LOGAN City Council is expected to investigate changing its controversial flood risk mapping in response to a record-breaking level of public feedback, including potentially renaming flood risk categories and easing development restrictions inside high flow areas.
At a council committee meeting last week, councillors were presented with a report recommending the organisation investigate seven “priority matters” related to the city’s new flood mapping.
These seven matters included: the low flood risk area, high flow area name, high flow area policy, small-scale extension to houses, shelter-in-place duration, ephemeral creeks, and the Logan Flood Portal and Property Flood Report.
The city’s planning manager, Christian Parks, said these matters were frequently raised by residents during council’s recent nine-week community consultation period, which saw a record 4000-plus formal responses to a new draft planning scheme.
He said they were matters that could potentially be changed.
Mayor Jon Raven commended the planning team for jumping on community responses so soon, saying he believed an investigation would provide “initial relief” for residents.
“All councillors in this room today are focused on making sure that what we do with the flood mapping and planning scheme is done in lockstep with what the community expects, and that we want to make sure we start working on solutions as soon as possible,” Cr Raven said.
One of the key issues raised by residents and councillors was the low risk flood zone, which highlights properties potentially impacted by a possible future flood as frequent as one in 2000 years and rarer.
These non-historical floods are formally referred to as the probable maximum flood, or PMF.
Several local councillors, who described floods of that level as “acts of god” and of biblical proportions, want the PMF removed from the city’s flood modelling and replaced by more “realistic” floods.
The high-flow flood area has been another point of contention for landowners across the city.
This area is aimed at keeping development away from areas considered important for storing and moving water during a flood, where buildings and structures are “vulnerable to potential collapse or failure”.
For many locals, that has meant they are not allowed to improve their properties with additions like carports.
But the report presented to councillors last week recommended council investigate easing restrictions to allow open structures to be built in high flow areas if they meet certain risk-mitigation standards.
The report also suggested changing the name “high flow” to limit confusion, as it describes areas that may have deep but not fast flowing water, and could be confused with the “high risk” flood overlay.
Cr Raven said the council should take the investigation a step further and look at all the category names.
“Is ‘low risk’ really the best way to describe something that might only have a one in 50,000 chance of happening in each given year?
“Is that the right word to describe it – should we be saying ‘extremely rare’ or ‘unusual’ risk?”
Mr Parks said the report could be returned to council during the first half of 2026, subject to councillor’s approving the motion, which they are expected to do on Wednesday 10 December.
