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Queensland Floods

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white_crane said:
Positive thoughts and wishes to those in NSW and Victoria who may have some hard times ahead.



PS Julia, Calliope - I made no reference to insurance policies in my last post and neither did the post I was referring to. Anyway, let's forget that. Thank you for your posts.
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My reference to insurance was in regard to your comment;

Exactly where in Australia (or even the world) is a place that everyone can live, that is safe from every natural disaster known (or unknown)? We have to live somewhere
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.

You have provided a good argument that where possible we should insure against disasters, unless of course the risk is too high, then the cost is prohibitive and we have to cop the fallout.

My policy covers me against fire, storm, flood, tidal waves, tsunamis, lightning and earthquake, but because I live in an area safe from flooding the premiums are very reasonable. The odds against the other major disasters are pretty high.
 
Looks like many flood victims will not be suitable for help from donated relief funds:

Means tests are so restrictive that key grants are off-limits to people on salaries well below the national average or with modest savings or assets.
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More here: Victims hit by tough checks

The asset tests are $48,400 a year for a couple, or singles at $36,600 despite the average wage being about $65,000. I wonder what Anna Bligh plans to do with the money if she is so severely restricting those who can receive it?

Anna Bligh did so well during the crisis. Is she now going to blow it big time?
 
For the "Qld floods caused by AGW" mob:

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Re: above

lies, damned lies and statistics

Brisbane was never meant to flood again due to the big dam they built.
 
Calliope said:
Lies, damned lies and anecdotal bulls**t.:D.
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Well, don't you think the floods have been mitigated in Brisbane over the years by the installation of drains (were they there in 1890?) a bloody big dam, widening of channels etc????

You can't say that Brisbane hasn't flooded much in recent times so therefore global warming is nonsense.

As I said lies, damned lies and statistics.
 
The dam itself was expected to reduce peak flooding by 2m. Add 2m to the recent flood and it's still below that of the big floods of the 1800's.

Development on the catchment can have positive and negative impacts in relation to runoff and hence flooding. Unless these changes can be quantified, it's difficult to argue a net overall impact one way or the other.
 
Knobby22 said:
Well, don't you think the floods have been mitigated in Brisbane over the years by the installation of drains (were they there in 1890?) a bloody big dam, widening of channels etc????

You can't say that Brisbane hasn't flooded much in recent times so therefore global warming is nonsense.

As I said lies, damned lies and statistics.
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There have been no flood mitigation measures of any note in Brisbane since the 1890's. Quite the opposite. There were 9,000 houses and businesses affected in Brisbane in 1974 and 22,000 in the recent much lesser flood, which was mitigated by the dam.

In Graceville where I used to live, the flood height in my former home was at least 2 metres lower this time. In fact water did not enter the house. It reached nearly to the top of the doorways in 1974.
 
This is a copy of an email I received from a mate in the middle of most of the current crisis.

This just seems to be amazing, can anyone substantiate this ?
(I have x'ed out the authors surname)

Hi Doug

There has been some amazing great story's come out of the floods. But there are also the ones that will never be told because in this country we tolerate idiots in government jobs and no one wants to point the finger in case it somehow blows up in their face.

Sorry, but at my age, I have become totally disenchanted and someone needs to tell it like it is, so I will start the ball rolling. Please join with me to lift the lid on idiots with uniforms.

Take Qld transport. In Dalby district.

Dalby hit the news with a record flood in the Condamine River that damaged the water treatment plant. And water needed to be trucked in in the middle of floods. Truck drivers worked hard to get us water.

Officers from Qld Transport booked drivers for so called over loading.......... what Idiots.
Who pays? It'll get squashed and probably has already, but what a waste of resources at a time when manpower was critical.

Farmers crossing a road with a tractor to feed starving, flooded stock were pulled up, the tractor measured, and they were booked because it was slightly wide. Not only that, they were forced to leave the tractor and go to town to get an over wide permit before they could move it back into the farm. And this happened on an already closed road where the farmer was the only person around. Except for the idiots.

