By Hedley Thomas, The Australian
A SECRET report by scientific and engineering experts warned of significantly greater risks of vast destruction from Brisbane River flooding – and raised grave concerns with the Queensland government and the city’s council a decade ago.
But the recommendations in the report for radical changes in planning strategy, emergency plans and transparency about the true flood levels for Brisbane were rejected and the report was covered up.
The comprehensive 1999 Brisbane River Flood Study made alarming findings about predicted devastation to tens of thousands of flood-prone properties, which were given the green light for residential development since the 1974 flood. The engineers and hydrologists involved in the study warned that the next major flood in Brisbane would be between 1m and 2m higher than anticipated by the Brisbane town plan.
The study highlighted how the council had permitted the development of thousands of properties whose owners were led to believe they would be out of harm’s way in a flood on the scale of 1974.
The study was leaked to this reporter in June 2003 by a high-level public servant, who revealed that the local and state government at the time were less concerned with flood risks and more interested in seeing property development in low-lying areas.
“The flood immunity of properties is less than previously assessed. The average flood damages associated with flooding will be significantly higher. There are potential legal implications for council by allowing development to occur in higher-risk areas. As a minimum, developers and residents may need to be advised of the actual flood risk on their property,” the study says. “All elements of the study have been subjected to independent peer review because the key findings have significant implications for council.
“The major finding of this study is that the calculated one-in-100-year design flood flow . . . is about 1m to 2m higher than the current development control in the Brisbane River corridor. The simple option of saying that the current development control level represents the one-in-100-year flood level is not valid.”
Full story here
h/t to WUWT reader “Baa humbug”
Is my post of a few hours ago in the spam filter? Can’t repost as I am told by wordpress that it has already been sent.
[Nope, not there. Robt]
Typical politicians.
All they care about is their own publicity for a few years and to hell with the safety of the communities they purport to represent.
Based on this, there is prima faciae evidence for all those officials at that time who are still being alive being sued by the insurance companies, the families of any who died etc etc for culpable homicide, wilful distortion of true risks for insurers and failure to heed proper advice by experts.
Of course, such trials would cost a lot of money.
It might be a better idea to go round to their houses and simply [].
[Now, now. No such (practical) answers allowed in polite discussions. 8<) Robt]
Mod. Robt – what can I do? No naughty or inflammatory words or sentiments in my post, and wordpress won’t let me resend it. (Not that it is a big deal, but it is not the first time this has happened) – j.
[Select your text, copy-and-paste-it to the submit box (It is probably already there) and add a line saying words to the effect of “Resubmitted, second pass”. The changed lines should pass the do-not-pass-duplicate-entries filter. Robt]
It seems to be a rule of nature that the politicians always overrule the engineers. I am thinking of the loss of the Challenger where the Thiokol engineers warned them not to launch in sub-freezing weather, and the loss of the Columbia where the engineers strongly urged that a spy satellite take a look at the TPS. Both were overruled by the mis-named “management”.
History has a lot of answers for us and the warmist notion better safe than sorry, spend billions now on carbon reduction, does not seem to apply to history with observed dangers.. By the way anyone live in San Francisco on the San Andreas fault?
Robert Ellison says:
January 13, 2011 at 2:59 am
Thnx for the detailed response.
No, I don’t want a $hit fight, I just want to know that decision makers are getting the best advice and acting on that advice to the best of their ability.
If an inquiry by disaster management team(s) in a productivity Commission framework will achieve that, I’m ok with that.
Your article you linked for me – http://sciencefile.org/SciFile/articles/articles-earth/2297-how-the-pacific-ocean-influences-global-climate-a-review-of-the-physical-evidence – is informative and well worth the read. I recommend it to WUWT readers and would encourage Mr Watts to invite you to do a post.
I think many readers here hit on a sailent point. Austrailia in particular bought into the AGW Alarmist hysteria. And it wouldn’t surprise me in the least that many planners took the Alarmists word that droughts and not floods are the pressing problem. This is AGW policy in action. In the UK, we’ve seen the same thing as far as snow is concerned.
The new meme now is one of “climate extremes”. Now every strange weather phenomenon can be accounted for. However, I’m not so sure the taxpayers will be so guillable in the future. Money is tight all around. And few governments can afford the lavish spending they’ve given Climate Science these last few decades.
The fact is, any government that tried to implement the recommendations of this report would have been thrown out on its ear.
