DAM LIES!
28.04.2007
THE Queensland Government appears to have been caught out misleading the Traveston Crossing dam inquiry, with false claims on flood mitigation and “ridiculous” examples of alleged damage from the 1999 floods.
In sworn evidence to the Senate Inquiry’s recent Queensland sittings, the State Government has confounded local experts with claims that Mary River flooding in 1999 killed seven people between Gympie and Maryborough, injured 30 more, rendered 130 homeless and forced the evacuation of 180.
Checks by “The Gympie Times” indicate the Government has attributed to our region flood damage reported over the whole of South East Queensland, including a huge area which could not possibly benefit from any flood mitigation effects at Traveston Crossing.
The Government submission claimed flood damage suffered by irrigators at Imbil would be “greatly reduced” by a dam, even though most residents know the dam would have no local mitigation effects, Imbil being upstream from the dam and adjacent to its impoundment area.
Instead, the Government is buying near-Imbil properties because the dam would flood them permanently.
“This is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard,” Mayor Mick Venardos said yesterday.
“I’ve asked people up and down the river system: ‘Were there any deaths caused by the February floods in 1999?
“There were none that anyone could recall. What are their names? Where are they buried? Where did their deaths occur? “Of the three funerals in Gympie within a fortnight, all involved people 82 or older.
“No inquests on any deaths have reported they were caused by the 1999 floods.
“I’d be most interested to have their people substantiate this.
“I chair the council’s Counter Disaster Committee and its Welfare Sub-committee reported that 40 to 50 people needed temporary accommodation before moving back into their homes when the water went down.”
The Government’s claims are contained in a report which it commissioned, apparently in an attempt to discredit the anti-dam report commissioned by the Mary River Council of Mayors and presented to the inquiry by Cooloola Shire Council.
That report, prepared by Sydney’s Institute for Sustainable Futures and the Brisbane engineering consultancy Cardno, was rejected out of hand by Deputy Premier Anna Bligh before she had even received a full copy, after it branded the dam useless in the short term and unnecessary after that.
The Government’s counter-report was prepared for the Queensland Water Commission by consultants Marsden Jacob Associates and MWH Australia Pty Ltd.
It ridicules ISF/Cardno for not mentioning the dam’s alleged “flood mitigation benefits,” but then presents false informaton to illustrate those benefits.
Ms Bligh’s press secretary Steve Keating denied the government submission had misled the inquiry and said “The Gympie Times” should take up its concerns with the source of the information, which he identified as the Commonwealth Attorney General’s website, particularly a report prepared by the neo-government group, EMA.
The report was presented as part of the official Queensland Government submission to the inquiry, in circumstances where knowing inaccuracies may constitute perjury or a contempt of the Senate.
He did not respond to the suggestion that the Government had a responsibility to ensure its submission was true.
Instead, it contains information which, even on a cursory reading, would be seen as bizarre by anyone with even rudimentary knowledge of South East Queensland geography.
The EMA report does refer to seven deaths but, unlike the Queensland Government’s re-telling of it, makes it clear they occurred over the whole of South East Queensland, not downstream from Traveston Crossing, where any flood mitigation benefits would be concentrated.
Although headed “Gympie-Maryborough, Qld – Floods”, the report refers to livestock losses at Kilcoy and damage at Imbil from Yabba Creek, neither of which would benefit from flood mitigation effects at Traveston Crossing.
It also refers, under the Gympie-Maryborough heading, to bridge damage “on the Brisbane River in Esk Shire,” disruption of Brisbane ferry services, disaster declarations at Beenleigh and Toowoomba, rescues from flooded homes in Toogoolawah, temporary flooding in Ipswich and evacuations in the Sunshine Coast hinterland.
stevem
(Note that none of the unfortunate fatalities mentioned in the following article occured downstream of the proposed Traveston dam site)
FLOOD TERROR - DELUGE TOLL HITS SEVEN
11 FEB 1999,
SARA BRADFORD and DAVID MURRAY
She had to cut her way out of the darkened, mud-filled hulk of the van with a kitchen knife after it slammed into a bank. Clad only in underwear, the woman staggered for two days over sodden, treacherous country trying to find help.Her camping partner became the seventh victim of the five-day south-east Queensland deluge which has left towns awash, communities isolated, roads cut and property owners facing huge clean-up bills.
In other developments: Gympie residents prepared to clean up after the worst flooding in a century. The huge surge moved down the Mary River and overflowed into Maryborough, where a peak was expected tonight.
Flooding in other areas began to ease, although roads remained cut and towns isolated.
An army of SES volunteers working non-stop were angered when forces had to be diverted to rescue two youths riding the Albert River near Beenleigh on an inflatable mattress.
