River Murray Recovery Stories
David Hasset
David Hasset led his council through a four-week sprint to save a flooded region, then learned the harder lesson: protecting your own people matters as much as protecting the town.
You don't have to be in crisis to call.
David Hasset moved to the Riverlands in 1989 as a young family man looking for work in roads and infrastructure. He never left. Over thirty years, he watched the Murray become the heartbeat of the region: a lifeblood for tourism, recreation, and the towns that line its banks. When the forecast arrived in 2022, it escalated week by week. Four to six weeks' warning. Not enough time, and far more water than anyone had planned for.
As director of infrastructure, David led his council through something that had no playbook. The team built levies to protect Madam's main street, but that meant leaving some riverside buildings on the wrong side of the barrier. He held public meetings to give people time to understand what was coming and evacuate. His crew ran pumps 24 hours a day on both sides of the levies to stop summer storms from backing water up into the town they were trying to save. The focus was absolute: one goal, one team, everything else put aside. His own CEO worked through New Year's Eve venting pumps to keep them running.
Two years later, the cleanup is still underway. Roads need resurfacing, shelters sit with missing roofs, caravan parks remain closed as insurance and funding processes crawl forward. David learned something harder than any operational lesson: his team gave everything to the response, but they looked outward, not back at themselves. Their own wellbeing got overlooked. Now, council has mapped the flood in detail, photographed every metre, built a database for the next time. The river is still glass-smooth on quiet mornings, still wild with hundreds of boats on weekends. But the Riverlands knows what it is capable of, and what it costs.
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