Despite the undoubted legal expertise of the Queensland Floods Commission of Inquiry, the final findings have implicated three of the four engineers who managed Wivenhoe Dam through the disaster in misleading reports and testimony about the flood event.
The exposure of the alleged cover-up reported by investigative journalist Hedley Thomas resulted in the Commission of Inquiry being extended to examine contradictory evidence, and has now given some Brisbane property owners hope of recourse to compensation for their material losses.
Sadly, the families of the Lockyer Valley who lost husbands, wives, children and friends were handed a report last week that leaves them without recourse to compensation and without answers to what happened or why their families, houses and businesses were taken without warning.
Irish business Gerry Keogh, who donated the use of heavy earth-moving equipment to search waterways for dozens of people listed as missing after the floods in the Lockyer Valley, has slammed the inquiry’s final report and called for a second, more thorough inquiry.
Keogh says the aftermath of the disaster had been a heavily politicised “arse-covering competition from the start”. He says the inquiry’s exoneration of a 380-metre long earthen wall up to 5.5 metres high on the floodplain upstream of the town of Grantham was an error.
“Water was diverted from the watercourse, causing the wall of water to change course and hit the town of Grantham. For a hydrologist to have made the assumption and for the QFCI to accept the assumption that the wall of earth mitigated the flood is absolute rubbish,” he said. “You don’t need to be a hydrologist to work out what happened.”
Phillip Jordan’s first report has obvious errors, such as stating that the flood was flowing west when in fact it was flowing east, towards the coast. His report said: “Flood flows would have flowed down Lockyer Creek in a roughly westerly direction. Debris lines and sediment marks on aerial photography demonstrate that at the peak, the flood was travelling outside of the normal watercourse, along the floodplain, before it reached Wagners Quarry.”
Keogh has called for a second inquiry — one that listens to people who saw what happened, rather than relying on representatives of organisations who were not in the disaster zone.
“It needs to be full inquiry into the areas where there was loss of life in Toowoomba and the Lockyer Valley with all the powers of a Royal Commission,” he said.
Leaving grieving families with only the avenue of civil litigation was unacceptable because it would be too risky unless liability could be established, he said. “For these people to get on with their lives they need the truth to be told.”
And local Grantham residents agree, saying the commission’s final report gives explanations for the timing of the devastating flood that are not borne out by dozens of witnesses on the ground. Community recovery centre co-ordinator Julie Johnson says people “just want answers”.
Some survivors who narrowly escaped with their lives now say the past 15 months since the flood has been more harrowing than when they confronted death on January 10 last year.
“There are discrepancies and inconsistencies about Grantham all the way through the report. The people are upset because no one listened to what they had to say,” Johnson said.
The commission has accepted evidence that an SES crew that set out at 2.50pm to warn the townspeople of Grantham (a five-minute drive) could not get into Grantham.
Yet police records from triple zero calls show the succession of floodwater surges hit the town shortly before 4pm.
Grantham businesswoman Lisa Spierling, who has moved to a new farm in the hills south of Grantham, says the “missing hour” makes all the difference because there was time for authorities to give warning to enable people to escape.
“They don’t have a big enough broom to sweep all this under the carpet. They’re laying another carpet on top,” she said.
The findings of the final report do not account for what dozens of witnesses saw — it was not the height of the flood but the rapid and dangerous onset of a raging torrent at least a kilometre from the creek bed, which killed 12 people in a small area of the town but left houses close to the creek relatively unscathed, she said. Spierling has challenged the commission to deliver its findings directly to the community of Grantham.
“If you want us to believe these timings come here and explain it to us,” she said. “Don’t expect us to swallow this report. Everyone in town will tell you the water hit after 4pm and the Operation Galaxy report by police agrees.”
Once again it appears people are being mislead by a world class arse covering competition! Edward James
The Brisbane floods of January 2011
The recently published Queensland Floods Commission of Enquiry Final Report together with articles in The Australian have considered the role of the engineers who managed Wivenhoe Dam during the floods and whether or not they were negligent. There is a confusion (mentioned in the Report) between the managing of releases of water from the dam (accepted by the Report as near ideal), and an accusation that the engineers did not follow the operating manual. I believe that The Australian and its reporter, Hedley Thomas, have exploited that confusion to lead their readers to believe that:
1. The Engineers caused the flood, by their lack of prudence and their cavalier approach to flood management; and
2. Therefore, people who suffered losses as a consequence of the flood are entitled to compensation.
I have known and worked with Terry Malone, Senior Flood Engineer in the flood team that was responsible among others for operating the gates on Wivenhoe Dam during the Brisbane floods of January 2011. Terry has worked on floods and flood forecasting all his professional life. He has helped develop and operate flood forecast models for a large number of rivers in Australia, and in overseas river systems as far away as China (the 3 dams project), Vietnam (on the Mekong) and Ireland. His experience in flood prediction is unrivalled in Australia and he is amongst the top in the world. Terry gave enormous help to the South Australian Hydrology team that developed and operated the flood warning service during the major floods of 2005.
