RTFM

About a year ago the Brisbane river flooded, and although it’s not the worst flooding Brisbane’s ever seen, it was enough to cause some pretty dramatic stuff and freak us comfortable urban dwellers out a lot.

I was fine and none of my family lost anything, either. Fortunately there were none of the horrifying freakish events that caused deaths in places like Toowoomba (an inland city built on top of a mountain range, for crying out loud), or Grantham a few days prior to the Brisbane river being affected. I do know some people who got flooded and lost possessions, but most people, fortunately, were fine, we just had to deal with things like power outages, transport not working and the overall eerie sensation of having familiar parts of your city covered with filthy mud and water.

The insurers lost a lot of money out of it, of course. There was some government assistance to some people but probably not enough (Tony Abbott didn’t want to impose a flood levy, but gave up on that fight pretty quickly when he remembered he didn’t want to publicly admit to being a colossal arsehole).

There was a great cleanup effort, with everyone coming together, in heartwarming scenes, etc. The City of Brisbane named a ferry after it, although it would be a bit awkward naming a ferry “flood cleanup”, so they called it ‘Spirit of Brisbane’ instead.

Anyway, this is still a subject of discussion not for pointless nostalgia reasons, but because they’re doing an inquiry into the flood to see if water releases from Somerset and Wivenhoe dams were managed in accordance with the operations manual. Disturbingly, there has been some suggestion they weren’t, which, when you consider what happens if the dams are mismanaged, is a pretty scary thought. Plus the insurers would probably sue the Queensland government, which owns Seqwater, which runs the dams, for potentially billions of dollars, which is bad news for me as a person who would like to live in a state that is not bankrupt.

So this has prompted me to read the manual for the operation of Somerset and Wivenhoe dams, or at least the publicly available version which is three years out of date and has numerous sections blacked out for security reasons. But the thing that made me laugh about all of this is the manual talks about some kind of process called “Real Time Flood Monitoring” or something, which is given the predictable acronym.