Lower Mount Emu Creek will be the focus of the Glenelg Hopkins CMA’s work through the Victorian Government’s Flood Reclamation Roadmap (Fast Tracking Flood Studies in Regional Victoria) in 2025-2027.

The focus will be on the 1870 square km area of the Lower Mt Emu Creek, and covers the Mt Emu Creek floodplain across 4 council areas (Moyne, Ararat, Pyrenees and Corangamite). The red boundary in the map below shows the area covered.

This will be the biggest flood investigations we’ve ever done for the region in terms of the size of the area to be modelled. 

The primary output from the project will be high reliability flood risk mapping produced by computer modelling.  By the end of the project around April/May 2027, we’ll have mapping that for the first time, covers the entire floodplain between Skipton and Mt Emu Creek/Hopkins River junction – a few k’s downstream of Panmure.

The new maps will build on the maps produced for the Upper Mt Emu Creek floodplain in 2020, which covered the floodplain from Trawalla down to Skipton.

The Glenelg Hopkins CMA project team and the project consultants, Venant Solutions, began the project September 3 2025 with a tour to gather key information on floodplain features including bridges, historic flood levels and stream gauges.

Covering an area this big wasn’t dreamt of 15 years ago because of how long it would take a computer model to run.  
These days, we can model much bigger areas more efficiently due to advancements in computer speeds driven by the gaming industry.

Graeme Jeffery,
Glenelg Hopkins CMA | Senior Statutory Planner | Waterways

Project activity timeline

ABOVE: Project day 1 catchment tour (3 September 2025) – visit to the January 2011 flood level mark on the railway bridge at Boorcan.

Call for community knowledge

The impacts of flooding can range from minor and major transport disruptions when roads get flooded, through to stock, crop and fencing losses, damage to homes and shedding and in the most serious circumstances, loss of lives.

A big focus of the project is to gather community’s knowledge and experience of flooding in the area, and to use this knowledge to ensure the maps produced by the computer model show what we can expect in real life.

Interested in learning more?

Stay tuned for details of our next community session or event.