RSS Feed
February 3rd, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda Queensland’s floods inquiry has heard extraordinary claims that Wivenhoe dam engineers colluded to cover up the mistakes they made before Brisbane and Ipswich flooded.
The inquiry has reopened hearings to investigate claims dam engineers failed to release water at the right rate on the weekend before the cities flooded, compounding the disaster.
It’s also considering whether they misled the inquiry about how the dam was managed in the lead up to the January floods last year.
Counsel assisting the inquiry, Peter Callaghan, accused the engineers on Friday of colluding after the floods to provide matching accounts of events for SEQWater’s final flood report.
That report, which said the correct water release strategy was used, was accepted by the inquiry last year.
Mr Callaghan said the dam’s operating manual required an adoption of a water release strategy at the time of the event, but flood engineers failed to do that.
He said the engineers only realised that requirement later, and then worked together to give the impression that decisions on water release strategies had been chosen at the time.
“You knew that if the lack of information about how the dam was actually operated became widespread knowledge, that it would be regarded as unacceptable,” Mr Callaghan told the dam’s lead flood engineer Robert Ayre, who testified on Friday.
“You knew that report was a careful reconstruction, contrived to give the impression that everything was done by the book.
“Every statement you have made, every piece of evidence you have given, has been calculated to give that impression.”
“It’s manipulation … that could not be achieved without close cooperation of all four of you.”
Mr Callaghan said the paper trail had exposed the collusion.
He said information in emails, situation reports during the flood event, and a strategy summary document contradicted SEQWater’s final report on the dam’s operation.
Mr Ayre rejected the collusion claims.
He said that in practice, water release strategy labels were only attributed after the event, and he may not have been “consciously” aware of what strategy he was in at the time.
“Consciously I’m not sure I was fully aware at that time whether I was in strategy W3,” he said.
But he said the objective of the W3 strategy – protecting urban areas – was being achieved.
Earlier, Mr Callaghan said another flood engineer John Tibaldi had written SEQWater’s final report after the flood to give a false impression about when release strategies were chosen.
“It (the report) is a fiction, it’s something that you created in the end of January, it doesn’t represent a single thing that happened in the event in terms of choice of strategy,” Mr Callaghan said.
Mr Tibaldi said he had not misled the inquiry, and denied creating a false or misleading flood report.
He said he had recorded the strategies after the event using data that could not be manipulated, such as lake levels, river flows and dam releases.
“I tried to match the strategy transitions against the data that was available to me and make conclusions based on that data as to when the strategy transitions occurred,” he said.
He said he stood by the report.
“I wanted to paint the full picture of the flood event, good and bad,” he told the inquiry.
“It’s out there and people can judge us.”
During the tense hearing, Mr Tibaldi broke down for the second time in two days.
He choked back tears as he described how he could not bring himself to take part in a ministerial press conference on January 15, after the floods hit.
“I just couldn’t go, I just couldn’t go,” Mr Tibaldi said, before the inquiry broke so he could compose himself.
He explained that his recollections of the events were imperfect. “It was an emotional time, with lack of sleep.”
Hearings will resume on Saturday.
Views: 0
Posted in 
Tags: 
