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February 10th, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda Engineers who operated Wivenhoe Dam before thousands of homes in Brisbane and Ipswich were flooded last year acted responsibly and by the book, an independent flood hydrologist has argued.
Hydrologist Mark Babister was asked by the Queensland Floods Commission of Inquiry to re-examine water releases from the dam on the weekend before the two cities flooded last January.
“It was in accordance with the manual and responsible,” he told the inquiry on Friday.
“You could possibly argue for some slight changes.”
In a new report, his eighth for the inquiry, Mr Babister says releases greater than the ones the engineers used would have amplified the floods initially, but reduced the peaks overall.
He noted that hindsight suggested a better strategy could have been followed but added, “It would have been unjustifiably risky using the information available at the time.”
Mr Babister was also asked to model two hypothetical water release strategies.
The first, G1, invokes release strategy W3 at 8am on January 8 as the engineers say they did, and ramps up releases to get a total flow at Moggill of 4000 cubic metres a second.
Forecast rain was not included.
The second, G2, also enacts W3 on January 8, with the floodgates opened as fast as permitted by the manual, to maintain a release rate of 4000 cubic metres a second.
Mr Babister’s report said the greatest flood peak reductions were achieved under G1.
The figures project the flood peak would have been reduced by 60 centimetres in Brisbane, 1.3 metres at Moggill, 1.2 metres at Jindalee and 90 centimetres at Oxley.
Under G2, the flood peak would have been 30 centimetres lower in Brisbane, one metre lower at Moggill, 80 centimetres at Jindalee and 60 centimetres at Oxley.
On the Saturday in question, official outflows from the dam were 927 cubic metres per second at 8am and peaked at 1242 cubic metres per second during the day.
Mr Babister said although both modelled scenarios would have had some benefit to downstream areas, neither would have been realistic last January because there were no grounds for such large releases at that time.
He said the scenarios relied on releasing water and raising flood levels substantially, well before engineers knew they were in for a serious flood.
“If we didn’t have the rest of rainfall that occurred, we would have actually made flooding significantly worse, worse than would have occurred probably without the dam wall,” he said.
“I very strongly expressed my opinion that neither were practical and highly risky.”
The Wivenhoe Dam engineers have been accused of moving to W3 later than stated, creating a fictitious final report for SEQWater and misleading the flood inquiry.
The hearing is continuing.
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