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There are not too many people who can compare the recent flooding to the state’s worst in 1929.
But 92-year-old retired engineer and academic Owen Ingles can, having witnessed the once-in-a-century flood as a six-year-old in Launceston.
The streets impacted by that flood are etched into the city’s $60 million concrete levee system, intended to guard low-lying suburbs against a one-in-200-year flood event.
Twenty-two people died statewide in the 1929 floods and more than 2000 Launceston homes and buildings were either washed away or damaged with 4500 residents evacuated.
The South Esk’s waters thundered down at such a height and velocity that the two suspension bridges at the Cataract Gorge were swept away.
Historians suggest that it took more than a decade for Launceston to fully recover economically from the event.
Dr Ingles has vivid memories of the water inundating the city’s centre and streets near his home in East Launceston.
“The major thing I remembered was the failure of the Duck Reach power station and the lights going out,” he said.
“The water levels remain in my mind. I remember standing outside the Town Hall and looking at the water flood down Cimitiere Street. We all certainly knew that it was an extreme event.”
Dr Ingles said the rush of water through the Cataract Gorge was so forceful that four-tonne rocks were pushed into the Tamar yacht basin.
“The force of the water today is very serious but it’s not quite like it was in 1929 and it hasn’t risen quite as far,” he said.
“But obviously it’s proof that the levees are very much needed to rectify the mistakes of previous generations involved in Launceston’s early development.”
Like many in Launceston, Dr Ingles has had a long interest in the Tamar River’s silt problem and claimed that the development of Invermay on a floodplain had contributed substantially.
“That floodplain was formed about 10,000 years ago and built up over a millimetre a year – the net result is about 10 metres of silt today,” he said.
“The silt has been coming down the river for that entire time … and the floodplain was the natural area for depositing all of the silt out of the North and South Esk rivers.
“Around about 1870, instead of leaving it as a swamp, they brought in soil and filled it in at the depth of a metre.”
Dr Ingles said the next mistake was how the buildings were constructed using strip-style footings and that it would have made more sense if architects took note from houseboat designs.