A new open thread for the week of the politicians’ return.
We have Gillard’s improving poll numbers that MUST BE IGNORED AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE. (Look over there! A whisper from an anonymous person claiming, again, there’ll be a “leadership spill”!) Extreme weather events in Europe that HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH CLIMATE CHANGE. And brutal oppression in Syria that we have, after previous extra-territorial misadventure, lost the ability to do anything about.
And we witness the launch of a new effort at providing quality, informative, genuine journalism – Monica Attard’s The Global Mail.
It’s an exciting week to be commenting on an open thread.
104 Comments
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uh oh is right MoC @ 96…
This could have massive implications for the “Howard light on the hill” myth that Abbott has been spruiking for the past couple of months.
I can see the MSM linking this behaviour with the same behaviour that led to the Tampa cover-up, especially given that it was around the same time.
Lets see if Fairfax or News runs with it. Could be a great 4 Corners expose though.
Chris O’N – Are you suggesting the wrong release strategy was used over the weekend of 8-9/01/11???
Podrick,that is the suggestion of the current thrust at the inquiry…that engineers were not in the strategies claimed….and that the actual releases don’t reflect optimum use and timing of the strategies…which to me seems a hindsight view. But the commission has to establish that hour by hour the engineers acted in acknowledgement of the feedback and forecasts,because they did not have the luxury of hindsight. BOM’s quantitative forecasts apparently underestimated rainfalls,after initially [as in,in the first few days] overestimating them,so it will be interesting to know how engineers weight these inputs.
Engineer Mark Babister has gone into bat for the engineers,saying that releasing flows larger than inflows is not ‘general’ practice,and would have been “unjustifiably risky using information available at the time”….I don’t know about that,frankly; provided co-ordination with downstream authorities is timely, the result of bumping up flows would be earlier closure of crossings and some low-level flooding,and more space in the dam.
I don’t know what some critics expectations are. If some are convinced that even minor flooding in Brisbane could have been avoided,I think that is unrealistic. However knocking the peak level at Brisbane down half a metre would obviously have spared some damage.
The Commission has a tough brief. If they decide a lower peak was possible,how do they exactly quantify it and justify it,which will ultimately decide who can join a possible class action. The characteristics of the Wivenhoe inflows were really nasty,and once the event reached the 9th opportunity for any bold,paradigm-busting pre-flood release was past.
I was responding to the assertion that “they were in a high W2 to W3 strategy from the Saturday morning”. I don’t know what was meant by “high” but it doesn’t seem to have much to do with the allowed maximum flows. But this is academic on Saturday because a substantially higher release rate was not called for by the conditions on Saturday even including forecast rain.
On Sunday at 2 PM, the expected maximum lake level was 70 metres ignoring expected rain and 71.3 metres including expected rain. It was expected to remain above 68.5 metres for more than 3.5 days ignoring expected rain and for nearly 6 days including expected rain. So that was well into W3 territory and as such the primary consideration was protecting urban areas from inundation and a prime part of the protection of urban areas from the risk of inundation is the maintainance of the flood compartment in the dam subject to the release limits allowed by W3. The release limit allowed by W3 at that time was the minimum of 3500 m3/sec minus the expected natural maximum at Lowood (700 m3/sec with forecast rain) and 4000 m3/sec minus the expected natural maximum at Moggill (1200 m3/sec with forecast rain), a net result of 2800 m3/sec (from both Lowood and Moggill limits coincidentally). The releases didn’t get close to this until 8 PM Monday when they reached 2695 m3/sec.
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