Queensland has always been very pro development and keen to increase population. Governments of all political persuasions have bent over backwards for these aims, supported by the voters.
If a government had placed huge swathes of Brisbane out of bounds for housing, it would have been crucified at the polls, accused of raising housing prices (by choking off land supply) and crippling economic development. Also, many of the inundated areas are very attractive to home buyers, precisely because they have rich alluvial soil – making for great parks and gardens – and river views.
It is just human nature at work, no conspiracy theories are required. I saw interviews today with homeowners whose houses had water up to the roof, saying they would ‘not be beaten’ and were determined to rebuild. I think they are idiots, but as long as it is their own money at stake, that is up to them.
Brisbane City Council has had a standing offer for 400 homeowners in low lying areas to buy their houses back for a long time. To date, 19 have accepted the offer. In a democracy, you can’t legislate against stupidity.
Resubmitted – second pass.
[Reply: you re-submitted this a third time @ur momisugly 10:21 a.m. I’m not posting that one because this was posted and it says the same thing. ~dbs, mod.]
Mod. Robt. – I followed your suggestion and the same thing happened, ie post disappeared, never got the ‘your post is being moderated’ box, but wordpress wouldn’t allow a repost. I tried it using a different opening line as well.
I’m using Firefox -latest version – and have no probs on other sites (or this one, mostly).
Fortunately, I’m not paranoid! But with all the IT experts on this site, maybe someone can suggest something?
It would be nice to take some smug view that expresses symphony for this poor Australians and the foolishness of their politicians, but it can’t happen here. Think again it can and has and will. When logic is overridden by faith and greed is ready to take advantage this is the result. It is world wide and ever present.
Baa Humbug says:
January 13, 2011 at 7:16 am
Robert Ellison says:
January 13, 2011 at 2:59 am
The figures in the paper would not open for me in either IE or Chrome.
I tried the link to the E & E site but they want £18.00.
I’ll try a few other work-arounds.
You folks are providing a lot of good information. Thanks for that.
RoHa says January 12, 2011 at 9:54 pm
The job of the police is to prevent burglaries, but if they fail through incompetence or corruption, we do not place all the blame on the police. We still think that the burglars are to blame for the actual theft.
After a burglary, I wouldn’t blame the police, but we might reflect upon the reassurances made by the suppliers of our failed burglar alarm and its fitting, as well as the future of the current (expensive to feed) guard dog!
I thought that government gave permission to build on a plot of land, because it was SUITABLE, sometimes done in conjunction with promises of extra flood defences.
Though houses below sea level or near receding cliffs etc do seem an obvious risk! I prefer passive security, not relying on human action for safety.
I have known plots that were OK until, years later, when even more building work close by made those original plots subject to flooding. The owners of the original plots may have protested at the new developments, (I don’t know in this case), but what do they do if they were ignored or, as sometimes happens, extra flood defences promises made and then forgotten. Being denied information on possible flooding would only make the situation worse.
I think Sydney will be next on the list we also have let 1000s of homes build on low lying land and close to rivers and the sea and the insurance co will not pay out on floods thay will find it a act of god
Rainfalls are now just a thing of the past.
by Chully Onion
Australia’s summer ends tomorrow with further indications of a striking environmental change: rain is starting to disappear from our lives.
Farming precariously on the barren landscape, collecting water in dams, and jumping puddles are all a rapidly diminishing part of Australia’s culture, as drier weather – which scientists are attributing to global climate change – produce not only fewer wet Christmases, but fewer wet Januaries and Februaries.
How bad is it? One Australian newspaper is reporting:
“DROUGHT will become a redundant term as Australia plans for a permanently drier future, according to the nation’s urban water industries chief….
“The urban water industry has decided the inflows of the past will never return,” Water Services Association of Australia executive director Ross Young said. “We are trying to avoid the term ‘drought’ and saying this is the new reality.”
http://www.theage.com.au/news/climate-watch/no-more-drought-its-a-permanent-dry/2007/09/06/1188783415754.html
“Drought is too comfortable a word,” said John Williams, the New South Wales state Commissioner for Natural Resources. “Drought connotes a return to normal. We need to be adjusting.”
http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/node/927
“Australia is the harbinger of change,” said paleontologist Tim Flannery, Australia’s most vocal climate change prophet. “The pattern that we’re seeing now in the weather in Australia is very much the pattern was predicted by computer models as much as a decade ago.We will have to get by with less water. The CSIRO’s telling us that. We’re seeing it now, in the evidence before our eyes in our rivers and creeks, and of course the computer models in the global models have been predicting just this now for some years. I think all evidence says that this is our new climate and we have to get by with less water than we’ve ever had before.”
http://old.globalpublicmedia.com/transcripts/2833
“Ultimately”, he says, “Australian children could have only virtual experience of water. Via the internet, they might wonder at river scenes – or eventually feel virtually wet.”
