River Murray Recovery Stories
David Hassett · 54 min
When the 2022 River Murray floods surpassed every forecast, one infrastructure director with 30 years of deep local knowledge became the operational backbone of a community's survival — and its long road back.
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In 1989, David Hassett moved his young family to the Riverlands for a job in roads and infrastructure. Over thirty years, he became deeply rooted in the region, watching the Murray River shift from drought to abundance, learning its rhythms and its dangers. When forecasts in 2022 began predicting a major flood, they kept climbing, week after week, until David's team faced a four-to-six-week window to prepare for something no one in the region had seen before. His role as director of infrastructure meant managing 220 kilometres of river frontage, 155 roads that would go underwater, and the task of notifying over a thousand people across shack communities and towns.
Confidence was not the word David uses when asked how he felt as the crisis unfolded. What mattered was focus. When the council leadership aligned around a single purpose, people from every department stepped up. His team ran pumps nearly 24 hours a day through summer storm season, worked overnight rosters, and made the brutal decision to build a levy protecting the main street while leaving some riverside buildings exposed. David's CEO showed up on New Year's Eve to staff the pumps until 6 a.m. on New Year's Day. The flood lasted weeks, but the cleanup and rebuilding stretched across years. David's team mapped the disaster in detail, contoured open spaces to safer levels, and built a database that now helps predict what to expect if the river rises again. Looking back, David recognizes that his staff threw everything into the response and overlooked their own wellbeing in the process. What emerged was not just operational success, but deeper respect between council departments, stronger bonds with the community, and relationships with people who had once seen council as disconnected. The river, he says, is most beautiful at dawn when it is glass-smooth and tranquil, but its true value lies in what binds a community together when it is not.
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