How the Central West could look to the North Coast floods for help

The Cabonne region was smashed by heavy rainfalls last week and the villages of Molong, Eugowra, Canowindra and particularly Eugowra felt the full brunt of the devastation.

In Eugowra, people clambered on to roofs to avoid the rapidly rising floodwaters and lost almost everything in the process, while two people lost their lives. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese visited the region on Tuesday to survey the damage.

It's not too dissimilar to how the NSW's North Coast was flogged by flooding earlier this year, and the flood-prone city of Lismore was left devastated.

In fact Lismore, located on the banks of the Wilsons River, is still suffering from the floods nine months on, and Lismore City News editor David Kirkpatrick says some parts of the city feel like a "ghost town".

He said regions need to react differently to major disasters.

"We are, for whatever reason, dealing with disasters on a more regular basis," he said.

"Are we going to be a country that spends billions of dollars on cleaning-up and reconstructing? Or do we have to get smarter when it comes to disasters? Do we have to have different building codes?

"I think we have things in our building regulations for fires but not floods. Up in Queensland, for example, they have really good temporary levee walls that can be rolled out at a moment's notice. We don't seem to have them in NSW.

"Do we have to mitigate differently? Do we have to build houses differently with different materials? Do we have to retrofit? Do we have to raise houses or move people out of houses?

"All those sort of questions are valid. If this is going to become more regular, we need to do disasters differently and better."

Mr Kirkpatrick and his team at the Lismore City News covered the North Coast floods extensively in February and March.

What he and his team witnessed will be similar to what many residents across the Central West will witness themselves in the coming weeks.

He said the scenes of devastation and mass evacuations, and emergency services being stretched to the limit, have stuck with him.

Mr Kirkpatrick believes communities are good at dealing with an initial disasters, but struggle in the medium to long term.

"I think what we're good at is dealing with that sharp end of an initial disaster, whether it be floods or fires," he said.

"I think the communities and emergency services have become quite used to that. I think we deal with it really well.

"We do the initial work of flood disasters; evacuations and warnings. I think we do the imminent clean-up after floods really well.

"I think it's the medium to long term that is probably the biggest problem, especially emerging on the North Coast. I know we weren't able to implement that broader recovery and reconstruction effort that well."

Our journalists work hard to provide local, up-to-date news to the community. This is how you can access our trusted content: