The flood uncovered

THE alarming truth was all but buried in the Wivenhoe Dam inquiry.

Wivenhoe Dam, January 2011

ONE evening two months ago John Craigie, a man with whom I had been in close contact for a year over the operation of Brisbane's Wivenhoe Dam - and its role in one of the costliest disasters in Australia's history - sent me a confidential email.

Craigie, a former sugar industry executive with a law degree, had retired to a property at Pine Mountain where he owns and operates a nursery with his wife.

His remarkable role in finding, and immediately appreciating, a seemingly innocuous evidence-archived communication between public servants has not been told until now because of his previous requests for anonymity.

Since the devastating floods in January last year, Craigie, whose home and acreage were inundated after releases of water from the nearby Wivenhoe Dam, has been distracted from the gentle work of growing exotic plants.

Much of his spare time for the past 12 months has instead been dedicated to a study of the dam, its operating procedures, flood mitigation potential and thousands of pages of evidence produced for the Queensland Floods Commission of Inquiry.

Craigie has no engineering qualifications but a talent for careful analysis. Michael O'Brien, who was not flooded and had never contacted a journalist until January last year when he determined that Wivenhoe was a man-made disaster, has a forensic eye for detail, engineering qualifications and operational experience in planning water flow and delivery. For a year, Craigie, O'Brien, others and I were deeply sceptical of the official line about how the dam was operated.

But when Craigie's email arrived in my inbox two months ago, the floods inquiry was effectively finished. Public hearings had concluded late last year and the many chapters of the final report were being polished for proof-reading.

SEQWater, emboldened by the interim report of August last year, believed it had little to fear. And while many flooded residents were still angry and deeply suspicious of the dam's management, they had barely a feather to fly with; even the plaintiff lawyers from Maurice Blackburn and Slater & Gordon, and litigation funder IMF, had all but given up.

But by chance Craigie had been looking over documents on strategies for operating the dam in his preparation for a low-key meeting with the Queensland government's dam safety regulator, Peter Allen, about future water releases. The nurseryman with a rural property fronting the river wanted to be at the meeting so that he could understand and perhaps influence new policies on the drawing board.

Craigie's online research in the post-Christmas holiday break had led him to what he would describe to me as an "interesting email", written by a senior Queensland water executive, Daniel Spiller, 12 months earlier during last year's flood event.

Craigie's curiosity was immediately aroused because the email he had chanced on, part of a large attachment of evidence to the inquiry, referred to the dam being operated in a release strategy known as W2. This was odd -- and in direct conflict with the evidence of the flood engineers, dam owner-operator SEQWater and others at the public inquiry, who insisted that W2 had been bypassed.

Selection of strategy is crucial to determining the amounts of water that need to be released by Wivenhoe Dam to mitigate a flood. Releasing low volumes under the wrong strategy means the dam can run out of storage, forcing a release of huge volumes quickly -- and an unnecessary flood. For the past year, it was what we strongly suspected had happened.

But according to the sworn evidence from those who actually operated the dam, the flood engineers had followed the manual to the letter, moving straight to strategy W3 at 8am on Saturday, January 8, 2011.

If they had done something significantly different, as Spiller's email suggested, it would mean they had breached the manual, covered up their actions, and misled the inquiry.

As Craigie said in his note to me two months ago, "the email (from Spiller) looks like it went through to the keeper and became a sleeper . . . I cannot recall this being raised before. I think it is worth investigating whether there are other such emails or correspondence. Alternatively, is the email in error? To ascertain this I think may require going back over the history to see what actually occurred and matching it with media, emails, submissions and attachments to the Flood Commission and other materials to resolve it. Are you able to help in researching this?"

After initial concern that the reference could be a typo, we teamed up in an exhaustive pursuit of all the relevant documents. By January 22, and with the constant support of O'Brien, the results of our examination were compelling.

Remarkably, we could not find a single line of contemporaneous evidence -- the many communications during the flood and immediately afterwards among thousands of megabytes of witness statements, transcripts, and other documents -- to support the sworn testimony afterwards of the flood engineers.

All of the evidence that we found directly contradicted the sworn testimony and the official line from 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 this year they were attacked by SEQWater as "inaccurate and unfounded". It said "the implied allegation that SEQWater (and its engineers) gave misleading evidence to the inquiry is baseless and is utterly rejected".

Craigie, who until now has insisted on anonymity, came with me to the floods inquiry's offices to inspect the largest exhibits in which we identified further striking evidence. After it was published in The Australian the following day, the inquiry commanded everyone's immediate attention with an announcement it was resuming public hearings. Craigie confessed on the way out that it was now time to return to Pine Mountain and his "boring life as a nurseryman".

As Craigie said yesterday: "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.

"I think it went overlooked by the inquiry because the commissioner (Catherine Holmes) and her staff were very trusting of what they were being told by the witnesses. As a commission of inquiry they should be entitled to rely on information under oath or affirmation; it should be true. If the inquiry had not picked up and run with the material that we found, it may have stayed buried."

Contributing to the prospect of it staying buried was a reluctance in the media to rigorously test and check what had happened in the flood. 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.

The issues were complex, revolving around hydrology, hydrodynamic modelling, and detailed release strategies, but they should have been subjected to better analysis in the media. Yet most journalists concentrated their efforts instead on human interest angles arising from those who were flooded, instead of how it happened.

If journalists had spent more time being sceptical, the truth could have emerged much sooner. 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. The floods inquiry contributed to this with its interim report and public hearings that indicated it largely accepted the official line.

The lack of rigour by journalists dovetailed with a quietly effective campaign of spin and misinformation by SEQWater to discredit The Australian's work until the breakthrough that Craigie provided. Peter Borrows, the chief executive of SEQWater, issued a call last August for the public questioning of how the dam was operated to cease. It was a call aimed at The Australian.

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 in Queensland": those are facts that should never have been spun.

But there is an oft-quoted line favoured by journalists, politicians and seasoned spin doctors. It goes like this: "Never mind the cock-up. It's the cover-up you need to fear; it will bring you down every time."

Political masters of crisis management such as former Queensland premier Peter Beattie understood the theory well. It is why Beattie, with few exceptions, worked like a maniac whenever a government-made disaster erupted. Beattie would then expose the ugliest aspects to public glare.

The flood engineers have been done over by the cover-up, as the floods inquiry's report yesterday plainly finds.

The inquiry head, Supreme Court of Appeal judge Cate Holmes SC, made powerful findings in a measured and meaningful way. Holmes clearly has little regard for many of the submissions of the senior lawyers for the parties against whom she makes adverse findings; their arguments are rebutted and rejected.

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 precise extent to which the breach of the manual contributed to the flood is yet to be well understood despite months of modelling. The inquiry found that "the possibility exists of at least some improvement in the flooding outcome for Brisbane and Ipswich".

Holmes wrote: "There is, it is obvious, plenty of scope for argument about whether adherence to the manual strategies would have made a difference to the way in which the flood engineers actually operated the dam; but the possibility certainly exists that they would have responded more quickly to the developing conditions of 9 January had their mindset been one of applying (the correct strategy) W3."

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 detailed modelling necessary to determine this will be conducted by overseas experts engaged by law firms Maurice Blackburn and Slater & Gordon, which yesterday described the finding of the breach and the cover-up as "crystal-clear".

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.