Disaster waste management scoping study: where South Australia stood in 2015
Prepared by Rawtec with Resources and Waste Advisory Group, Resilient Organisations and Mike Haywood Sustainable Resource Solutions, for the Office of Green Industries SA. Final report 17 September 2015.
Summary published
This is the study that started the work. Before it, South Australia had no set framework for managing disaster waste. Events were handled well, but through the joint effort of individual organisations and people rather than any plan.
Rawtec consulted hazard leaders, regulators, the waste industry, councils, insurers and utilities between March and May 2015, reviewed three past South Australian events and looked at what happened interstate and overseas.
The recommendations it made are, broadly, the framework South Australia now has.
Past SA events reviewed in detail
Major SA waste or recycling facilities identified
Weight of an average SA dwelling, excluding contents
Consultation carried out March to May
What the study found
There was no framework at all
The study’s central finding was that South Australia had no set framework for managing disaster waste. It also found the state’s systems had not been tested against millions of tonnes of debris from a single event.
Three events, three different outcomes
The 2015 Sampson Flat bushfires burnt 12,548 hectares, destroyed 24 homes and damaged or destroyed 44, took out 196 outbuildings and 215 vehicles and killed more than 914 stock animals. Debris volumes were never estimated. The 2014 Burnside storms produced more than 3,000 tonnes of wood waste and took 1,750 hours of clean-up plus 350 hours of help from other councils, with good resource recovery outcomes. The 2010 Stockport floods hit 40 homes and businesses, needed five or six houses demolished, and everything collected went to landfill because of the urgency to clear the site.
Councils carried it
Local councils played the key role in managing waste from severe weather and fires, alongside the SES, power networks, the transport department, homeowners, insurers, waste contractors, the EPA and the recovery office.
What a large event could generate
The study modelled debris volumes for contingency planning. A one-in-10,000 year earthquake in metropolitan Adelaide came out at 8.8 million tonnes, roughly eight times the masonry waste the construction and demolition industry handles in a year. A one-in-1,000 year earthquake gave 670,000 tonnes, a one-in-300 year bushfire in the Adelaide Mount Lofty Ranges 1.2 million tonnes, a one-in-1,000 year severe storm 290,000 tonnes, a one-in-70 year storm 40,000 tonnes, and a one-in-100 year flood on Brownhill Keswick Creek 25,000 tonnes.
For comparison, what happened elsewhere
Queensland’s 2010 floods generated around 460,000 tonnes. The 2011 Christchurch earthquake produced 8.5 million tonnes, the 2008 Sichuan earthquake 20 million, and Japan’s 2011 Great East earthquake more than 22 million.
Speed and recovery pull against each other
The study framed disaster waste decisions as trade-offs: how fast the community recovers, against the environmental and employment benefits of recovering the material rather than burying it. Stockport is the clearest example of speed winning.
What it recommended
Create a Disaster Waste Management Support Plan under the State Emergency Plan, and assign roles and responsibilities for strategic management.
Identify funding and payment mechanisms before an event rather than during one.
Develop state guidelines for debris collection and management. Rawtec went on to write them.
Establish and maintain panels of pre-approved suppliers, so procurement is not happening in the middle of a response.
Further develop South Australian debris metrics and a calculator tool, and keep a register of tools and resources.
A note on the tonnage estimates above. The study describes them as order of magnitude figures suitable for contingency planning, not forecasts. Limited modelling had been done for most scenarios, the damage assumptions were built specifically to estimate debris volumes, and secondary events such as fires after an earthquake or spoilage from power outages are not included. The study says explicitly that none of these exact scenarios would play out in practice, and that the bushfire scenario in particular is unlikely given the state’s fire prevention and firefighting practices.
What came next
The framework this study recommended now exists.
The full study includes the consultation findings, the scenario modelling and the interstate and international comparisons.
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