Cyclones aren’t Byron’s only major catastrophes waiting to happen to pricey Pacific beach-front properties.
I’m one of the founders of IQ. Before the film festival took it over. I did the paperwork and grant applications with the help of Peter Wynn-Moylan from the Australia Council.
The other co-founders and I would han gout at IQ picking up rocks and rubbish. Sometimes tribespeople would come and sit with us. One of them told me how people didn’t live full time in the coastal areas. They only came there to pick food, fish and hunt. Their reasoning is that, more often than not, tsunamis wipe out the whole area.
Now I live in Haight Ashbury, San Francisco where everybody is earthquake- and tsunami-conscious. I check earthquake and volcano reports every day. Lately the Pacific Rim is making moves. NZ sits on a huge fault line that runs up to Tonga. The Pacific Plate is currently making some moves under the Australian Plate and there is an uptick in earthquakes in Oz in recent times.
Along that fault line are undersea volcanoes and earthquakes and massive underwater landslides. Every so often big enough to generate a tsunami that travel thousands of km. Estimates of minimum 6m high when they hit the Oz coast. The whole Northern Rivers and Gold Coast are in a red zone, zone of total wipeout. No or little warning, even with modern tech. No time to grab your stuff and run. No protection from trees or BMWs swimming through your house, or the foundations of a high-rise.
It will be years before anybody can rebuild and insurance won’t cover it all. They won’t be able to afford it en masse. Government can’t afford to cover the rest, because they have roads and utilities to rebuild. It happens with every big catastrophe in the USA. Some insurance companies have dropped hundreds of thousands of policies from people who have paid in for decades. And that’s just in California. You’d be lucky to get a crappy caravan in cow paddock.
For this reason, until the 1900s, UK, Europe and European settlers didn’t live near the coast if they didn’t have to. They lived at least 3 to 5 km inland on high ground. Including my ancestors! ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it’, attributed to philosopher George Santayana.
‘It only takes one generation to forget…’ from the books of Judges and Deuteronomy in the Bible.
Insurance companies and governments in due diligence, no doubt know all this stuff, but their hands are understandably tied. All they can do is wait and hope it doesn’t happen. All you can do is not live near the coast.
There is some good news in 2025 though. The further from the coast is a whole heap cheaper the real estate, and heaps more land. The money from a discount sale on the coast will more than pay for a house with enough land to pop a few friends’ tiny houses on. Heaps of room, and a few hands, to grow enough organic food with plenty to spare. Your real estate agent can help find a nice property, they have big networks. Some towns might even welcome the additions to their economies. The caveat is there are no BMW mechanics, or BMW parts, outback of the Great Divide.
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