A state government grant of $156,000 received this week will be used over the next six months in a feasibility study that will test a combination of two ideas.

Either the levee will be raised to provide protection against one-in-20 year storms, or homes on the flood line will be raised or purchased by council.

“Nature is nature, floods can come from anywhere at any time, [based on] the conditions at Burrinjuck and the Snowy,” said Peter Ross, council’s manager of technical strategy.

“It’s great that we have this money that we can now start the investigations.”

Meanwhile, residents believe the announcement represents little more than a continued discussion of the problem which has been going on since the last major flood in 2012.

“We’ve had feasibility studies before and they’ve come to nothing. This one will go as far as it has in the past, which is nowhere,” said Hampden Avenue resident Geoff Conway.

Mr Conway moved to his current home in Hampton Avenue in 1956, the same year a 9.45m flood came through. It had followed similar events in 1950 and 1952.

Since his home, and many of his neighbours' were built in 1946, before these floods, Mr Conway is particularly concerned with the second prong of the proposed solutions.

“They have Buckley's hope of raising 50 per cent of these houses because they’re all brick and built to the ground,” he said.

As a response, in 1962 a levee bank was constructed that was supposed to provide 20 years of protection from water levels below 9.9m, based on rainfall and run-off projections from the Bureau of Meteorology.

Yet as more data became available over the years, it was revealed that what had been built was only likely to protect against a one-in-12 storm. 

Water levels breached the banks at 10.56m in 1974.

“That’s why we’re going through the process now to bring [Wagga and North Wagga levees] up,” said Mr Ross.

“Since the ‘70s, the council has wanted to provide one-in-20 protection in North Wagga and one-in-100 in Wagga urban. It’s just with fresh data we’ve been able to devise a way forward to that [goal].”