Queensland floods: How we exposed a damning cover-up

Most of us from Southeast Queensland have a memory about the first realisation that January 2011 would be a shocker.

A bridge choked with debris at Grantham. Picture: Craig Borrow

The Qantas captain sounded a note of caution at 35,000 feet.

We were three hours from Brisbane and on the final leg from Los Angeles after a family holiday over Christmas and the first week of January 2011.

It was a decade ago this weekend.

“Brisbane and surrounding areas are being hit hard by shocking weather with torrential rain for a couple of weeks,’’ the captain told his couple of hundred passengers.

“There’s flooding and it’s forecast to worsen significantly. We’re checking to see if we can still land at Brisbane Airport.’’

A New York taxi driver in Manhattan the previous day had asked where we were from. When we answered, he knew all about the wild weather and imminent flooding of southeast Queensland.

“I saw on the news that it’s badly flooded,” he said.

He shook his head in amazement. “An area the size of France is underwater.”

Most of us from Southeast Queensland have a memory or ­anecdote about the first realisation that January 2011 would be a shocker. Mine started in that taxi, and restarted high in a blue sky over the Pacific Ocean.

My wife Ruth and I feared the two creeks that join at the farthest point of the backyard would become a wall of water, possibly engulfing our house and tearing through the kids’ bedrooms by the time we got home.

That’s if we could get across flooded roads to our home, a few kilometres downstream from one of Australia’s oldest and most unsteady dams, with its sorry history of having been built by a fellow later found to have falsely purported to be qualified in engineering. His qualification for drinking a lot of whiskey was never in dispute.

We should not have been surprised in the least by the flooding in January 2011. For months through the second half of 2010, meteorologists had been predicting extreme rainfall and warning that a particularly intense La Nina weather phenomenon was likely to deluge southeast Queensland.

The risks were amply described and well communicated. Now, in those first two weeks of January, it was happening. They’d got it right.

The unknown was in predicting what the extreme weather would do. What the toll would be. The deaths and injuries, property damage, family breakdowns, suicides and depression.

And now, still unfolding a decade later, the findings, recriminations and blame-dodging.

Major natural disaster

My journalist colleagues and I from The Australian’s Brisbane bureau returned home from cut-short holidays in that first week of 2011 and fanned out across southeast Queensland to cover what was shaping up to be a major natural disaster.

You’ve seen their bylines: Michael McKenna, Jamie Walker, Trent Dalton, Graham Lloyd, Natasha Bita, Sarah Elks, Andrew Fraser, Rory Callinan, Rosanne Barrett, Tony Koch and Sean Parnell. Other reporters, including Milanda Rout from the Sydney ­office, came to help.

After ensuring the safety of our families, we joined with photographers led by the office’s No 1 snapper Lyndon Mechielsen along with Jack Tran, Stuart McEvoy and Aaron Francis.

Fearing the potential destructive force of the creeks in the backyard, Ruth and I had already evacuated with our two children, her parents and the family pets to her sister’s home in elevated ­Bardon.

We were hearing horror stories from the Lockyer Valley where the creek and river flooding had become what witnesses described as a “wall of water”.

It moved quickly and powerfully, all but wiping out the communities of Grantham, Murphy’s Creek and Postman’s Ridge. The death toll rose through 10 and kept going. Thirty three would perish in flood-related tragedies across the state by the time it was over.

Reporting in those early days of the flooding was fraught. Roads and highways were cut. Helicopters were dangerous in the extreme weather. Journalists who reached Grantham and other flood-smashed towns such as Murphy’s Creek described utter ruin. Dazed residents looked forlornly at concrete slabs and rectangles of mud where their family homes — with all their possessions — had once stood. Survivors mourned the loss of loved ones.

Three bodies have still not been recovered.

Brace for inevitable

As the trauma and losses of thousands of people across the rural Lockyer Valley escalated, another threat loomed — the flooding of the Brisbane River. We were told to brace for the inevitable.

The rain was no longer falling and the wild weather had ceased when the city’s usually lazy river spilled, quietly inundating thousands of houses and businesses with mud and sludge and smelly water, turning near-river streets of the CBD into gross canals.

The wreaking of this much damage across the suburbs and the city was happening on a bright and sunny January day. It made it somehow more jarring.

On the first weekend after this disaster, thousands of people across Brisbane went to the stinking, sodden homes of friends and sometimes complete strangers.

Our house was untouched by the flooding in the two creeks, but friends who lived near the Brisbane River in Graceville were hit hard. Dragging ruined furniture from the second level of the once-charming family home of our friend was not a delicate task.

Almost everything inside had to go. What we couldn’t get down the stairs went out the window.

The streetscape had become a rubbish dump for things which were always replaceable — sofas, beds, tables, chairs and televisions.

The irreplaceable — framed photographs, albums, children’s drawings and other family heirlooms destroyed by the mud and water — were also strewn across lawns and driveways in my friend’s street, and many others.

It was the first weekend in which some of us became deeply suspicious of the official line from the Queensland government and SEQWater, the owners and operator respectively of the Wivenhoe Dam.

They insisted the dam and its staff had performed perfectly, lessening the magnitude of the flooding and subsequent damage.

