Spotting discrepancies 'not my job'

9 Feb 2012, 5:26 pm   -   Source: AAP
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Queensland water minister Stephen Robertson says it was not his job to spot discrepancies in documents on the running of the Wivenhoe dam.

Queensland's water minister says it wasn't his job to spot inconsistencies in documents about Wivenhoe Dam's management during last year's floods.

Stephen Robertson on Thursday spent 40 minutes giving evidence at Queensland's reconvened flood inquiry.

He later told reporters he didn't notice a discrepancy between a briefing note prepared for him and what was said about water release strategies in a final report by dam operator Seqwater.

The Seqwater report said dam engineers jumped to a higher water release strategy, aimed at protecting urban inundation, on January 8 last year.

That was the Saturday before thousands of homes were swamped in Brisbane and Ipswich.

But the inquiry has heard evidence engineers moved to the higher release strategy later than claimed and created a fictitious final report on how the dam was managed.

Mr Robertson asked for a ministerial briefing on the dam's operation for January 17 to take to a cabinet meeting.

It said the higher release strategy, W3, was in place by Monday morning, almost 48 hours after the date was claimed in the Seqwater report.

Mr Robertson told the inquiry he read the documents two months apart and didn't pick up the discrepancy.

"Ministers don't sit down at their desk comparing documents against each other. That is not a reasonable suggestion of what ministerial responsibility is all about," he said.

Mr Robertson was also told by then Water Grid Manager director of operations Dan Spiller, on the Monday before the floods, that the dam was operating under a transitional W2 strategy.

That was more than 48 hours after the Seqwater report said the higher release W3 strategy was implemented.

Mr Robertson told the inquiry he only became aware of the different records of events via media reports, but said it was not unusual for ministerial briefings to contain mistakes.

He noted dam engineers were given only a few days to prepare the ministerial briefing and had been through a very stressful and difficult time.

He said he would not necessarily have expected the times and dates of when strategies were implemented to remain the same in official documents.

"I wouldn't have been surprised in the preparation of the final report from Seqwater ... if some of the information changed, based on a more considered and more detailed review of what occurred," he told the inquiry.

He said he trusted that dam operators were managing the dam with the best intentions.

"If I had detected a `she'll be right' attitude, that would have set off alarm bells as minister," the minister told the hearing.

Independent dam expert Greg Roads, hired by Seqwater to review its final report, told the inquiry water releases were compliant with the dam's operating manual.

But when he was pressed by Commissioner Justice Cate Holmes on what strategy he believed the engineers were working under on Saturday, January 8, he said he couldn't conclusively tell.

Mr Roads also defended an email he wrote to the dam's four engineers on January 17 last year, before he was asked to independently review their performance.

"Looks like you guys did a great job," the email read.

When asked about it, he said he made the assumption they'd done a good job based on rainfall data he'd been tracking on the Bureau of Meteorology's website.

Another dam expert concurred with Mr Roads' view that it was actual water releases, not strategy labels, that mattered.

"You don't absolutely need the tag to do the job that you have been tasked with," dam expert and peer reviewer Brian Shannon told the hearing.

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