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Responsibility ... the management of Wivenhoe
Dam has been minutely scrutinised in the wake
of floods that hit Brisbane and Ipswich. |
Queensland's floods inquiry is raising the election stakes for Premier Anna Bligh, writes Rory Callinan.
Brisbane resident Ian Chalmers is usually a mild-mannered man, but last week outside the Queensland Floods Commission of Inquiry, he snapped.
Shouting and swearing, the retiree confronted one of the inquiry's expert witnesses, flood engineer Mark Babister, who had just given evidence.
''Liar,'' Chalmers yelled at Babister who was leaving the inquiry chambers at the Brisbane Magistrates Court on February 10.
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Babister ignored the outburst but it prompted the inquiry head, Justice Catherine Holmes, to warn members of the public not to harass witnesses.
The confrontation between the men says much about the $15 million inquiry delving into the complex systems of flood management, water release strategies, dam gate settings and inflows and rainfall forecasts.
Chalmers is not one of the thousands of flood victims whose properties or businesses were swamped on January 12 last year.
He is a retired civil engineer who helped oversee construction of the dam about which Babister had been giving evidence. And he was furious at Babister for suggesting that despite the flooding, the dam had been operated effectively.
''I just wasn't going to let it go through to the keeper,'' Chalmers told the Herald.
"I just didn't agree with what he was saying … If you let water out early you can get it through.''
These are claims the year-old inquiry seems unable to put to rest.
On January 17 last year, as thousands of Brisbane residents were still hosing stinking flood-mud out of their properties, the Premier, Anna Bligh, announced an inquiry to ''thoroughly and totally forensically'' examine how such catastrophic floods could occur.
With a state election in the winds, the Premier believed residents should know the full story behind the floods and was mindful of how her government's handling of the crisis would be received at the ballot box.
She appointed Court of Appeal Justice Catherine Holmes as Commissioner and two deputies, the former Queensland Police commissioner Jim O'Sullivan and dams expert Phillip Cummins.
The terms of reference were wide-ranging - dealing with everything from reviewing the preparation of flood warnings and rescue services to the performance of private insurers, the adequacy of forecasts and land planning and the effectiveness of flood mitigation systems.
The commission held weeks of hearings around the state and sifted through hundreds of submissions, but it was the operations of the dam system and flood mitigation that became the centre of attention.
The dams, Wivenhoe on the Brisbane River and Somerset on the Stanley River in the Brisbane Valley, were supposed to hold back flows and ease the flooding in Brisbane which had affected some 14,000 homes and properties.
Days of expert testimony were heard as the commissioners tried to gauge whether the dam operating manuals were followed and the flood well managed.
If it was proven the manuals were breached and the dams mismanaged, then flood victims and insurance companies could take legal action for compensation.
Counsel assisting the inquiry quizzed the four men who ran the Flood Operations Centre for South East Queensland Water, which operates the dams.
Did the engineers, Robert Ayre, John Tibaldi, Terrence Malone and John Ruffini, ignore the manual and allow the dam to overfill to the point it had to be quickly drained causing a flood to engulf Brisbane, the lawyers wanted to know.
And were records created after the fact to present their operations of the dam in a favourable light?
Or were the four merely hard-working professionals put under enormous pressure, who utilised the dams to the finest of margins for the best result?
The four all rejected any suggestion they had mismanaged the flood.
The key issue was whether they had closely followed the dams' operating manuals that demand specific dam gate-opening strategies when the water reaches certain levels.
The first and lowest release settings are W1 and W2 which aim to ''minimise disruption to rural life in the valleys of Brisbane and Stanley Rivers''.
The next setting W3 is designed to ''provide optimum protection of urbanised areas from inundation''.
And at W4, the release setting is designed to ''ensure the structural safety of the dams''.
During hearings in April last year, the flood operations engineers told the inquiry they had implemented strategy W3 on the morning of Saturday, January 8.
This meant the dam was supposed to be engaged in flood mitigation days before the flood peaked on Thursday, January 13.
But a situation report written by Ayre on the evening of January 8 suggested the lower release strategy of W1 or W2 was engaged, indicating that the focus was not on protecting Brisbane from flooding but on minimising disruption to the rural areas below the dam.
Ayre explained the contradiction as an accident where he had inadvertently recorded the wrong strategy and that the transition to W3 had occurred earlier in the day.
And at the time, the inquiry found no contemporaneous record detailing when the engineers moved to the W3 strategy.
It also noted that there was no discrepancy in the evidence of the three other engineers and Ayre's course of action.
Four independent experts brought in to review the report and locate any breaches of the manual concluded there was compliance with the manual.
In August, the inquiry released its interim report which called for a review of the manual aimed at ''resolving uncertainty about the manual's meaning and effect''. It noted issues with record-keeping.
The report also found the engineers had failed to comply with the manual because they did not use the best available forecast information to work out water releases.
But Justice Holmes noted the finding did not necessarily reflect upon the flood engineers operating the dams.
And that seemed to calm the public debate over the matter until last month when reports in The Australian newspaper alleged there was further evidence the dam had not been operated in the manner described to the commission.
The report cited emails and other reports which allegedly provided further evidence the managers were using the low-release strategy W1 on the crucial January 8-9 weekend.
Bligh moved to allow the inquiry to extend its reporting deadlines in order to investigate the allegations.
She also said she had decided to move back the date of the state election from March 3 to March 24, saying Queenslanders should be able to consider the report before voting.
The commission announced 10 extra days of hearings and the four flood operations engineers were recalled. Again they denied any inappropriate actions or falsifying of records.
Babister was also called back. The Sydney hydrologist conducted modelling to see if greater releases would have provided better flood mitigation.
He stated in his report that the dam engineers had to keep the dam levels low in case of a deluge which would have made the flood worse, and that there was little more that could have been done to have prevented the flood.
For observers such as Chalmers, however, who was not called to give evidence at the inquiry, the claim was unsettling.
''There are heaps of strategies that you can apply, some good some bad. All you have got to do is to start early,'' he says.
The emergency hearings have now finished and the inquiry is due to report on March 16, giving Queensland's voters a week to decide whether to reward Bligh for her government's handling of the floods or to punish them for not doing enough.
18.2.12
Wivenhoe Dam operators have opted not to ramp up water releases after levels failed to reach the expected height.
