New Grantham study contradicts Queensland Floods Commission

A NEW expert study reinforces what the snubbed survivors of Grantham’s 2011 floods have long maintained.

AS a turgid wall of water laden with debris churned towards the Queensland town of Grantham on the afternoon of January 10, 2011, Lisa Spier­ling, her children and countless neighbours were living their own terrifying nightmares.

Minutes earlier, Spierling had been in her kitchen baking a carrot cake. Now the florist and army reservist was herding seven children and some elderly neighbours up a steep, slippery railway embankment about 2m high.

Looking out across her flower farm on the other side of Railway Street, Spierling watched her largest shadehouse crumble; 18 years of her toil was destroyed in seconds. But the worst was to come.

“My son screamed ‘f..k!’ and we looked to the west — the railway line was disappearing,” Spierling told The Weekend Australian. “It’s like at the beach, it just had this big sort of roll on it. It was brown, with a lot of crap in it, logs and sticks and trees. It’s just a lot of debris, a lot of crap.”

FULL REPORT: Grantham flood

Spierling began running east along the concrete railway sleepers, a four-year-old child on one hip and a baby on the other. The older children carried Bogart the dog and ran ahead. As she looked to her right she saw the torrent engulfed the street like an inland tsunami, cars and shipping containers floating on top. A wooden house broke from its anchors and began to tilt on its side.

“I remember it going up like that to, I don’t know, about 45 degrees. And I remember the people in there sort of yelling,’’ she says. She could see them screaming and waving for help but could not hear them over the noise. “It was deafening. You could hear the cars crashing and getting sucked under the bridge. My son said he felt the bridge shaking. He said he saw people in some of them.”

Spierling’s account of a rolling wave more than 2m high sweeping through the streets of Grantham is consistent with the stories of more than a dozen witnesses interviewed by The Weekend Australian. It is consistent with the Queensland Coroner’s report that describes water bursting into kitchens, demolishing a brick veneer home and ripping a baby from the arms of a mother who barely survived herself.

Yet none of these accounts were included in the Queensland Floods Commission’s report into the 2011 floods. Commissioner Catherine Holmes, a serving Sup­reme Court judge, decided that to meet her deadline she would not hear evidence from those who experienced the floods. She relied instead on experts from respected firm SKM. It was left to this team, led by hydrologist Phillip Jordan, to examine the pattern of flooding in Grantham and to help explain why 12 people died.

Grantham residents believe the main force of the water was not along the banks of Lockyer Creek as Jordan claimed, because the people all survived and the houses there were least affected. It was the people and houses more than a kilometre from the creek, along the Gatton-Helidon Road, that bore the brunt of the deadly force.

Jordan concluded the residents were wrong in claiming the collapse of the quarry’s levee or embankment, 3m to 5m high and 380m long, had released the wall of water that engulfed the quiet Lockyer Valley town. He determined that, far from triggering a deadly wave, as residents claimed, the quarry and its embankment had mitig­ated the flood damage, lessening its impact on the town.

At least that is what Jordan’s computer modelling told him and what the floods inquiry adopted. Holmes concluded in the inquiry’s final report, “on the basis of Dr Jordan’s evidence, that none of the earthworks associated with the quarry caused or contributed to the flooding of Grantham on 10 January 2011”.

Now, however, serious questions are raised about these findings. A second independent study, commissioned by The Weekend Australian from international hydraulic engineering firm DHI, strongly suggests the original findings are seriously flawed. The new findings strongly suggest the embankment’s breach was five times greater than modelled by SKM — and that, as a result, the surge of floodwaters through the much wider breach in the wall was larger, more sudden and more hazardous. The upshot: it would have left the people of Grantham with less time to escape to higher, safer ground.

More people died in 40 minutes in Grantham than anywhere else in Queensland that dreadful, rain-soaked summer. Yet Holmes’s 653-page report devoted less than 1½ pages to their plight. Jordan’s verbal evidence to the commission lasted a matter of minutes.

Spierling cried when she read the findings. “I’ve said it all along, I’ll say it until the day I die. I will tell you that was a huge wall of water that hit us. And it was coming from the west.”

Marty Warburton saw shipping containers, cars, a house and two bodies floating past his service station. He too cried when the original report was released and he still cries, shaken, pale and quivering, as he recalls the horrors of that dreadful afternoon.

