The retirement village, which flooded when the Maribyrnong River in Avondale Heights, 11km northwest of Melbourne’s CBD, burst its banks in October last year, should have been a metre higher than it was built.
More than $7 million of damage was caused to the village owned by David Thurin’s TigCorp business, which was built after Melbourne Water agreed to his request to remove flooding rules designed to discourage building on the land eventually built on.
Melbourne Water is holding an inquiry into potential mistakes it may have made that exacerbated the damage the flood caused.
Inquiry chair Tony Pagone, a former Federal Court and Supreme Court judge, said the documents showed it was unclear why the buildings flooded if they were built at the height agreed to by Melbourne Water, when it removed a flood overlay on the land.
The data released by Melbourne Water to The Age showed the level of the land relative to the river in 2005, when TigCorp first applied to build Rivervue. The documents also detail what was actually built on the land from 2012.
A 2015 letter from Melbourne Water to Thurin’s planning consultants, BMDA Development Advisory, which was released to The Age under freedom of information, revealed the water authority agreed that retirement units proposed near the river would no longer be “affected by the Land Subject to Inundation Overlay”.
These units were built on that land, which flooded last year. Had Melbourne Water left the overlay in place, almost none of these 47 high-end villas would have been allowed to be built without significant earthworks to raise their floor levels.
Asked if this stage of Rivervue was built according to plan, a spokesman for the retirement village said it had been “developed according to the approved permits and planning controls” and that these had been “reviewed by Melbourne Water”.
The inquiry will visit Rivervue today “to provide a first-hand sense of the impact of the flood on the village”, an email on Friday to residents said.
TigCorp has taken the companies that built the retirement village, Glenvill Homes and earthworks company CSC Civil, to the Victorian Supreme Court.
The SOURCE: An inquiry, legal action and yet no-one seems to care about the residents who live in those units
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