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The US Army engineers' report differs from the findings of the commission. |
IT should be no easy feat to turn the serious, damning, evidence-based findings of a $15 million royal commission-style inquiry -- one that nailed an egregious cover-up - into a glowing endorsement barely six months later.
But that is precisely what a group of US engineers, asked to review the performance of another group of engineers - those in control of Wivenhoe Dam's massive releases of water in January last year, water that became most of the Brisbane River flood - have managed to achieve.
Yesterday, Premier Campbell Newman, whose government faces multi-billion-dollar class actions over floods that deluged thousands of homes and businesses, authorised the release of a new report that his bureaucrats have been holding in its draft form for the past fortnight.
The report comes from a team of officials from the US Army Corps of Engineers and the US Department of Interior. It is being warmly welcomed by the Newman government.
For this report, the US experts were asked by the Queensland government to review an earlier, highly controversial Wivenhoe report produced last year by the dam engineers to explain how they managed the dam and the floods.
The Wivenhoe report became spectacularly controversial for this remarkable reason: a Supreme Court judge would subsequently find in March this year that it was a "false" presentation of the dam engineers' performance in the flood. The Wivenhoe report was a "facade of precision".
It is instructive to compare and contrast some of the findings.
Before returning to her role on the Supreme Court of Appeal, Catherine Holmes, as commissioner of the Queensland Floods Commission of Inquiry, spent 12 months scrutinising the Wivenhoe engineers and their actions. In her final report in March, on page 508, she says: "There are several things that may have motivated the three engineers to present the false flood report, including a wish to protect their professional reputations from the damage that would be caused by a disregard of the manual, or the maintenance of (dam operator) SEQWater's immunity under the (relevant legislation)."
Yesterday, the US engineers said this about the same document, following a behind-the-scenes review lasting two months: "The flood engineers should be commended for producing this extensive, well organised and very readable document in six weeks, while the region was recovering from the flood event."
The US engineers omitted the official adverse findings of the inquiry, airbrushed out of existence despite being published in more than 100 pages of the final report.
When the US engineers received the Newman government's precise terms of reference for their review, they expressly excluded the findings of Queensland's $15 million public inquiry.
The contradictions in these documents are plentiful and they could not be more stark. They make a mockery of the taxpayer-funded processes and fuel the concerns of flood victims and their lawyers. With potentially billions of dollars at stake, only a prolonged court case before a senior judge may resolve the issues.
Yesterday's report is but the latest instalment in the continuing, complex and emotionally charged saga over Wivenhoe Dam - and its contribution to the flooding of greater Brisbane when Anna Bligh was still premier, Newman was lord mayor, and complicated operating strategies for the most important and dangerous infrastructure in the state suddenly became crucially important.
Because of its tone and findings, the latest report is good for Newman as he tries to protect Queensland's debt-ridden balance sheet from the compensation claims being prepared by class-action specialists Maurice Blackburn lawyers on behalf of several thousand people.
The US report states that "based on the contemporaneous information, the flood operation engineers made correct release strategy decisions"; and that "as with any (dam) operation, there were instances where an alternative operation could have been used, however, without the benefit of perfect foresight, there still would have been a risk that the outcome could have been worse as well as better"; and "there were no instances identified which violated the intent of the flood operations' primary objectives".
The report's conclusions should be embraced by the dam's government-owned operator SEQWater and the three engineers - Rob Ayre, John Tibaldi and Terry Malone - who were found by the Holmes inquiry to have engaged in a deliberate and dishonest cover-up of the truth. The engineers repeatedly and strenuously deny wrongdoing.
In their section on acknowledgments, the US engineers express thanks to SEQWater and the flood engineers for hosting them on site visits and to meetings, and "answering our detailed questions on modelling, forecasts, gauging, processes etc".
Six months ago, the same engineers were accused by the inquiry of lying. Their referral to the Crime and Misconduct Commission for consideration of perjury-related offences led to retired judge John Jerrard recommending last month that a criminal prosecution would be oppressive.
But for flood victims such as Tegwen Howell, one of many who lost the family home and hold out hope of being compensated for their losses, a life without a home is oppressive. The report yesterday is another bitter pill. "The bureaucrats may think everything is back to normal, but as someone walking the walk, I can tell them that it is far from normal," Howell tells The Australian.