“It’s hard not to think that they’ve got it so wrong because they want to,” he told The Weekend Australian. “We were all treated like stupid problems, basically; you know, like hillbilly hicks. They said: ‘We’ve got to have experts to tell us that.’ If the experts got it wrong, well …”

The Weekend Australian has been investigating the cause of the Grantham flood for more than 18 months. Most of the interviews were conducted more than a year ago, yet it is only today, with the support of an expert study, that the newspaper has the confidence to publish the information, believing the case against the quarry wall is now reinforced with evidence.

Further corroboration is provided by 60 minutes of video mat­erial, hundreds of photographs and the harrowing accounts given to the Queensland Coroner, which have been forensically examined and compared.

The quarry, now abandoned, lies about 3km west of Grantham in a horseshoe bend on the Lockyer Creek, on a once-flat patch of land where Tom Friend harvested lucerne more than 30 years and several floods ago. “In 1996 the water just went straight across, across the flat,” Friend said. “I was standing here in 1974, it was big but it came just down below the gully here, across the flat.”

In 2011 it was different. Graham and Helen Besley were living in one of three properties adjacent to the quarry. At around 3.45pm they were standing on the eastern banks of Lockyer Creek watching the water rising on farmland behind the embankment.

“I just looked at it mesmerised. I stood there for three or four minutes,” Graham Besley said. “Then I saw a wave of water coming overland. That’s when I turned and ran.

Helen Besley said: “We drove around the end of the house. We were facing west. We didn’t see it coming. All of a sudden it was just there and over us. If it had broadsided us it would have rolled us. But we were facing west. It hit the front of the car and it went over the top of the car.”

The two floated on their car before falling off and clinging to the frames of their greenhouses for an hour or more. Their house fared less well. The western walls, facing the quarry, were destroyed. A tree trunk speared the house, lodging in the corner of the lounge room.

When Friend and his wife Sandra were allowed to return to their house across the road from the Bes­ley property five days later, the evidence of the force and direction of the torrent was clear to see. A steel gate bar had been snapped off, a cold room had shifted 10m and the concrete base of a water tank had worn away.

The Friends’ Friesian cow had floated 1.5km and was found alive on the railway line. The wave rolled eastwards across farmland unimpeded for another 200m, inundating properties, bending the corrugated metal walls of a farm shed and scattering plastic horticultural tunnels like streamers. It crossed the Gatton-Helidon Road before it met its match: a solid railway embankment, more than 2m high, that funnelled the torrent towards Grantham.

Teenager Katherine Godley was in her front yard recording the ripples of rising water on her video camera when the flow suddenly changed direction. “What did they do, open a dam or something?” she asked at the time as the flow became faster. “It’s as fast as friggin’ hell.” As she tilted her camera towards the paddock across the road, she caught sight of a second wave, murky and menacing. “Shit! That’s coming in really fast now. I’m going to go upstairs.”

About 250m away, Stacy and Matthew Keep were sheltering in their new brick-veneer house with their three children — Madison, 5, Jacob, 4, and Jessica, 1 — and their mothers, Pauline Magner and Dawn Radke. “We decided to put the kids up on the kitchen bench thinking they were safe,” Stacy Keep told the coroner. “The windows could not take the pressure of the water and they started smashing instantly, and all the water came gushing in and the kids went flying off the bench.”

Keep remains too shaken to speak publicly of her ordeal, but the coroner’s account bears testimony to the unequal struggle of a mother and her baby with the powerful hydraulic force released when the quarry embankment collapsed.

Keep, who was pregnant, lost sight of two of her children but clung on to Jessica, grabbing on to the buckled garage door and then to a downpipe before she became too tired to do so.

She and her child were washed across the road in water too deep to stand up. Helpless in the current, they were swept towards the now submerged railway line, where Keep’s legs became trapped in debris. “We went under water and I couldn’t get them out,” she said. “The water was just so strong and Jessie got ripped out of my arms.”

Keep’s husband had been washed for 150m to a house in nearby Sorrensen Street, where he helped the neighbours on to the roof of their house, using their mobile phone to dial 000 at 4.30pm. After being rescued by helicopter and reunited with his wife, Matthew Keep walked back down the hill and jumped into the water, swimming back with Jonathan Klassen to his house where they rescued their two frightened children. There was no sign of Matthew Keep’s mother, Magner, or Radke.

There had been every reason to fear the water rushing along Lockyer Creek towards Brisbane. Shortly after 1pm, a ferocious storm hit Toowoomba delivering a torrent that cascaded down both sides of the Great Dividing Range. By 2.45pm eight people had died. A dozen more, nine adults and three children, would die in Grantham within two hours, but no alarm had been sounded and no one was poised to come to the rescue.