It is, I suggest, totally misguided to suggest as Hedley Thomas of The Australian has done, that the “banking of water in the dam before the big releases of January last year, a failure to adopt prudent risk management amid predictions of dire rainfall, a cavalier approach to operating ‘the most valuable and dangerous piece of public infrastructure’, these are the facts that should never have been spun.” (The Weekend Australian, March 17-18, 2012)
With the benefit of hindsight we can all be wise. When a major disaster occurs we have to find someone to blame. Anyone who has followed the history of dams with gated spillways knows the terrible dilemma faced by an engineer required to operate those gates in a flood. If they are opened too early, and the forecast rainfall does not fall in the catchment, does not fall at all, or inundates the adjacent catchment, flooding can occur downstream that can be proved to be unnecessary. If they are opened too late, as has been suggested for Brisbane, the flows may increase the amount of flooding unnecessarily. The flood manual is not a recipe book, to be followed slavishly, word by word, like the set of instructions to build a helicopter out of Lego. It is a guide to help the operators of the dam make the appropriate decisions.
The problem of gate operation is so difficult that, in many cases, water authorities have removed the gates completely to prevent any possibility of being blamed for flooding downstream. This was done for the South Para reservoir in South Australia in the 1980s after flooding downstream was blamed on the (then) Engineering and Water Supply Department. For the Mt Bold reservoir, which still has gates, I gather that the policy for operating the gates is Flow In = Flow Out, which is designed to ensure that no liability for flood damage can be attached to the owners. It also means that there is no flood mitigation benefit from the storage in the dam.
For Wivenhoe dam, the focus of the critics has been on whether the gate operations followed the manual. Has anyone paused to think whether the manual was correct?
It has been said that half-truths are worse than lies. Hedley Thomas has, by intent or otherwise, created the impression that the Brisbane floods could have been avoided if the gates at Wivenhoe had been managed better – with the benefit of hindsight. The headline “The truth about the flood finally uncovered” together with the passage quoted above leaves the reader in no doubt that the engineers created most if not all of the flooding that took place. That conclusion was not reached by the Queensland Flood Commission of Enquiry. Careful reading of the report reveals that:
“Even a large dam such as Wivenhoe has a limited flood mitigation capacity when the volume of water entering it is significantly larger than its storage capacity. Its flood mitigation effect for Brisbane was further limited by the fact that floodwaters from other parts of the Brisbane River catchment entered the river downstream of the dam, through the Bremer River and the Lockyer Creek.” P30
And following on from this:
” The flooding in Brisbane and Ipswich could, as Mr Babister’s study has shown, have been reduced to some degree had the dam had its capacity reduced to 75 per cent prior to the December rains; but to appreciate what the magnitude of the rain would be and that it would fall in the dam area would have required a more than human capacity of prediction.” P30
The criticism in the report is directed at the degree to which the engineers adhered to the manual in their management of the flood, not as to whether they operated the dam correctly. As far as I am aware, the engineers in question wrote the manual, as a guide to operators in a flood emergency. The manual was written without the writers having the experience of a major flood passing through the dam. It is unfortunate that in the effort to assign blame, the question of whether the manual was followed is more important than whether the dam was operated correctly, given the circumstances that prevailed at the time.
“Mr Babister concluded, in light of the information available at the time, that, allowing for the limits of the strategies in the Wivenhoe manual, the flood engineers achieved close to the best possible flood mitigation result for the January 2011 flood event.” P524
In support of his ‘Facts’ including:
“ failure to adopt prudent risk management amid predictions of dire rainfall, a cavalier approach to operating ‘the most valuable and dangerous piece of public infrastructure’ ” Hedley Thomas says that despite the statements by the Enquiry’s expert witness “independent engineers consulted by The Australian have calculated that almost all of the flooding could have been avoided.” He does not say who those engineers are, how they were qualified to pass judgement? He did not say what parameters were assumed to avoid the flooding. Did they assume perfect knowledge of forecast rainfall? Did they assume emptying of Wivenhoe Dam before the flood? Did they assume flows in the Lockyer and Bremer rivers did not contribute to the flood?
Those who suffered damage in the Brisbane floods are entitled to know whether those floods were caused by human error. Careful reading of the Commission report shows that as far as the investigation could determine they were not. The desire to make good their losses is understandable, particularly for those who did not have flood insurance. But it is unreasonable to lay the blame for a natural flood disaster on a small group of engineers. They did their best, under very difficult circumstances, to minimise the effects of that disaster; and deserve credit for achieving “close to the best possible flood mitigation result”
It seems to me that Hedley Thomas and The Australian have succeeded in make the lives of the engineers and those close to them, a misery, which will haunt them for the rest of their lives. Secondly it has created false hope in those who were damaged by the floods, that their losses will be made good. I say this based on the incredible complexity of this flood disaster, ( one has only to read the 658 pages of the Commission report to get an inkling of this) and the near impossibility of proving human negligence in managing the dams during the flood.
I firmly believe that Terry and his group of engineers were both prudent and responsible in managing Wivenhoe dam in its crucial role in the Brisbane floods. I sincerely hope that in times to come they will be cleared of all blame and allowed at last to live in peace, away from the headlines and the spotlight, and able to get on with what they do best- working on the very difficult subject of flood hydrology.
Author: Christopher Wright
Engineering Hydrologist, M Eng Science, MIE, formerly member of IE Aust and the Institution of Civil Engineers (UK) and for 20 years in charge of the flood forecasting office in the Bureau of Meteorology in Adelaide.
8 Gratton Street
Belair 5052
South Australia
Mob: 0414 789 220
They might have done the best they could at the time, but they lied
under oath. That is why they are being referred to the CMC