Hopefully Australia will see the value and urgency in taking climate action before the last puddle dries up, since unrestrained greenhouse gas emissions are projected to accelerate drought and desertification.
http://climateprogress.org/2006/12/19/australias-facing-worst-drought-for-1000-years/
Sorry, but I just couldn’t help it. Did graham g says: January 12, 2011 at 9:30 pm say that the City of Townsville was under attack? So the obvious solution would be sugar and spice and everything nice – plus a secret ingredient, Chemical X.
As a Brisbane resident through the 1974 and 2011 flood events, it appears to this observer that the same low-lying areas that were flooded in 1974 have been inundated once again.
I see no evidence so far that any new (post 1974) subdivision approvals in the Brisbane city area have been affected to the extent of dwelling inundation, over the Q-100 line (1-in-100 year flood).
I suspect that the “secret” report was merely a turn of the century wish-list by greenies and global warmenists, who unfortunately seemed to infect and gain influence in professional engineering bodies at that time.
This “secret” report would have said that Wivenhoe Dam’s storage capacity would be insufficient to alleviate a really, really big flood event, such as 1974. As a consequence, the pre-existing (before 1974) residential properties would once again become inundated.
This is perfectly true. However, minor flooding events were successfuly mitigated bewteen 1974 and 2011.
The report would have suggested that the Council buy back or otherwise prohibit persons from residing in the flood-prone pre-1974 dwellings, which would have resulted in enormous costs, and vastly expanded ex-burb infrastructure.
I would think that rejection of this “secret” report would show some modicum of common sense being exercised by the left-wing Labor Government of the time, because the contents of the said report may have been really off the wall prognostications of an easily identified lunatic fringe.
There is no evidence that such a report was commissioned by any Government of the time, and my intuition is that is was gratuiously prepared and presented.
I repeat – there is no evidence that any residential development approved since 1974 has been inundated. If this is the case, then questions need to be raised as to the approval process, and the Q-100 determination of that time.
It looks like you folks have the same problem with government as us.
We are moving in hard to get them to slow down their regulation writing and stop spending money.
They think all they need do is let the EPA steal our money instead of our congress.
Good luck with your “drought!”
Baa Humbug and Robert Ellison:
It was suggested I take a look at the discussion of the PDO included here:
http://sciencefile.org/SciFile/articles/articles-earth/2297-how-the-pacific-ocean-influences-global-climate-a-review-of-the-physical-evidence
The following two sentences are incorrect, and that’s as far as I went: “A cool mode PDO, over 20 to 30 years, sees cooler than average sea surface temperature (SST) in the northern Pacific and more frequent and intense La Niña. A warm mode PDO is defined as warmer than average SST in the north eastern Pacific over 20 to 30 years and is associated with more frequent and intense El Niño.”
Robert, the PDO does NOT represent the average SST anomalies of the North Pacific north of 20N. The PDO is the leading principal component of the SST anomalies of the North Pacific, north of 20N. Refer to my Intro to PDO post:
http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2010/09/introduction-to-enso-amo-and-pdo-part-3.html
Reply to Robert, Khwarizmi and Kaboom.
Thank you for your comments.
I’m pleased that Bob Tisdale has joined this discussion.
Robert Ellison’s Science File link is interesting reading .
I appear to have a serious misunderstanding of the safety or wisdom of going above 100% of design dam capacity before releasing large volumes of water downstream. !
I thought these water releases were called “short term pain for long term gain” by the people downstream back in the 1980’s, from a dedicated “flood mitigation dam”.
As I watch the TV footage from a helicopter this morning the massive property damage to all the people affected by this flood, I believe there should be a better system of flood control for Queensland’s capital city, Brisbane . It is not only housing that is being impacted. Public health is going to be an serious issue, and loss of life has already occurred. I have lived most of my life with this in Northern Queensland, and flood control should be minimised better that we have observed this year in Brisbane .
