Dam bursts on new evidence as Queensland flood inquiry is recalled

THE floods inquiry has been recalled to hear new evidence that suggests the wrong strategy was used to manage Wivenhoe Dam.

THE Queensland floods inquiry has been recalled to hear extraordinary new evidence that suggests the wrong strategy was used to manage Wivenhoe Dam days before Brisbane was inundated, throwing Premier Anna Bligh's timetable for the state election into disarray.

The Australian understands Ms Bligh will today announce local government elections scheduled for March 31 will be pushed back to after Easter, threatening a backlash from councils around the state.

After a series of exclusive reports in The Australian revealing documents and emails that point to breaches of Wivenhoe's operating manual, key SEQWater witnesses, including the flood engineers and senior executives, will front the inquiry for at least six days of public hearings.

Inquiry head Cate Holmes has requested that her reporting date of February 24 be pushed back to accommodate the new hearings, cutting into the time available for a state election before the end of the Bligh government's three-year term on March 31.

Ms Bligh sought "urgent" legal advice on her options.

Liberal National Party leader Campbell Newman insisted the commission of inquiry should take "as much time as it needs".

"I think the matters raised in The Australian are of such significant gravity that they must be examined in more detail," he said.

The decision to reopen the floods inquiry comes as The Australian can reveal today that SEQWater's official account of the operation of Wivenhoe Dam in January last year was changed after an emergency meeting of Ms Bligh's cabinet on January 17.

Internal documents not previously tested by the inquiry show that SEQWater chief executive Peter Borrows gave cabinet a dossier on January 17, four days after the flood had peaked in Brisbane and Ipswich. The document and attachments - called "Cabinet in-confidence ministerial brief: Flood event and Wivenhoe Dam" - include a formal SEQWater report about the strategies used by flood engineers.

They make it clear that Wivenhoe Dam was being operated for almost all of the weekend in a strategy known as W1, under which the primary consideration is to minimise disruption to rural life by keeping releases of water relatively low to avoid submerging rural crossings and bridges.

The briefing shows that the strategy known as W3, which has a primary consideration of protecting urban areas and Brisbane, was not invoked until the morning of Monday, January 10. This is consistent with a raft of technical reports, emails, memos, flood log entries and other documents from senior public servants and the flood engineers during the flood.

In a statement to the floods inquiry last April, Mr Borrows said: "I saw these documents prior to them being provided to the minister (Stephen Robertson) and I generally agreed with their contents. I attended a meeting with the minister on 17 January, 2011. My best recollection of this meeting is that we walked through the documents."

The Australian has found that SEQWater's position on when the W3 strategy was implemented changed after the cabinet briefing, and after engineer Michael O'Brien began sending alarming reports to a board member of SEQWater.

Mr O'Brien sent his report - "What went on in Brisbane? Was this a natural disaster or a man-made disaster?" - to SEQWater late on January 13 with detailed calculations suggesting that the dam should have been able to prevent much if not all of the flood.

The following day, the lead flood engineer, Robert Ayre, sent an email from his home address to his fellow engineers that said: "In light of the impending review of our performance during this flood event, can we please ensure that all duty engineers are cc-ed on any information/comments relating to the forensic analysis of data prior to distribution to any other party. We need to ensure we have a consolidated view on things before information is distributed."

Mr O'Brien sent an updated report to SEQWater that included the operating rules for Wivenhoe Dam, which stipulated that flood engineers must initiate strategy W2, a transition stage to W3, or W3 itself when the lake level in the dam goes above 68.5m.

This is to provide for higher releases of water to give the dam safe storage to mitigate a flood.

Mr O'Brien said in his updated report that if the flood engineers had followed the manual they should have moved to W3, releasing much greater quantities of water shortly after 7am on Saturday, January 10, as this was when the lake level in the dam rose above 68.5m for the first time.

A flood log entry shows that on January 17, Mr Borrows called the Flood Operations Centre, in which the flood engineers work, saying he will "email a revised copy of Michael O'Brien's document".

When SEQWater failed to reply, Mr O'Brien took his concerns to The Australian and agreed to air the issues publicly in articles, beginning January 17, questioning whether the dam was negligently managed.

Premier Bligh announced the commission of inquiry into the floods after the emergency cabinet meeting on January 17.

SEQWater's next major report on the flood event, which was largely put together by flood engineers and released soon before the inquiry's public hearings began, included for the first time the claim that the dam began operating under the W3 strategy at 8am on January 8.

There is no contemporaneous evidence supporting this claim. There is a raft of contemporaneous material that shows W3 did not start until the morning of January 10.

Engineers have calculated that the difference could be that most or all of the flood in Brisbane was avoidable.

SEQWater has said that any allegation that "SEQWater (and its engineers) gave misleading evidence to the inquiry is baseless and is utterly rejected".

The 1180-page SEQWater report also omitted key documents including technical situation reports from crucial stages of the flood, which contained information that contradicted SEQWater's new assertions about W3 starting on January 8.

The inquiry is expected to be pressed in its new public hearings next week to investigate who contributed to the report, verified its contents and signed off on its release. It is also expected to try to trace the chronology of the change in SEQWater's position on when it invoked strategy W3.

Mr Ayre gave evidence to the inquiry last April and stated that he had made the decision to invoke W3 during his shift. But he was not robustly cross-examined about his own situation report that was issued nine hours later in which he advised the dam was still in W1.