiding stringent modern codes.
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The stupid and depressing irony is that most of the stumps and the floor had been replaced previously. What they dumped was almost entirely original. What they kept to rebuild from, was generally not.
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A modern replica of our 1892 Town Hall, using new timbers and materials was built in eight weeks. The insurer Suncorp handed the building to Council last week.
A ‘replica’ of our 120-year-old town hall, built in 8 weeks
Vice President Stephanie
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Cardwell has a strong and energetic Historical Society with diverse strengths, but the constant battle against mounting odds in our efforts to rebuild and recover is taking its toll.
Historic 1924 rail station
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Since Yasi we have re-established a temporary museum: recorded oral histories of Yasi; launched an historical publication on Cardwell; sponsored and launched a book of Yasi stories; halted plans to demolish our 1924 railway station; gained Council endorsement for an expanded historical precinct; obtained funding from the United States to rebuild Sunbeam House, an iconic 19th century building collapsed by Yasi; and raised grants totalling around sixty thousand dollars to re-equip our organisation.
Sunbeam House in 1976
Kept in the dark
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The crushing reality is, that while our volunteer Historical Society was raising money in the United States to reinstate our heritage, our paid local government representatives were planning to pull it down and dump it. An insurance contract worth eight hundred and eighty-four thousand dollars, for rebuilding our museum and repairing two other heritage buildings, was drawn up between the Council’s insurer, Suncorp, and Suncorp’s builder, Ambrose. Our community would like to be sure we’re getting value for money through that contract, but despite many questions to Council we remain unable to make that judgement.
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One of the few benefits of Yasi is that nearly everyone now knows where Cardwell is. For a brief period our region was at the centre of national, even worldwide attention, although that faded rapidly.
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Now, fourteen months later, problems persist and some are worsening: an acquaculture venture that was farming prawns for sale to the Japanese sushi market, has just laid off 23 workers; a mariculture operation farming barramundi did not re-open after Yasi; banana farmers say their recovery will take two to three years;
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and the future of the privately-owned Port Hinchinbrook marina, which provided one of the defining images of Queensland’s year of disaster in 2011, remains in limbo.
Girringun flame tree
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Backpacker accommodation in Cardwell is greatly diminished. The Girringun Aboriginal Arts community, which has a history of nationwide success, is struggling, and tourism, which underwrites Cardwell’s economy, is suffering. Social infrastructure has also taken a massive hit: student numbers at Cardwell’s State Primary School remain at around 60 percent of their establishment level.
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More than 50 families have moved to settle elsewhere. Virtually every building in Cardwell was damaged: several historic buildings were destroyed; some 50 buildings have since been demolished; prominent meeting places took months to re-open; and a couple, like Cardwell’s Country Club, are still under repair.
Once the Freemasons’ Hall
No funds to clear foreshore debris left by Yasi 14 months ago
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Insurance rebuilding has been frantic, but is far from complete: our public jetty is only partly repaired, and our foreshore remains strewn with debris because there is no funding to clear it. Our community assumed that our damaged town assets and infrastructure would be the priority for national disaster relief and recovery funding. Instead all 35 million dollars of Cardwell’s National Disaster Relief and Recovery Funding - even the money for clearing and reinstating our foreshore - has ended up under the control of the Queensland Department of Transport and Main Roads.
Project ‘Reconstructing Cardwell’ A 1.4 km highway upgrade & rock wall
costing $30-35 million
Questions of accountability
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There has never been a public meeting to properly inform or test community opinion on how our disaster relief funding should be spent. Project “Reconstructing Cardwell” was announced via the Queensland Department of Transport website, and only after that were a limited number of 30 residents invited to a workshop, last August, to view the plans and offer opinions. Despite public opposition, and appeals to all levels of government and to nongovernment MPs for intervention, the Department of Transport agenda has rolled on without pause. Tenders for “Reconstructing Cardwell” are to be called next month.
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The community losses and damage from Yasi were exceptional. Our Prime Minister and our Premier visited our devastated region and pledged they’d be with us every step of the way on our road to recovery. Our Mayor has said that total government spending on Cardwell’s reconstruction and recovery will be around $43 million. Yet not a single dollar of it was available to save our precious 120 year old museum - one of Queensland’s finest remaining examples of a 19th century timber town hall.
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Our foreshore - where Australia’s first far northern sea port was declared in the mid-1800s - is to be dug up and reshaped without any prior historical impact assessment. We’ve seen no Environmental Impact Assessment, nor a Climate Change Adaption Statement.
Post-Yasi road works in the tidal zone
Formal truck stop plan
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Against the community consensus, expressed at the August workshop, a formal truck stop is to be built on our foreshore. Cardwell will have the only government-funded truck stop in the world, on a beachfront, beside a marine park, with panoramic views of some of the finest natural and protected ocean and island wilderness on earth.
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There are serious questions - questions that go to the core of accountability - about who is really benefiting from this major expenditure on natural disaster reconstruction and recovery. Especially when, within this bigger picture, community organisations like our Historical Society are venturing offshore to raise money to restore and rebuild. Especially when we’re depending on private grant funding to replace our lost operational assets. Especially when we’re having to hire storage space for our public museum because our local government cannot afford to. Especially when we’re handing over $2000 to our local government so adequate power points are installed in our replica museum. And especially when we are being told to go to the dump, if we wish, to secure our most valued heritage assets.
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The Cardwell experience is a warning of a need for great caution. In the scramble for government disaster funding, recovery is at risk of becoming another disaster.
