Experts say dam added to Queensland flood damage
By Steven Wardill, The Courier-Mail
March 07, 2011 EXPERTS hired by insurance companies have blamed Wivenhoe Dam for contributing to the devastating floods in Brisbane and Ipswich. A report written for the Insurance Australia Group, which owns NRMA and CGU, details how releases from Wivenhoe, combined with intense rainfall, flooded hundreds of homes and businesses. The expert opinion, written by engineering giant WorleyParsons, potentially exposes the State Government to legal action for negligence. However, the report fails to ascertain how much of the January 13 flood could be attributed to Wivenhoe because Government-owned dam operator SEQWater has refused to detail its water releases in the days prior. The secrecy surrounding the releases has left in limbo victims such as David Stark, who is attempting to write submissions to the flood inquiry. Mr Stark, whose insurance claim has been rejected by NRMA based on the report, suspects the rapid inundation of his Fairfield home was partly caused by huge volumes of water released by dam operators, in concert with the massive rainfall in other catchments. “Obviously Wivenhoe contributed, but how much I am not able to be ascertain,” he said. … The report detailed how the Brisbane city gauge peaked at 4.5m at 2am on January 13, 30 hours after Wivenhoe operators reportedly released water at a rate of 9000 cubic metres per second to prevent the dam overtopping. Water discharged from Wivenhoe usually takes about 36 hours to reach this gauge. …
International Rivers had a PDF on the building of dams in the Himalayas. India has had their environmental controls bypassed routinely. Even the flooding in Pakistan after the record rains was affecting by dams : the levee across from the American Predator base raining rocket assaults against Pakistanis being breached to keep the base from being flooded ! That affected millions.
North Korea was accused of waging Water Warfare against the South when dam releases caused flooding this past year.
You may well run into military secrecy concerns even with matters of public knowledge these days. Not that the Americans are unaffected : the flooding of New Orleans being more than predictable…one could reasonably say manufactured !
See Levees.org for more on that.
Why ? Ah-hem. Do you see where this is going ?
Anyway, perhaps some of these articles can help provide more context for such insufferable oversights.
http://opitslinkfest.blogspot.com/2009/07/water-wealth-power.html
This sounds bad. I mean really bad. If they have something to do with the floods they have to be punished by the law. The State Government shouldn't close it's eyes about the situation. This is really serious. Flood Damage.