A rare “rain bomb” again plunged the Hawkesbury-Nepean River and the communities that live and work along its banks into crisis between April 5-7, and another flood washed through the area.
Now the waters are subsiding, we have a sense of the scale of this flood compared to others occurring in 2021 and 2022.
| Date | Flood height (Windsor guage) |
|---|---|
| April 2024 | 9.4m |
| Oct 2022 | 7.384m |
| Jul 2022 | 13.9m |
| Apr 2022 | 9.07m |
| Mar 2022 | 13.714m |
| Mar 2021 | 12.912m |
| Feb 2020 | 9.225m |
| Feb 1992 | 10.82m |
The “1:100” level (badly named, better described as “the height of a flood that has a 1% probability of happening in any one year” is 17.3m at Windsor. the 1:200 level is 18.5m.
The famed 1867 flood, the worst since European settlement, was 19.68m. Other historical flood heights are listed here.
Here is a time-lapse of the total flood event I compiled by scraping individual images from LiveTraffic.com‘s webcams around the district. I owe a dept of thanks to the technicians at the LiveTraffic website for helping me with this project.
It remains frustrating that the NSW Government went to the last election pledging to scrap the raising of Warragamba Dam, the one mitigation measure certain to reduce the frequency or height of bad floods. What measures they would pursue as a replacement was vague then and shambolic now. They gesture vaguely to levies as a solution, but have done nothing in the year since they were elected to articulate, develop or fund a solution.