Premier Peter Beattie yesterday briefed Prime Minister John Howard and said he had offered whatever federal assistance was required.
The woman who escaped her wrecked campervan near Kenilworth in the Sunshine Coast hinterland stumbled into a camping area exhausted after her ordeal.
Her name and that of her partner had not been released. She was believed to have been from Kenilworth and the man was visiting from Victoria.
She said they were sheltering in the campervan when the creek bank beneath it collapsed and the vehicle was swept into Little Yabba Creek on Monday afternoon.
The man got out of the van but was swept away by the current. Police and the SES recovered his body yesterday a few hundred metres from where the van was washed up. The woman said she was trapped as the van was tossed like a cork by the surging stream. She cut her way out in the early hours of Tuesday and struggled through the swiftly moving water to the shore. The woman told of trekking for hours through bush to find help before stumbling on the other campers.
“Not only was she lucky to survive being in the van, and get out, but she was taken down stream and there was so much debris she could have easily been hurt … she was incredibly lucky to survive,” search co-ordinator Sergeant Kyle Bates said.
The woman, believed to be in her early 40s, was recovering last night from hypothermia and exhaustion.
The floods claimed their first victim on Saturday after 13-year-old Harriet Hunter of Closeburn, north of Samford, drowned.
Page 11 Seven dead in deluge
Harriet was pulled into a storm culvert by a strong current while attempting to rescue her dog.
On Monday, Peter Muller, 41, of Kenilworth in the Sunshine Coast Hinterland, drowned after he tried to swim across the Conondale River from his stranded vehicle. His body was recovered yesterday.
At the height of the deluge on Tuesday, four people lost their lives.
Another boogie-boarder, Christopher Yankof Miric, 25, drowned after he was swept over a weir on the Caboolture River.
And in the South Pine River at Albany Creek, a man drowned after he was trapped by fast-rising waters. Police are yet to make a formal identification.
In the Currumbin Valley at the Gold Coast, a man suffered a heart attack while clearing weeds near a swollen dam.
… residents of Gympie woke up yesterday to face the worst flood this century with the Mary River reaching a record high.
stevem
AUSTRALIA: February 15, 1999
Story by Diana Taylor
BRISBANE, Australia - A cyclone hit the northeastern Australian tourist resort of Port Douglas late last week, packing winds of 170 km (105 miles) per hour, a weather bureau spokesman said.
“The eye of Cyclone Rona passed over Port Douglas,” said Jim Davidson at Brisbane’s cyclone warning centre.
Emergency officials in the area urged people to take shelter and braced for major floods as Rona dumped heavy rain on the area.
Queensland is just recovering from floods that have claimed five lives near the state’s southern coast since Tuesday.
Resident Andre Leu told Australian radio of the calm in the eye of the cyclone. “For the last 20 minutes we’ve had absolutely no wind or rain, it’s just dead still,” said Leu, who lives just north of the resort town.
“I’ve got trees down around the place, I’ve got our driveway washed out and the creek’s over our causeway,” Leu said.
The radio said much of the far north of Queensland was without power after winds tore down cables and trees as Rona struck land. There were no immediate reports of casualties.
Rona lost power as it crossed the coastline and was swiftly downgraded to category two, weaker than the category four Cyclone Tracy that killed more than 60 people in Darwin in 1974.
A receptionist at a luxury hotel complex in Port Douglas said guests sheltered in a corridor in the centre of the building.
The radio said rescue authorities were managing to stay in contact with a clipper with 32 passengers on board caught out at sea just off Port Douglas.
Torrential rains since the weekend in southern Queensland have sent raging waters down creeks and swelled the Mary River to a peak of nearly 22 metres (72 feet) at the town of Gympie on Wednesday, the highest level in a century.
One woman found help 48 hours after floodwaters swept her camper van several kilometres down a creek north of Brisbane.
Police said she escaped after cutting a hole with a knife in the van’s rooftop window, then grabbed at a succession of trees to try to pull herself out the water, only to be swept away.
After 10 hours in the water, she walked all day on Tuesday, got trapped by another creek, slept in foliage until the water subsided and finally walked into a camping ground on Wednesday.
Police later found the body of her companion, who had managed to scramble out of the van when the floodwaters first hit.
Four other people, including an eight-year-old boy, have drowned in the Queensland floods since Tuesday.
stevem
Dodgy dam figures ‘typical
3.05.2007
Story: Arthur Gorrie
ANTI-DAM campaigner Kevin Ingersole says misleading flood mitigation claims are “typical” of state government tactics to justify its Traveston Crossing dam proposal.