Three doors up the road from the Godleys’ raised wooden Queenslander, Frances Arndt took a phone call from her daughter Kym Evans, who was standing on the other side of the valley and watching a wave of water heading towards her parents’ house.

“Get the f..k out of the house, Mum!” Kym screamed.

Frances Arndt’s husband Kenley, 72, was talking to neighbour Danny McGuire, a volunteer firefighter.

“I could see across the paddock toward Lockyer Creek and saw a large sheet of water heading towards us, like watching a wave at the beach as it comes up the sand,” Frances Arndt told The Weekend Australian.

As the Arndts set off for safer ground in their Toyota Hilux, McGuire climbed into his truck and radioed Queensland Fire and Rescue’s South-East Region HQ at Beenleigh. The call connected at 4.01pm and 47 seconds.

McGuire: “Comms, this is Grantham 5-1.”

Operator: “Go ahead Grantham 5-1.”

McGuire: “Grantham 5-1 needs assistance by QPS and SES in a big hurry. Grantham westbound has gone under. The Lockyer Creek has busted its banks. We’ve got about 35 to 40 people to get out of here in a hurry.”

There had been no flood warning for the Lockyer Valley from the Bureau of Meteorology that day. It would be another 58 minutes before one was issued, by which time much of Grantham was under more than 2m of water.

When the roaring creek struck the tight bend at Wagners’ quarry, the artificial dam at the kink of the creek forced the water to swirl back on itself, spreading out and creating a temporary reservoir covering 100ha or more of farmland. Photographs from the late 1970s show the land as it once was, pancake flat and cropped. Gatton Shire Council approved quarrying on the site in July 1981 and extraction began on the northern end. In 1994 the quarry was purchased by Wagner Investments. Accounts differ about the development of the embankment, who was behind it and whether it became larger in the 2000s during the long drought.

Jon Sippel’s house is one of three that adjoin the quarry separated by the creek on its northern edge. He was still too shaken to discuss what he saw that traumatic day, but neighbour Tom Friend took up the story, pointing to locations on a satellite photo. “Jonno was standing here at his place and he could see the water starting to come over that bank,” said Friend, pointing to the levee.

“He just got out in time before it went whoosh-ka. He was running. He said it was just a horrific noise. Whoosh-ka, bang, crash.

“Once it has let go it has gone straight ahead. It didn’t take any corners. That’s why people said they had a wall of water. It had to come, bang, straight through.”

Tom and Sandra Friend were holidaying at Hervey Bay. He rang Sippel from his mobile at 3.53pm, minutes after the levee burst.

From early that morning when a deep low-pressure system travelling north encountered a monsoonal trough travelling south off the Queensland coast, it had become clear to amateur weather watchers that southeast Queensland should brace for an exceptional storm.

At 1.16pm, hours before the Grantham flooding, Anthony Cornelius posted this message on a Weatherzone forum from Heritage Park in Brisbane: “Concerning for the Gatton-Grantham area right now with that very large storm/rain area moving towards it … I hope they’re prepared for it.”

They were not. The Arndts had travelled barely 100m west on the Gatton-Helidon Road when the water from the rising creek began creeping over the door seals.

Through the rear window Frances Arndt saw McGuire’s yellow Isuzu fire truck pull out of his drive and try to turn towards them, but the current was too strong and the truck was washed backwards. Then, as the Arndts rounded a bend, the water that had burst from the quarry hit them head-on, setting the two-tonne ute afloat.

“It was like a bloody torrent, it was unbelievable,” Kenley Arndt said. “The water was up to our necks and the car was beginning to sink.” They wrestled with the electric windows and managed to lower them sufficiently to squeeze through. They grabbed a tree and clung on to it.

McGuire and his family had problems of their own as their truck was tossed in the current. Unable to get through on his radio, McGuire rang 000 and told the operator he and his family would have to abandon their vehicle.

“I was still on the phones and the next thing there was a big wall of water that hit us. It was bigger than the truck,” McGuire told coroner Michael Barnes. He threw his son Zach towards a tree through the driver’s window and told him to start climbing. His wife Llync was screaming that her window would not open. Water pouring into the truck swirled around, thrusting McGuire out of the window. He grabbed hold of tree and lost sight of the truck. He could hear his son crying and screaming.

“He just kept calling out, ‘Where’s Mum?’ and I kept going, ‘I don’t know, mate.’ ”

Frank King and his son John were on top of John’s car in Railway Street when rapidly rising water overwhelmed them.

