In cooperation with ClimateXChange, Heriot-Watt's School of the Built Environment recently hosted a talk and discussion with visiting Australian expert, James Davidson, to share strategies for post-flood recovery and re-instatement with Scottish flood practitioners from Glasgow and Edinburgh Councils, engineering consultancies and the Scottish Flood Forum.
Resilience to and recovery from extreme weather such as flooding will be a key component of climate-adapted communities in the future, and it is vital that future policy-makers and practitioners understand how to support such recovery. With this in mind, 35 of the School's postgraduate students were given the opportunity to attend the talk and discussion.
James' presentation focused on recovery, re-instatement and the role of policy after the devastating flooding in Brisbane in January 2011, which affected 28,000 homes. As Director of the non-profit charity Emergency Architects Australia (EAA), James coordinated a volunteer team of 50 architects, 10 engineers and 100 students to undertake 220 pro-bono professional house inspections. The inspections provided practical advice to uninsured flood-affected homeowners on appropriate reconstruction.
In order to do this, the EAA team designed a robust process for assessing flood damage and specifying appropriate re-instatement work that would make properties more resilient to subsequent floods and so reduce the potential for damage and losses. Examples of post-flood re-instatement / re-design work carried out by James' Architecture Practice can be found here
For more details of the Emergency Architects Australia (EAA) Flood Inspections, please visit the EEA website