If I am wrong in my belief, maybe an expert like Robert can enlighten us all on the important issue of when a flood mitigaton dam becomes a significant water storage area. If you observe anger in my comments so far, it is because I experienced this flooding problem caused by economic necessity for far too many years, to want more people to share the unnecessary pain that floods cause. We know enough about weather patterns here now, and we should shun or ignore the Climate Change “drought only experts” of the past decade.
tango,
Jan 13: 10:03
Sydney Harbour is a sunken valley (from the LGM), inflow is from the Parramatta river, outflow at the heads would greatly exceed inflow. The Brisbane river is on a flood plane with flat contour gradients and a huge catchment area. Big difference.
So many threads come together in these comments.
Delingpole (and Andrew Bolt for that matter) is in my opinion wrong to choose the Mary River dam as an example of the wayward green religion. Again this is an example of the Orwellian nightmare that is Australia. A commenter mentioned document shredding, the funny thing is those implicated in this event appear as players in the choice of the site for the dam on the Mary.
To set the scene, the development boom in South-east Queensland ( Greater Brisbane) where we are busy building a new Los Angeles complete with smog bucket, was under threat from a lack of water. A group of trough feeders and snake-oil salesmen were up for re-election with the majority of their electorates starting to shower in buckets and unable to wash the car. Hey, presto the ‘Cheshire Cat’ Premier flew over at tax-payer expense and selected the Mary River as the site for another dam. This was to the great surprise of anyone with an understanding of dams as the dam would be shallow, and therefore not suitable for water supply. The public cried bulls#%t and the poor bastards whose farms, houses and livelyhoods were threatened said they would fight the dam to the death. This was when the trash from our university student unions that now inhabit our parliaments threw unbelievable buckets of cash at the land-owners ( they were buying an election with the public’s cash). The people who took these deals did well. Thus cynically and without a real public interest a community was disrupted.
So as we sit here in a sodden Australia watching the waste of the Anthropogenic Global warming scam wash away. The cynical water grid is submerged, the grid solar arrays are as dangerous as brown snakes, the sodden insulation is collapsing ceilings while our wonderful foreign Minister (ex Copenhagen Prime Minister, ex implicated in shredding) is wandering around with a TV crew threatening one of his electors with police because he was happy sitting in his raised house mistakenly offering, in my opinion one of Australia’s lowest forms of life a cold beer and schnaps.
This is absolute nonsense.
You are right, undoubtedly, in your understanding of Brisbane’s geography, and probably of its voters’ mindsets as well.
Where you are wrong is that it was utterly despicable to hide and bury this report. It should have been made public, and then a public conversation ensued (to whatever limited degree the voters were interested in it or cared).
Then, so informed. the public and its representatives could have carried on, business as usual, and taken the risk.
But to not tell them accurately about a known risk, or at least make this report known so it could be compared to other estimates, was criminal negligence.
Or at the very least, unethical and dangerous.
Brisbane City has their own hydrologists who model, map and advise the government about flooding potential and mitigation measures. It sounds like this secret report was done by external parties who probably expected to suddenly become the principle advisors.
If their report was read by anyone at all, they might have sent it through to the hydrology department, who then might have looked through and said things like, yep, yes, we know, hmm, what was he thinking.
It sounds like a political if not power mongering exercise, of dubious merit.
A really excellent illustration of the validity of von Mises’ observation:
One gets the impression that many commentators believe Queensland’s urban planners should have designed big cities on high ground surrounded by vast and empty ‘flood plains’. Unh, not likely. Australia is an ancient, worn-down continent, hence very flat. A few mountains still stand, but Oz is basically one humongous flood plain. You live here, you need to deal with that. Earlier settlers to Queensland (up through the 1950s would be my guess) recognised the challenge and built ‘Queenslander’-style houses … on stilts (usually with wide covered porches surrounding a central living area, an excellent design for mitigating the worst effects of inordinately hot summers). The ‘Queenslander’ is a superb example of what, these days, we’d call ‘adaptation’. Unfortunately, town planners are uniformly certain that nobody born before 1970 knows anything whatsoever about designing houses or communities. They’re unanimous about the primacy of high density construction on concrete slabs. They design for cheap, flat roads connecting separate precincts for retail, industrial, and residential development. And, like the universities which hand out their degrees, they’re pig-ignorant of history (no offence intended to real pigs). Truth to tell, Australians knew a lot more about how to accommodate themselves to their environment in 1811 and 1911 than they do in 2011. On form, I doubt that much will be learned from the current tragedy. It’s too much easier to chant ‘Global Warming!’ than to say ‘We’re sorry, we got it wrong’.