“I was hanging on to that tree there, around about the fork,” Frank King said. “I was out horizontal. It took my trousers and my shoes and everything off and ripped my shirt. I pulled this hat over my face and it saved me an awful lot of grief. It wasn’t a steady stream, it came in surges. Someone up at Helidon told me they counted 22 surges; well, I reckon I felt the whole lot of them.”

At 4.09pm at his service station a half kilometre east along the road, Warburton photographed a 20-foot shipping container sailing briskly past the bowser. The water was no more than a half-metre deep at that stage. One video shows a child paddling in it.

“It went from just below knee-deep to waist-deep within 30 seconds or a minute,” Warburton said. “And that’s when you could feel in the water the vibrations and the movement of it … That’s when I knew we had to get out.”

Warburton was standing inside his shop, waist-deep in water, when the torrent hit. “The windows exploded when that big surge came. It came through the door like a fun­nel, just like you see in cartoons. My drink fridges were picked up and just smashed into the back wall. You don’t believe in monsters until you see one.” Within moments the water was almost at the ceiling. “I took a breath and duck dived out the door. I grabbed a hold of the awning and jagged myself up.”

A few hundred metres away, the Grantham Hotel was surrounded with water. Video footage shot by publican Lance Richardson from the balcony shows the raging torrent.

Next door, water was pouring into Brenda Ross’s double-brick house at 8 Anzac Avenue where the wheelchair-bound 56-year-old widow was sheltering with her 25-year-old son Joshua and family friend Christopher Face, 63.

Video taken by Richardson at 4.28pm shows the house surrounded by floodwater. “I heard a loud crack and I looked around and the house was gone,” Richardson told the coroner. “The house just went splat really. We did look but we could not see anyone and I believed at the time they really had no chance.”

His wife Morva told investigators she recalled seeing Face and Joshua Ross through the window as the water rose. “The whole house seemed to pop up out of the water and then it exploded,” she said. “All the bricks just blew out a couple of metres in all directions. There was no actual explosion; it was just like the house blew out.”

All three died but their dog, Penny, escaped, swimming for three days until it was rescued.

Across the road, Peter and Marie Van Straten heard a loud crack as trees carried by the torrent smashed into their high-set Queenslander home.

“The first thing we know the front steps are gone and the back veranda collapsed at the same time,” Peter Van Straten said. Shortly after 4.45pm the house broke free from its stumps, where it had rested 2m off the ground, and began floating to the east.

“As it went through the trees the kitchen broke off,” Peter Van Straten said. “It was the hardest thing I’ve ever heard in my life, the sound of timber breaking and ripping and tearing. We’re both standing round the kitchen table, we had the dog on the table with us, standing in water. Everything was rocking and rolling a bit.”

The house sailed on east across the paddocks, eventually hitting a car wedged against a bore pipe and coming to rest. The couple huddled together, shoulder-deep in water, until they were rescued by helicopter.

The Van Stratens are among those who take issue with the floods commission’s findings. They know what they saw. The tsunami that knocked their house off its stumps did not come from the south where the Lockyer Creek had burst its banks. It arrived from along the Gatton-Helidon Road from the direction of the quarry. The path the house took, like every other piece of debris tossed about by the flood, is evidence that the main current of water came from the west.

“I would like to see a proper inquiry on what happened here,” Peter Van Straten said. “I’m not after anything for myself, I’m not asking for money or anything like that. I just want to find out what the truth is. If you know the truth something can be done about it so it doesn’t happen again.”

Warburton added: “It’s not about persecution or personal gripe. Let’s just get the truth about what happened here.

“The violence and destruction and the devastation that was caused from that water coming from the way that it did I believe has man-made influences associated with it. No doubt whatsoever that development in the desig­nated watercourse pushed the water out on the flat and that with the contributing factor of the railway line keeping it all in a small area, our town got destroyed because of that.”

Tom and Sandra Friend have since rebuilt their house across the creek from the quarry. They want the wall demolished and the quarry restored to its natural condition.

They lost many possessions in the flood, but it is not the lost treasures that reduce them to tears. It is the frustration of not being believed despite the evidence that was there for all to see but that somehow failed to register in SKM’s computer modelling.

“I’m pretty sure a bloke looking at a picture can’t tell what a bloke standing there looking at it can tell,” Tom Friend said. “There’s witnesses seen the wall of water coming, and they’re trying to say there was no wall of water. How did a house get washed off its stumps if there’s no wall of water?

Friend apologises to his wife for swearing before continuing: “That’s what happened and how it happened, and then every bastard tried to deny it. That is the part that really pisses you off.”