The public largely bought this bogus line. The TV footage and witness accounts of unprecedented flooding in Toowoomba at the top of the range, and then the destruction of the Lockyer Valley’s communities, appeared pow­erful evidence of nature’s wrath.

The Lockyer Valley’s flooding was entirely due to the torrential rain and unaffected by anything related to decision-making at Wivenhoe Dam in a different catchment. This is not in dispute.

The notion that the dam — and its releases of massive volumes of water — might have been mostly to blame for the Brisbane River flooding seemed far-fetched at first to many people. After returning from a tour of Grantham as the people of Brisbane did what they could to help flooded friends and strangers, Queensland’s then premier, Anna Bligh, said: “All of the advice that I have is that the dam has been managed exactly in the way it’s meant to be and has worked in the way that it was originally envisaged.

“The dam has never experienced the pressure that it was under this week, so this is a first time for a dam that is almost 40 years old,” she said.

“So of course we are going to go and have a really good look at everything that happened, all the procedures and the decision-making, because that is what this dam was built for and we want to see how it functioned and if there are any lessons.

“But I’m not a hydrological engineer and I don’t pretend to be, and these are the questions we would look at in any review.”

At The Australian in those early days, I spoke to engineers and whistleblowers who were ­confident that the devastation and tragedies in the Locker Valley were unavoidable — but that much of the Brisbane River flooding was altogether different, and almost certainly the result of serious error in banking water at Wivenhoe Dam, then releasing huge volumes at the worst possible time. Without those colossal ­releases, we reported, the river flooding would have been relatively minor.

‘Collusion and lying’

The subsequent commission of inquiry run by Catherine Holmes, who would go on to be Queensland’s Chief Justice, was hopelessly misled by several key witnesses from the operations side of the dam.

It took the discovery by a nurseryman, John Craigie, of documentary evidence — internal emails written at the time of the flooding by the dam’s operators — and a series of stories with interpretation by engineer Michael O’Brien in The Australian to change the course of history.

The emails were damning. They showed how the dam was ­actually operated through January 2011, in stark contrast to how SEQWater would later purport.

But the revelations were being made after the inquiry’s public hearings had ended. Holmes and her inquiry team responded by extending the inquiry and scheduling new public hearings to get to the bottom of what appeared to have been a cover-up.

It was a cover-up. It nearly succeeded. The operators of the dam were rightly grilled when hearings resumed. And the rewritten chapter in the inquiry’s final report confirmed the worst suspicions.

This is how we reported it in The Australian in 2012:

“It is now official — the final ­report of the floods inquiry has found there was a serious cover-up over the devastating floods last year. It involved collusion, dishonesty and lying. The inquiry found three engineers presented false evidence after the event in an attempt to protect their professional reputations.

“The cover-up concealed a breach of the operating manual for Wivenhoe Dam, Queensland’s most dangerous and powerful infrastructure, from 8am on January 8 until the evening of January 9, according to the findings.

“The scathing findings delivered today, in the final report of the floods inquiry by Supreme Court of Appeal judge Catherine Holmes, confirm that she and her team were fed false evidence.

“Her finding that Wivenhoe Dam was operated in breach of the manual for a day and a half was unavoidable after the evidence she examined when public hearings were restarted last month. It is likely to usher in the largest class action in Australia’s history.

“Her finding of a cover-up, of ‘recent invention’ by the flood engineers in their attempts to justify their actions, have already triggered a referral of three of the four flood engineers to Queensland’s anti-corruption body, the Crime and Misconduct Commission, for further investigation of alleged perjury-related offences relating to their preparation of documents, and statements to the inquiry.

“Holmes found that ‘several things 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’.

“There was also the fact that if the engineers were found to have breached the manual, SEQ­Water’s immunity from liability for massive damages would have ended.

“The inquiry’s expert witness had previously asserted that close to the best possible result was achieved; however, independent engineers consulted by The Australian have calculated that almost all of the flooding could have been avoided.

“The inquiry’s final report should bolster the hopes of thousands of Queenslanders that they may be compensated for some of their enormous property losses and hardships, arising from a negligent operation of the dam.

“It should also be a reminder that the experts get it wrong, self-interested parties lie, and the media’s role in challenging the spin, and highlighting wrongdoing, is as vital as ever.”

Victims still waiting

That finding by the commission of inquiry started by Anna Bligh was delivered nine years ago.

The Crime and Misconduct Commission looked at it — and then decided to do nothing about the inquiry having been misled.

During Campbell Newman’s time as premier, his government tried a number of shameful ploys to wriggle out of responsibility for the damage that had been caused.

But the Maurice Blackburn lawyers running the legal class action were undaunted. This action included almost 7000 homes and businesses affected by the flooding. The dam’s operators conceded nothing in the litigation. It was eight years of legal slog.

One year ago, NSW Supreme Court judge Robert Beech-Jones, who heard the case, delivered his findings that the operators of the Wivenhoe Dam were negligent. This negligence made a significant contribution to the flooding in Brisbane and Ipswich.

A decade on, the victims are still awaiting compensation, despite winning their case. And the operators of a dam owned by the Queensland government still ­insist they did nothing wrong.

With their insurers, they are squirming to avoid owning up to the damage they inflicted on flooded residents and businesses.

A lot has happened these past 10 years. But some things haven’t changed at all.