The 1998 Floods in the Tambo Valley

This paper examines the flood event of June 1998 and its effect on residents of the upper Tambo Valley, in Victoria south east Australia. While the concept of vulnerability has been widely employed to understand disasters, this case study is unique in that it adopts a long-term historical perspective of vulnerability. It shows that rather than being the result of a chance occurrence of a natural event, the 1998 flood disaster was in fact foreseeable, and the culmination of various social, political, economic and environmental pressures, some of which had existed for well over a century.