Queensland water official admits he only took cursory look at Wivenhoe report

A SENIOR Queensland water official has admitted he did not read the Wivenhoe Dam report, while another  took only a cursory look at it.

A SENIOR Queensland water official has admitted he did not read the Wivenhoe Dam engineers' disputed 226-page report until last month, while another took a "cursory" look on a bus trip home.

Commissioner Cate Holmes is examining Seqwater's March report, after The Australian revealed a string of inconsistencies in the flood engineers' evidence suggesting they disregarded the manual and used the wrong flood mitigation strategy in the days before Brisbane was swamped.

It is alleged their official March flood report is "a fiction"; a reconstruction of events designed to show the engineers engaged each strategy as the manual required.

Giving evidence this morning, SEQ Water Grid Manager chief executive Barry Dennien told inquiry he only read the report "in the last two or three weeks when it came highlighted there are some differences".

"I relied more heavily on the commission of inquiry's interim report to see how the whole event and the operations went," he said.

"When it came to the sequence of events, I didn't look in detail mainly because I knew that the commission had looked very very closely at the strategies and triggers and I wasn't really in a position to question what other experts had looked at."

SEQ Water Grid Manager operations director Daniel Spiller said he had only a "cursory" look having "read it on the bus trip home".

Mr Spiller also said immediately after the flood, the engineers were "not enthusiastic about preparing a detailed explanation of what happened during the event".

"They were not as forthcoming with information as we thought was appropriate."

The text of the March report is 226 pages in length. With appendices, the report is over 1100 pages long.

The length of Mr Spiller's bus journey was not discussed.

The inquiry continues.