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| Brisbane floods flyover |
EXPERTS for Maurice Blackburn lawyers have released an animated flyover of areas they say should not have been flooded during the 2011 disaster.
LEGAL action is to be brought against the Queensland Government over the 2011 floods.
Lawyers from Maurice Blackburn has on Monday revealed maps that show a "very significant" number of properties would not have been flooded if Wivenhoe and Somerset dams had been managed properly.
"We have sufficient evidence to go ahead," Principal solicitor Damian Scattini told The Courier-Mail.
"Comprehensive (flood) modelling will form the basis of a class-action lawsuit on behalf of thousands of flood victims."
The press conference heard the Ipswich CBD should not have flooded at all, and areas such as Chelmer, Auchenflower and Milton should have also been spared from flooding.
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| THIS is the map flood victims have been waiting to see .... experts working for Maurice Blackburn lawyers say the areas in green should not have flooded at all. Orange denotes areas where flooding was 15cm (6 inches). |
Ipswich Mayor Paul Pisasale said he agreed with the assessment "100 per cent".
"The safety of the dam (Wivenhoe) was too paramount over the safety of the city," Cr Pisasale.
He said he doesn't blame the dam engineers because their supervisors did not give them orders to release water earlier.
He blamed a "drought mentality" for poor decision-making.
"We went from a drought mentality to a flood mentality and we couldn't make the switch," Cr Pisasale said.
"Wivenhoe Dam was being used for water storage instead of flood mitigation."
He said the damage of flooding to downtown Ipswich cost hundreds of thousands, not including loss to trade and employment.
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| Maps released by Maurice Blackburn lawyers ahead of their planned class action. The green regions show areas which should not have been flooded, according to their experts. |
Mr Scattini said the lawsuit would be run on a no-win, no-fee basis.
"Our modelling shows that had Wivenhoe been operated properly, there would not have been flooding in some areas.
"In other areas, this poor operation meant flooding was much worse than it should have been."
"This evidence provides us with strong grounds to proceed with a class action."
He said he expected a complaint would be filed within a couple of months, after Brisbane and Ipswich flood victims had been given a chance to see whether or not they might have been spared damage.
US experts have spent about a year analysing the actions of the dam operators, crunching data and modelling the water flows that would have resulted if the dam had been operated to what they consider an internationally acceptable standard.
The colour-coded maps will mark in green the area that should not have flooded, and in orange the areas that would have received at least six inches of floodwater.
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| Maps released by Maurice Blackburn lawyers ahead of their planned class action. The green regions show areas which should not have been flooded, according to their experts. This one shows the Eagle Street Pier in Brisbane's CBD. |
Mr Scattini said people living in the orange-marked areas could still have a case against the dam operator.
"We're not ruling anyone out," he said.
IMF Australia says its own investigations had determined the Wivenhoe dam was not operated competently, and as a direct result downstream properties suffered unnecessary flooding.
IMF Australia executive director John Walker on Monday told AAP he was now extremely confident that a class action by flood victims would proceed.
Investigations had determined the dam "was not operated to the standard expected of a reasonably competently dam operator in all of the circumstances", IMF Australia said.
It said independent US experts engaged to carry out the investigation had identified two key failures:
- a failure to use rainfall forecasts in making decisions about (dam) operating strategies; and
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Maps released by Maurice Blackburn lawyers ahead of their planned class action. The green regions show areas which should not have been flooded, according to their experts. |
- a failure to preserve a reasonable amount of Wivenhoe's storage capacity to provide optimum protection of urbanised areas from inundation.
In a release to the Australian Securities Exchange on Monday, IMF Australia said:
"Based on these investigations, IMF has formed an opinion that material flooding of a large number of properties down river from the Wivenhoe dam would not have occurred had Wivenhoe been operated during the flood event to the standard expected of a reasonably competent dam operator in all of the circumstances."
The next step will be contacting all residents in areas the IMF investigation identified as having suffered unnecessary flooding.
"We'll be writing to all of the flood-affected people who we think have a claim," he said.
"A lot of those people are already involved. But there's a lot who either have not been aware, or haven't decided what they want to do."
He said he could not provide an exact figure for the number of properties IMF believed had suffered unnecessary flooding.
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Maps released by Maurice Blackburn lawyers ahead of their planned class action. The green regions show areas which should not have been flooded, according to their experts. |
But he said maps of affected areas, "all along the river", would be released at a press conference in Brisbane at 11am (AEST) on Monday.
"We're currently in the process of using Google technology and maps...to identify how many there are.
"But the state knows how many there are, and certain instrumentalities know how many there are."
IMF Australia and Maurice Blackburn contend that too much water was allowed to accumulate in Wivenhoe, and the strategy for water releases during the crisis was botched.
Maurice Blackburn has previously said any class action against the Queensland government would probably seek compensation in excess of $1 billion.
21.1.13
