Introduction 
Climate-driven disasters disproportionately impact vulnerable populations, particularly elderly residents in aged care facilities. Aged care facilities contain some of the most at-risk individuals, making disaster evacuation a complex and hazardous process, with older adults particularly susceptible due to mobility issues, cognitive impairments, chronic health conditions and dependency on medical equipment (Boon et al., 2014). 
This case study examines the challenges encountered during the Bundaberg floods, identifies best practises and offers recommendations for enhancing disaster preparedness and response. Drawing from a blend of academic and grey literature, it underscores the importance of integrated planning, robust communication systems and infrastructure resilience to safeguard aged care residents.

Background
In January 2013, Bundaberg, Queensland, experienced severe flooding due to Tropical Cyclone Oswald. Intense rainfall led to record-breaking flood levels in the Burnett River, inundating large areas of the city (Queensland Government, 2013). Over 4000 homes and 600 businesses were affected, with public infrastructure damage estimated at $103 million (Debbage & Fawcett, 2013; Queensland Government, 2013). 
The floods caused power outages, road closures, and disruption to emergency services, resulting in mass evacuations, including several aged care facilities whose residents faced immediate risk (Bundaberg Regional Council, 2013).  

Impact on age care facilities
Multiple aged care facilities in Bundaberg were severely impacted, requiring urgent evacuations. Key challenges included:

• Infrastructure damage: Floodwaters damaged electrical systems, plumbing, and accessibility features, making buildings unsafe for residents (Queensland Government, 2013).
• Loss of essential services: Power outages affected medical equipment and refrigerated medication storage, placing residents at risk (QRA, 2014).
• Evacuation logistics: Limited availability of ambulances and accessible transport delayed evacuations, increasing stress for residents and staff (Bundaberg Regional Council, 2013).
• Staffing shortages: Some workers were unable to reach facilities due to flooded roads, leaving remaining staff overwhelmed (Journey, 2014). 

Lessons learned 
The 2013 Bundaberg floods provided critical insights into the complexities of evacuating aged care residents during disasters, including:

• Early evacuation decisions: Facilities that delayed evacuations faced greater risks as floodwaters rose (Australian Ageing Agenda, 2013).
• Pre-established transportation plans: Struggles to secure sufficient accessible transport led to reliance on emergency services and military support (Bundaberg Regional Council, 2013).
• Communication failures: Lack of coordinated communication between providers, emergency services, and families led to confusion and delays (Queensland Government, 2013).
• Continuity of care: Some residents experienced health complications due to missing medications or lack of access to medical equipment (Queensland Government, 2013).
• Community Support: Local businesses, volunteers, and healthcare workers played a crucial role in assisting evacuees, highlighting the need for strong community partnerships in disaster planning (Bundaberg Regional Council, 2013). 

Best practices for evacuations
These best practices are based on academic research, emergency management guidelines, and disaster case studies:

• Disaster preparedness: Facilities should develop individualised disaster plans and conduct regular training exercises (Boon et al. 2014).
• Communication: Use centralised systems and geospatial tools for real-time updates (Wang et al., 2023).
• Logistics and transport: Pre-arranged transport contracts and early evacuation triggers.
• Building resilience: Retrofit buildings with flood resistant designs and back-up systems (Owens, 2024; Lim et al., 2023).
• Promoting collaboration:   Foster partnerships with emergency services and NGOs for resource sharing (Taylor et al., 2023).
• Medical and continuity of care: Evacuation kits and alternative care facility agreements.
• Psychosocial support: Trauma-informed care for residents and mental health support for staff.

Policy recommendations
The following policy recommendations aim to enhance the safety, efficiency, and resilience of aged care evacuations: 

• Regulations and funding: Regular review and updates to regulations, and dedicated funding for disaster planning and training.
• Inter-agency coordination: Establish regional emergency networks to ensure representation at Local Disaster Management Groups (LDMGs) and on the Australian Incident Management System (AIIMS), while enhancing communication systems.
• Evacuation logistics: Implement pre-arranged transport contracts and standardised evacuation documentation.
• Medical and psychosocial support: Fund crisis counselling and develop mental health programs.
• National disaster frameworks: Establish a national taskforce to advise and advocate for best practices.