Referring to revelations that the government used flood damage statistics from all over South East Queensland, including Toowoomba and Brisbane, to help justify the dam as a flood mitigation asset, Mr Ingersole said: “The reality is that they’re prepared to use everything to win their agenda. To date that’s been their style.
“They haven’t been called to account anywhere. They haven’t had to answer to anyone.
“They haven’t responded openly to questions from the public and they’re treating the senate the same way.
“We have serious concerns about the numbers the government has produced right through this whole process. We have many concerns.
“Figures we have been after have either been missing or misleadingly presented.
“I would have to say this is just another example of misleading information from the government.
“It follows closely on the heels of various statements this government has made about the predicted water yield performance of the dam, if it is ever built.
“On several occasions we have invited the government to review our modelling of the dam’s likely performance, which shows that it cannot deliver water even close to the numbers the government is talking about.
“It’s tempting to suggest that the dam’s likely performance is one of the pieces of modelling which the public should surely be entitled to see.
“We would like to see modelling on the basis of recent actual stream flows, rather than data which talk about flows you would get from certain rainfall events, which are hypothetical.
“It is widely understood that decreasing rainfall has an even more significant effect in decreasing stream flow,” he said.
stevem
Thursday 3rd May 2007
Story Arthur Gorrie
The state government has played down the significance of sensational but misleading information in its submission to the Traveston Crossing Dam inquiry.
Deputy Premier Anna Bligh has been forced to admit she did not thoroughly read the state government submission, before having it lodged as sworn evidence to the senate inquiry.
The submission appears to attribute a disastrous death, injury and damage toll – one that never happened – to the 1999 floods in Gympie.
Ms Bligh has since told television journalists she did not read the misleading report, which formed part of the government’s 221 page submission, and reportedly said she “didn’t think anybody read all of those”.
Referring to “damage to Gympie” during the 1999 floods, the government submission says “the floods caused seven deaths, 30 injuries and left 130 people homeless”.
Confronted with the fact they did no such thing, Ms Bligh’s press secretary, Steve Keating, indicated their accuracy or otherwise was irrelevant to the points on flood mitigation which the government wished to make.
Ms Bligh admitted she had not read the technical material or the consultant’s report.
The figures are published under the heading “Flood mitigation benefits” and are contained in a Traveston Crossing dam report, carried out by consultants MWH/Marsden Jacobs, on behalf of the Queensland Water Commission.
The report appears to be an attempt to discredit an earlier council commissioned study, which found the dam is both useless to relieve South East Queensland’s current drought crisis and unnecessary for the longer term. That report was carried out by consultants ISF/Cardno on behalf of the Mary River Council of Mayors.
Checks by The Gympie Times show the government report illustrated the flood mitigation benefits of a Traveston Crossing dam with death and damage figures from all over South East Queensland, including Toowoomba and Brisbane.
Mr Keating said the consultant had only sought to demonstrate that the whole region was flood prone and that a dam at Traveston Crossing would help some of this.
stevem
Tuesday 8th May 2007
story by Arthur Gorrie
CAUGHT misleading the senate inquiry into the Traveston Crossing dam, Deputy Premier Anna Bligh has indicated she had not expected Senate investigators to examine the State Government submission in detail.
Flaws in the submission have cast new and widespread doubt on the credibility of the government’s entire case for the Mary Valley dam.
Ms Bligh admitted at the weekend she had not read the misleading claims, exposed in Saturday’s The Gympie Times, before including them as sworn evidence to the inquiry. Her admission was accompanied by a further statement to reporters that she “didn’t think anybody read all those”.
“Well, the Senators do,” was the concerned reaction of one Senate staffer contacted by The Gympie Times this week.
It was a sentiment strongly echoed by Townsville-based Queensland Senator and inquiry committee member Ian Macdonald, who warned that “very serious penalties apply” to anyone misleading a Senate inquiry under oath.
Noosa MP Glen Elmes said he had listened twice to a recording of Ms Bligh’s remarks “to make sure I heard her correctly”.
Cooloola Mayor Mick Vernados said the flood mitigation claims “cast doubt” on the report’s veracity and raise the question of whether the consultants’ claims lack substance. “It seems to have been written for their masters,” he said.
Sen Macdonald said he could not comment on specifics until he had studied the case, but “as a general observation, the Senate would take a very serious view of any evidence which is given and which is deliberately misleading or deliberately inaccurate.
Even without deliberate falsehood, he said inaccuracies on flood mitigation cast doubt on the credibility of the State Government submission overall.
“If it transpires that they were inaccurate in the assessment on flood mitigation, it then calls in question how accurate must be their evidence on environmental impacts and, indeed, engineering assessments and claims on the benefits of the dam.”
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