A victory for the usually voiceless who stuck to the facts and prevailed

Slowly and calmly, NSW Supreme Court judge Robert Beech-Jones delivered his judgment on Friday, thousands of words pouring out like a great engulfing force. A bit like Queensland’s Brisbane River.

As the judge in Sydney unpacked his conclusions over what he had determined was the negligent operation of the massive Wivenhoe Dam — with its ill-timed releases of water that caused much, perhaps almost all, of the devastating January 2011 Brisbane River flooding — John Craigie was 1000km away, picking up the phone. Craigie, at his property, a nursery near the dam, sounded relieved. “It was not my effort alone,’’ he said. “It was a great team effort.”

Beech-Jones’s judgment is an extraordinary outcome for thousands of affected property owners and businesses. The damages bill can probably be quantified in the billions. And it’s a victory for usually voiceless people who were ­severely affected, in some cases broken, by a largely avoidable flood. Craigie said: “There would not have been a legal class action or any of these findings about what really happened if it were not for what we did, particularly in reopening the official flood inquiry.”

Craigie was talking about his collaboration with a chemical engineer, Mick O’Brien, and this reporter to uncover critical facts in 2011 and 2012, reversing a tide of spin, concealment, misinformation and bullying from those with most to lose in the Queensland government’s inept control of its dams and water supplies.

O’Brien and Craigie live quiet lives in semi-retirement in Brisbane. As introverts, they prefer to avoid the limelight. They’re not political thorns or social troublemakers. They’re not in the least bit shouty. Some people embrace conflict; not O’Brien or Craigie.

But they are always persistently factual, logical and forensic. They’re always playing a straight bat — with the ball, not the man.

Although we didn’t know each other when the floods submerged great swaths of Brisbane on those fateful days in January 2011, we separately suspected the flood was linked to probable negligence by the engineers who were operating Wivenhoe Dam. Our premise was that the engineers had dangerously banked far too much water in the dam despite the increasingly alarming and accurate forecasts of imminent deluges.

At a policy level, it was a perfect storm. The Queensland government-owned dam’s operators, or engineers, were at its epicentre. There was growing hysteria before January 2011 because bureaucrats and politicians had heeded the alarmist predictions of climate warriors that floods were unlikely to trouble Australia in future. Tim Flannery’s dire warning that “even the rain that falls isn’t going to fill our dams and river systems” was followed by a drought that blighted Queensland.

Alarmism and dropping dam and reservoir levels must have influenced the way dam engineers were managing releases. Politicians wanted engineers to store water, not “fritter it away” with releases that might be called wasteful. But throughout 2010, the weather changed as a La Nina effect with heavy rainfall overwhelmed the drought-causing El Nino. While the weather had changed fundamentally and Queensland’s catchments were saturated, the politicians, bureaucrats and dam operators were stuck in the past. They still wanted the state’s dams to be storing, not flood-mitigating.

In early 2011, as the evidence before us of breaches of the dam operating manual and water-banking mounted, we called the Brisbane River flood a “man-made” disaster, not the natural catastrophe most were led to believe.

But inconvenient truths were poison for the parties most exposed — the Queensland government, its dam operators, SEQWater and SunWater and the hapless engineers on duty. Exposing the negligent operations of those responsible for water supplies and flood mitigation had the potential to result in damages of potentially billions of dollars.

For contradicting the official line being peddled across the media, we were ostracised and branded conspiracy theorists. O’Brien’s qualifications as a highly experienced chemical engineer were lampooned — engineers in dam management wanted him disciplined for having the temerity to investigate their colleagues and question their conduct. Craigie grows exotic plants — his critics scoffed: “What would he know?”

Until yesterday’s judgment, not much had changed. For the past 8½ years, the self-serving narrative of the dam’s operators and the government — from Labor’s premier Bligh to the Liberal National Party’s Campbell Newman to current Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk — has been consistently stubborn and ridiculous.

When pressed, they insisted what their lawyers also argued in court — that the dam was operated almost perfectly in the crisis of January 2011. They insisted that the dam engineers followed their official manual at all times.

And that weather forecasts of imminent flooding of biblical proportions should have no bearing whatsoever on dam operations.

On this last point about the weather, which became an important feature of the class action brought by Maurice Blackburn lawyers upon our discovery of new evidence in 2012, you need just a modicum of common sense to know that pre-emptive releases of water from a dam are prudent when extreme rainfall is predicted.

The alternative is that you sit on your hands and ignore the dam’s operating manual while the heavens open — and when the dam is full and you’re panicking that it could blow, you make massive and urgent releases. This is what happened at Wivenhoe Dam in January 2011. This was the negligent operation in stark breach of the operation manual that explains why the Brisbane River and many thousands of properties flooded.

In 2012, I wrote this in The Australian: “All of the evidence that we found directly contradicted the sworn testimony and the official line from (dam operator) SEQWater. It was black and white. It looked like a cover-up with serious implications. With this much detail from numerous pieces of evidence to the inquiry, it helped to pull it all together in a 60-page working document, which became my template.

“After I sent it to Craigie and O’Brien and one of the lawyers representing flood victims at the inquiry, O’Brien said the case looked powerful and was ‘nailed’. The lawyer was persuaded, too, and went to work on a weekend. When the first reports were published in The Australian on January 23 (2012) they were attacked by SEQWater as ‘inaccurate and unfounded’.

“Many journalists and their outlets dismissed the alternative narrative in The Australian, and were scornful of the work and calculations of people such as O’Brien and Craigie. But for a year, despite nuggets of evidence that pointed to SEQWater gilding the lily with many assertions about the scale and circumstances surrounding the event, the unvarnished truth remained elusive.

“Peter Borrows, the chief executive of SEQWater, issued a call for the public questioning of how the dam was operated to cease. It was a call aimed at The Australian.”

Craigie told me: “I was rocked by the extent of the material uncovered. I had mixed feelings: saddened to have found it and angry that there was so much of it. It was very serious and very concerning.”

After Friday’s outcome, Craigie and O’Brien are grateful. Finally, there’s been formal recognition and findings that will deliver justice to people whose properties should not have flooded much, if at all.