Conclusion
Evacuating vulnerable residents from aged care facilities during disasters presents significant challenges. The 2013 Bundaberg floods highlighted critical gaps which led to delayed evacuations, increased stress on residents and staff, and preventable health complications.

While improvements have been made in disaster planning for aged care since 2013, there is still room for enhancement. This case study highlights best practices for aged care evacuations.

As climate change continues to increase the frequency and severity of disasters, it’s crucial that aged care evacuation planning keeps pace. This need is even more pressing given the aging populations in Australia and many other developed countries. Proactive investment in preparedness measures will save lives and reduce the financial and logistical burden of emergency responses. Moving forward, stronger policy enforcement, collaborative disaster planning, and improved resource allocation are essential to safeguarding vulnerable populations during crises.

This case study has been developed in collaboration with Bundaberg Regional Council, CCQ Country to Coast, Local Government Association Queensland (LGAQ), Redland City Council and Queensland Police Service.

Image credit: Max Fleet (NewsMail)

Glocal Evaluation Week (2-6 June 2025) is a unique knowledge-sharing event, connecting a global community of people across sectors and regions. Over the course of a week, participants from all over the world join events - in their neighborhood or across the ocean - to learn from each other on a vast number of topics and themes.

The Resilient Australia Awards celebrate and promote initiatives that build whole of community resilience to disasters and emergencies around Australia as well as capture and share examples of resilience in action. The awards recognise collaboration and innovative thinking across a broad range of sectors and initiatives that strengthen disaster resilience with communities, institutions, and the private sector.

The International River Foundation is proud to bring the International River Symposium back to Brisbane to align with the Brisbane Festival from 8-10 September 2025. Under the theme “River Revolution: Accelerating Solutions for Climate Resilience,” this global forum for river managers, basin representatives, policymakers, scientists, consultants, students, NGOs, Indigenous and community organisations, as well as industry representatives, offers a unique opportunity to exchange knowledge, accelerate solutions, and collaborate on practical actions to enhance the sustainable management and resilience of rivers worldwide.

Join this special April Hazardous Webinar to learn about early post-disaster field observations of the devasting Los Angeles (LA) fires with on-the-ground researcher Dr Faraz Hedayati (Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety).

Brought to you by Natural Hazards Research Australia and AFAC, this webinar will share recently released insights from Faraz’s early post-disaster research and follows February’s Lessons from the LA fires and implications for Australia webinar. 
 

The United Nations General Assembly has designated 13 October as the International Day for Disaster Risk Reduction to promote a global culture of disaster risk reduction. It is an opportunity to acknowledge the progress being made toward reducing disaster risk and losses in lives, livelihoods and health in line with the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction.

A recent investigation by seismologists at Geoscience Australia has unearthed new evidence with which to modify the epicentral location of the 7 June 1918 Queensland earthquake. This event, and its relocation, has been described in detail by Martin et al. (2024) in a paper published in the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America with key results summarised here. This event is the largest earthquake in eastern Australia in at least the past ~150 years (at the time of writing). It was extensively felt in eastern Queensland and in parts of northern New South Wales. The GA study has documented reports of felt shaking from 225 individual locations for this event. 

Almost all previous studies (e.g., Hedley, 1925; Gutenberg and Richter, 1954) repeat the offshore epicentral location (-24o S, 154o E) proposed by the Riverview Observatory in 1918. The currently accepted location ( 23.5o S, 152.5o E) for the 1918 event in the GA hazard catalogue (Allen et al., 2018) is from Everingham et al. (1987). 

The attention of early investigations was largely focused on the minor damage sustained by masonry structures in larger coastal towns such as Gladstone and Rockhampton. This is similar to the 1954 Adelaide earthquake, wherein, as pointed out by Martin et al. (2022), focus was largely on damage within the City of Adelaide with poor attention paid to damage in the thinly populated Adelaide Hills. The coastal damage observations from the 1918 Queensland earthquake supported an offshore source. However, the newly found evidence also points to severe shaking at inland locations to the south-west of Gladstone. The strongest evidence comes from the owner of a cattle station at Camboon who described severe shaking; in his words “I could scarcely keep my feet, the place was rocking so”. Minor damage was reported from a few locations such as Banana (Hedley, 1925) but owing to the low-rise, wood-frame, Queenslander-type buildings that made up the building stock in these remote areas no major damage is known of. 