"The social and economic impact of the floods will last a very long time. We find ourselves 20 months post-flood, still without our own home, the building still hasn't started as we still don't have a builder and we are fast running out of time.
"As for the social impact, a neighbour recently told me my children should just move on and have no right to be upset about the fact that they still don't have a home. With views like that, how are we supposed to feel comfortable in our own neighbourhood?"
Context and a chronology of key events is important in the fiasco over the management of a dam that was storing too much water at the onset of a particularly intense La Nina-driven wet season. It was a wet season that weather forecasters had been increasingly warning would be likely to produce serious flooding. When the rain came on top of a dam above full supply level, the dam's engineers had to release massive volumes quickly to protect Wivenhoe's structural integrity.
Nine months ago, as a direct result of a series of stories in The Australian highlighting the evidence of a cover-up that had been overlooked by the floods inquiry, Holmes decided to restart public hearings and resume investigations. An inquiry that had effectively completed its year-long assignment, save for the release of a final report yet to be printed, went back to work. Flood victims saw a glimmer of hope that their concerns of a man-made disaster, or at least a disaster that could have been minimised with a more prudent dam operation, were justified.
The decision to restart public hearings would have immense fallout, politically and economically. State and local government elections were delayed to give the inquiry time to test the new revelations and do its job properly, albeit late in the piece, while flood victims, insurers and their lawyers weighed the financial implications of adverse findings.
One of the most important pieces of evidence for the inquiry and its investigating teams to test for accuracy and truthfulness was the official document that the Wivenhoe Dam engineers had produced in the immediate aftermath of the flood.
Known as the March 2011 Flood Report, or Wivenhoe report, this document - heavily relied on by Bligh and her cabinet, the media, the wider public and the floods inquiry - presented an account of how the dam was operated at crucial stages during the disaster in January last year.
But the comprehensive report that was produced by the dam's engineers, adopted by their managers at SEQWater, and accepted as fact by the Queensland government, had a fundamental flaw - it was found to be false in its most critical parts because it presented a bogus explanation of how the engineers had performed at key stages of the flood. In this way, it misled everyone into believing, wrongly, that the dam had been operated in accordance with its strict operating manual.
Holmes, in her findings, highlighted "after-the-fact rationalisation" by the engineers. She ruled that they presented a "facade of precision".
In reconstructing their possible motives for producing the false flood report, Holmes found that "the evidence does not suggest that (the engineers) were especially confident" about how they had performed in the flood event. They feared their performance was deficient.
On the question of collusion, Holmes ruled "the evidence leads inevitably to the conclusion that, in addition to their own knowledge about the misleading nature of the March flood event report, Mr Tibaldi and Mr Ayre were each aware of the other's state of mind in this regard".
The problem for the Newman government as it contemplates the potential financial hit is that those findings stand. Nothing has altered them. They were not appealed or challenged by the Bligh government, the incoming Newman government or the engineers themselves. No amount of woolly, lazy analysis by gullible sections of the media alter these findings.
The findings that the engineers breached the manual during the flood by failing to select the correct operating strategy, and by failing to take into account forecast rainfall, are well understood by the legal teams laying the groundwork for the compensation cases.
The consequences of the breaches in terms of the impact of the flood remain uncertain. Some experts are adamant there would have been a significant reduction in the flood height; others are equally adamant there would have been little difference.
Holmes concluded in her final report: "The model results are purely illustrative. They do not demonstrate the outcomes for the infinite range of possibilities that exist. Ascertaining the practical result of acting more quickly also
is subject to the uncertainties inherent in the modelling, but again, the possibility exists of at least some improvement in the flooding outcomes for Brisbane and Ipswich."
It may be instructive that the US engineers did not do any modelling or, as they called it, "post-flood sensitivity evaluation of the actual releases made during the event" to inform their report. They attributed their decision not to do the modelling to the terms of reference received from the Queensland government. In the absence of modelling, it is unsurprising the report from the US engineers states: "There is no indication that had the flood engineers taken a different path, materially different outcomes would have resulted."
As Queensland has seen since January last year, the experts on floods will come and go. Millions of dollars more will be spent before the cases of flood victims are concluded. And the performance of Wivenhoe Dam and its engineers will be highly controversial for a long time to come.
- Hedley Thomas
www.TheAustralian.com.au
25.9.12