These are not rumors. They are facts. This morning, I was booked for driving down a closed road to check livestock that were reported out on the road and, at the same time, pick up my employee who had walked over the bridge to come to work. My house happens to be 50 m past the road closed sign, so apparently I cannot even go in and out my gate. I tried to reason amicably with 2 idiots. Of course I got more than a little agitated when they refused to let me down the road to my farm. As a result they pulled a tape recorder, so I made sure that it recorded their stupidity. I even had to insist that they returned my driver’s license. I'll definitely win the court battle as my employee witnessed the whole affair. But what a waste of time and resources.

Over the last 3 weeks, there have been Qld Transport officers stationed outside our farm booking innocent locals for about 8 days. 2 guys sit in a vehicle with the engine idling and hazard lights on 24/7. That would be 3 shifts, plus motel and other costs. Now most of these guys were reasonable people. I had to chat with them every time I went out my gate. Some were idiots like my experience this morning. But the real idiots in this case are the people who sent them out here to guard an obviously flooded and closed road. And never bothered to check when the water went down, and left them there. We, the taxpayers, pay them to be there and also pay fines for trying to get on with our lives in tough times.

Wrote the above in the hour before I went to Brisbane to help clean up the mess in our flooded premises there. While in Brisbane I was told a true story about the truck drivers delivering food to Gympie. As happens in times of desperate need, trucks rolled out of the Brisbane warehouses stacked with as much as they could get in. After all, the media was screaming for food for Gympie. Queensland Transport then intercepted the trucks and fined the drivers for overloading.

What Senior Idiot in Qld Transport decided that he could solve Queensland’s financial crisis by fining drivers? And sent dozens of men out to embarrass the Government when they could have been helping people in need.

And did you hear about the farmer who was ferrying food and other essentials for himself and neighbors across the flooded Condamine.

Well, the SES and Police decided that was their job. Apparently it is illegal for us farmers to even launch our boats to help ourselves or rescue our livestock. So they sent him home after warning him that if he continued to help, they would prosecute. As he was putting his boat back on his trailer on the other side of the river, he heard horns blowing and looked back to where he had been sent away from. There were the professional idiots, in the middle of the river, sinking. And, as we normal citizens are stupid, he had to re-launch his boat and go back and rescue them.

Apparently they had forgotten to put the plugs in the bottom of the boat and their training had not taught them how to simply put them in after they discovered it and then how to bail the boat out. He should have let them drown. That would be called "natural selection". But again, they had been sent out with an attitude rather than real training. So who is at fault? Need I answer that?

As I said at the start, there have been many, many great deeds by the vast majority of people, but when a society gets to the point that ordinary people are stopped from helping each other and are forced into submission by bureaucrats, Where are we going?

Please add your story's and keep this going. somehow, we have to reverse the stupidity that makes our nation the dumbest in the modern world.

Our great grandfathers would be appalled.

And if any of you have the personal emails of any Politician, or Media people, please make sure they get a copy.

Gary xxxxxxx, Dalby.

 
It seems the emergency services personnel are told to disallow any public participation in salvage & rescue. Like when police turn up at a crime. Probably due to fear of losing lives or adding to their workload.

As for the Qld. Transport dept. officers actions during this extraordinary event, well some of those stories are over reaction by the officers who were themselves likely inexperienced.
 
From another email I got tonight, a valid response to last years comment during the third year of drought in SA perhaps ?



AUSTRALIA......YOU’RE STANDING IN IT!!!!!

What about the fxxxwit from QLD who said: (about this time last year when the “Banana Benders” were busy filling up their reservoirs with water that was destined for the Darling thence Murray thence S.A. when we were in our 3rd straight year of drought) “What falls in QLD. Belongs to QLD.” Fxxk’em.....pump our excess water back to the bastards, sand bag the border & send the cnuts the bill!!!!
 
As mentioned earlier in the thread I sensed a degree of fear and anxiety in the hourly media reports by the Qld gov during the Brisbane flood.

This article seems to confirm how close Brisbane came to a disaster worse than if the Wivenhoe dam had not been built.

