After six months of work, 30 days of hearings and hundreds of submissions, the Queensland flood inquiry will begin giving some definitive answers today.
The Bligh Government launched the $15 million commission of inquiry under Court of Appeal judge Catherine Holmes after the deadly summer floods devastated the state.
The inquiry team will hand Premier Anna Bligh its first report on flood preparedness issues today.
The document will focus on the steps that can be taken in time for next summer’s wet season, with the major report not due until early next year.
Hearings in April and May focused on concerns over weather forecasting, flood warnings, disaster management and emergency responses.
The enormous releases of water from Wivenhoe Dam in the days leading up to the Brisbane and Ipswich floods were also a key issue.
During the first week of hearings, engineers said they based their decisions on no further rain flowing into the dam as forecasts could be unreliable.
Wivenhoe Dam controllers said they delayed activating the highest emergency water release stage because they didn't want to “needlessly” inundate properties downstream, but then had to ramp up releases.
At one point, Justice Holmes suggested the dam manual was “a bit of a mess” because of the confusing ways in which it talked about factoring in runoff, rainfall and dam level.
Last week, the commission released a report from independent hydrological expert Mark Babister, who argued Wivenhoe engineers achieved close to the best possible mitigation during the January floods.
This was despite 59 per cent of floodwaters in southeast Queensland coming from dam releases.
However, Mr Babister also found that earlier increases in releases from Wivenhoe Dam during January 9 and 10 could have reduced the eventual peak outflow and the resulting severity of flooding experienced downstream.
The inquiry hearings also put a spotlight on how emergency services and disaster managers struggled to respond to the unfolding disasters in Toowoomba and the Lockyer Valley.
A triple-0 call played to the inquiry revealed that a Toowoomba police officer repeatedly castigated Donna Rice for driving through a flooded intersection minutes before she and 13-year-old son Jordan died.
Mark Kempton, the helicopter pilot who rescued 28 people after the deadly Lockyer Valley floods, fronted the inquiry to relive his darkest hours and call for equipment upgrades.
The inquiry was also told that Brisbane-based emergency authorities made decisions at the height of the flood crisis that failed to take into account local needs.
The Lockyer Valley Regional Council, which was in charge of disaster management in the area that suffered the highest flood death toll, was accused of being ill-prepared.
The inquiry was also told of a lack of flash flood warnings in Toowoomba and the Lockyer Valley.
The commission’s first report will be released after an official handover about 1pm today.
It is understood the government is likely to be given an advance copy several hours beforehand.
State Cabinet is due to meet this morning, ahead of the start of another parliamentary sitting week.
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