River Murray Recovery Stories
Shannon Baxter · 53 min
When the 2022 River Murray flood threatened a town of 10,000, one council intelligence officer turned local knowledge, digital tools, and radical transparency into the backbone of a community-saving response.
You don't have to be in crisis to call.
When the River Murray rose to record levels in 2022, Shannon Baxter found herself in the middle of it. A council infrastructure officer who'd drifted into the role from human resources, she ended up as the intelligence officer for Renmark Paringa's emergency response, caught between her director of infrastructure on the front line and the CEO making critical decisions about which levees would be reinforced first, which roads would flood, which parts of town would stay dry. She watched the water climb day by day on her drive into work, past the lettering on an old winery sign, her children counting the rise with her. The stakes were real: a town of 10,000, nearly half the levee network running across private land, no room for guesswork.
Instead of guessing, Shannon's team used LiDAR data and digital elevation modelling to show community and leadership exactly why they were making the decisions they were making. She kept her staff informed and empowered, knowing that if council workers heard questions in the community, the leadership needed to know. For three months, including Christmas Day and New Year's Day, she coordinated levee inspections across 37 kilometres using iPad-based mapping, catching erosion early enough to deploy contractors before catastrophe. When the water receded and the tone shifted from gratitude to frustration about road openings, she kept communicating the recovery plan. The depot that normally sat quiet moved 150,000 tonnes of material in 3.5 months. The community proved it could respond to what was presented. That capability, Shannon believes, didn't have to end when the flood did.
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