THE hydrologist who oversaw the design and construction of the Wivenhoe dam has defended its operator from criticism that it caused the Brisbane floods last month.

Neal Ashkanasy made the comments yesterday as SEQWater, which manages the dam, began releasing 25 per cent of the water in Wivenhoe to increase its ability to absorb further heavy rainfalls.

Some engineers have suggested that draining water from the reservoir in early January would have reduced the flooding in Brisbane, but Professor Ashkanasy said such "extraordinary claims" could only be made in hindsight.

Advertisement: Story continues below Professor Ashkanasy, a former national president of the Hydrology and Water Resources Institution of Engineers and now a professor of psychology at Queensland University, believes criticism of the dam's operator stems from a desire to blame uncontrollable events on human intervention and to seek "certainty over uncertainty."

He told the Herald: "To say those in charge of Wivenhoe 'caused the flood' provides a good headline, but it's nonsense. The flood was caused by heavy rain in the Brisbane River catchment area, not because of the way the dam was operated.

"Yes, there are calculations that suggest releasing more water would have lessened the flood, but all of these figures are worked out with the benefit of perfect hindsight."

He believed SEQWater operated the dam's spillway gates "responsibly" and in accordance with long-standing guidelines and that, without the flood mitigating effect of Wivenhoe, last month's flood might have been 1.5 metres higher.

Had SEQWater not begun releasing water from Wivenhoe on January 11, Professor Ashkanasy said, there was a possibility a fuse plug in the dam - designed to automatically collapse and release a large volume of water to quickly lower the level of the reservoir - could have been triggered.

If that had happened, you would have a very serious situation, with the height of the flood and, more importantly, the speed of the flood greatly increased.

"People would have had to flee for their lives as the water would have risen very, very quickly. My understanding is the level of water was only 60 centimetres from the fuse plug and that the dam was rising at about 10 centimetres an hour."

The management of Wivenhoe, built after the 1974 floods, will be a central issue in the inquiry set up by the Queensland Premier, Anna Bligh. But just over half of Brisbane's run-off water comes from the Bremer River and Lockyer Creek, which run into the Brisbane River below the dam.

http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/env...am-operator-says-designer-20110220-1b13o.html
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That is terrifying Whiskers.

They overfilled the dam as it was, what if it had blown?
 
Knobby22 said:
That is terrifying Whiskers.

They overfilled the dam as it was, what if it had blown?
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Yes indeed!

If those figures are correct, and I expect they probably are coming from someone so closely involved with the dam design and construction, Brisbane narrowly escaped massive damage and probable high human loss from a Tsumani that would probably have dwarfed the Toowoomba flash flood.
 
The problem is not with dams per se, but with adopting a cheap approach to dam safety.

The fuse plugs are there to ensure the safety of the dam itself. That is, to prevent a flood from physically washing away the dam.

Raising the dam wall height further above the spillway and/or increasing spillway capacity would have been a more sensible, but more expensive, means of achieving the same result. In that case, the worst case downstream flood would not exceed the natural level, since there would be no above-natural release from the dam due to fuse plugs blowing.

In short, someone in Qld decided to save a few $ on the dam and there is a price to be paid for that. I do suspect there is some possibility that those who made the decisions simply did not understand the issues involved. That is, safety of the dam itself as distinct from safety of those downstream. Certainly the media does not seem to understand it, and I have yet to see anyone challenge some of the incorrect information being given out.

Fuse plugs in a dam is a bit like driving off the road through a fence and into a field so as to stop a car. Better than a head-on smash with a big truck but certainly not the preferred means of stopping. It costs more initially, but is far cheaper in the long run, to have brakes that work on the car and a properly designed and built dam.
 
Oh dear, white crane. So sorry to hear that. I was thinking of you today when I heard about all the rain in FNQ.
 
White crane, are you eligible for any of the payments announced today by the State government? i.e. $100K initially for owner occupiers and a possible $90K later?

I gather you're being deluged again at present up there.
Many commiserations to all those ASF members in FNQ.
 
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