2017 – Lessons Learned and the impacts of Cyclones Debbie and Marcia on Queensland’s Emergency Planning and Guidelines

Peter Allen and Mark Rhimes

Recent tropical cyclones have had significant impacts on coastal Queensland and produced significant inflows into a large number of major dams with the triggering of a number of Emergency Action Plans for downstream release hazards. While there were several floods of record, there were no significant dam safety incidents. The dams seemed to have been blamed for a lot of this flooding even though they provided significant flood mitigation. This paper will cover the emergency responses to these events, the public perceptions and the associated third party reviews of these events. Community expectations and the ability to undertake post flood event assessments of dam operations is also driving such investigations.This paper will also discuss the consequential updates being made to Queensland Emergency Action Planning Guidelines to encourage effective engagement with local emergency planners and other stakeholders in the development of these guidelines.