The latest Victorian parliament inquiry into the October 2022 floods has heard about issues accessing community portals during the event.
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Chief executive of the Goulburn Broken Catchment Management Authority (GBCMA) Grace Cumming said there had been intermittent issues as people viewed the portal 21,420 times and 5800 downloads reports and maps were viewed 9300 times.
She said a "concentrated demand" on the GBCMA's community flood portal, which provided coverage and levels during the flood event, exceeded expectations during the floods.
"The portal's bandwidth was temporarily overwhelmed following a community information session in Shepparton and was offline twice for two and then four hours," she said.
"There were intermittent issues over a few days.
"Multiple improvements were quickly implemented, and we also rapidly developed a second community information option, producing online web maps with predicted flood extent and depth information."
She also said there were also significant challenges with planning scheme amendments.
The amendments help flood studies identify flood zones and overlaying controls so that development does not add to current flooding problems.
"In our catchment, there are ten studies waiting for planning scheme amendments," Ms Cumming said.
Ms Cumming said there were 46 breaches of rural levies, like Loch Garry, which were expected to fail with the levels seen during the flood event.
At the time, Loch Garry was governed by rules which say bars in the structure are pulled 24 hours after the Goulburn River reaches a major flood level in Shepparton.
Nationals Member for Gaelle Broad outlined submissions to Goulburn-Murray Water (GMW) representatives accusing them of failing to operate flood mitigation infrastructure and not releasing water in a reasonable timeframe.
Goulburn-Murray Water managing director Charmaine Quick said there were constant conversations with the community since the event but she was waiting on a review from the Department of Energy, Environment and Climate Action (DEECA) to get further factual information.
"The DEECA review, come November, is really where the conversation starts because we'll know where the five options they are looking at," she said.
"They're looking at gates, ... bigger outlet structures so that we can release more water."
Damage to Loch Garry from the flood had recently been fixed, and bars can now be removed earlier.
Government representatives from the Department of Energy, Environment and Climate Action Water and Emergency Management Victoria also spoke in the morning session of the hearing.
The hearing also heard from Inspector-General for Emergency Management Tony Pearce who said attracting volunteers to assist emergency services was becoming a perennial problem.
"I personally have not yet been able to identify a single way or a small group of ways in which you might improve volunteer capacity," he said.
"The problem that we've had... particularly the last decade, but even before that... is we've seen a reduction in the ability of community members to volunteer.
"[As demographics] change and as the rural decline has continued to increase we've seen younger people moving out of rural areas into urban areas, taking away a lot of the base that you would have had normally to start building your volunteer capacity, and that's been a real problem."
Mr Pearce said that rural volunteers are increasingly involved in multiple organisations, causing physical and mental exhaustion over time when providing aid for various emergencies.
"There are certainly programs and strategies that are being applied by all of the agencies to try and increase their volunteer base and retain them but it's very difficult," he said.