Not only did the new GA study by Martin et al. (2024) document these shaking effects, but they also documented a long sequence of felt aftershocks that lasted as long as a year at Camboon. Two large aftershocks have been identified previously (Rynn et al., 1987) that were felt in the Bundaberg-Gladstone region within hours of the mainshock. However, none of the subsequent shocks were perceived anywhere else except in the region of Camboon. 
Neither the newly identified zone of aftershocks, nor the region of strongest shaking are consistent with an offshore epicentre. Unfortunately, as with the 1954 Adelaide earthquake (Bolt, 1955-56), instrumental observations are few. The best instrumental evidence for the 1918 earthquake comes from the Riverview observatory in Sydney where the shock was recorded on two different seismographs. The time difference between the primary (P) and secondary (S) seismic waves (multiplied by some constant) can be used as a crude measure of distance to an earthquake’s epicenter. The arrival times of these waves were picked by observatory staff, and these were subsequently published in the Riverview Seismological Station bulletin. The S-P arrival times derived from this publication have supported an offshore source, at a distance of ~1250km from Sydney. But over the course of the investigations by GA, written correspondence was found between Walter Bryan, a renowned Queensland geologist, who questioned this offshore source. In the communication that ensued between him and the Riverview Observatory in the 1930s, it became clear that the arrival picks at Riverview could be erroneous. Surprisingly, this evidence does not appear to have been known to most subsequent investigators.

In this latest investigation, seismologists at GA double-checked these arrivals by consulting the original hardcopy seismograms for the event preserved at GA. They repicked the arrivals which yielded much shorter S-P times. These correspond to a distance of ~990kms which now corresponds well with the distance from Sydney to both the region of high intensities onshore, and the area with documented aftershocks also onshore. 
These different lines of evidence now offer convincing evidence that the source of the 1918 Queensland earthquake was onshore in the region of Camboon, and not offshore, as previously assumed. This study also estimates a reviewed magnitude in the range of M6.0-M6.2 based on limited instrumental data that exists for the earthquake from Australia.

References:

• Allen, T. I., M. Leonard, H. Ghasemi, and G. Gibson (2018). The 2018 National Seismic Hazard Assessment for Australia: earthquake epicentre catalogue, Geoscience Australia Record 2018/30, Canberra, 51 pp, doi: 10.11636/Record.2018.030.
• Bolt., B. (1955-1956). The epicentre of the Adelaide earthquakes of 1954 March 1, Journal and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wales, Vol 89-90, pp 40-43.
• Everingham, I.B., D. Denham and S.A. Greenhalgh (1987), Surface-wave magnitudes of some early Australian earthquakes, BMG Journal of Australian Geology and Geophysics, Vol. 10, pp 253-259.
• Gutenberg, B. and C.F. Richter (1954). Seismicity of the earth and associated phenomena, Princeton University Press.
• Hedley, C. (1925). The Queensland earthquake of 1918, Transactions of the Royal Geographic Society of Australia, Vol 1, pp 151 – 156.
• Martin, S.S., P.R. Cummins, J.D. Griffin, D. Clark, T.I. Allen (2022). Reviewing the 1st March 1954 Adelaide Earthquake, South Australia, Australian Earthquake Engineering Society 2022 conference, Mount Macedon, 11 pp (https://openresearch-repository.anu.edu.au/handle/1885/282619).
• Martin, S.S., P.R. Cummins, T.I. Allen, J. Griffin, D. Clark (2024). Resolving the location and magnitude of the 1918 Queensland (Bundaberg), Australia, earthquake, Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America 114 (6), 3202–3223.
• Rynn, J., D. Denham, S. Greenhalgh, T. Jones, P.J. Gregson, K.F. McCue and R.S. Smith (1987). Atlas of isoseismal maps of Australian earthquakes, Bureau of Mineral Resources, Geology & Geophysics Bulletin, Vol 222, 169 p., Canberra.