It's one of Australia's worst infrastructure failures, a time bomb counting down to catastrophe for a city and farming community unaware of the threat until one man's alarming discovery.
Paradise Dam 's reservoir glitters sapphire blue under a brilliant central Queensland sky, the monolithic spillway a monument to nature tamed. It's a placid scene — and an illusion.
It's one of Australia's worst infrastructure failures, a time bomb counting down to catastrophe for a city and farming community unaware of the danger until one man's alarming discovery. How did it come to this? Why was a critical infrastructure project meant to last 100 years defective from the start? Who's accountable? And is it safe?
The river rises in the eucalypts, hoop pines and forest reserves of the Dawes Range north-west of Bundaberg. Two days before voters went to the ballot boxes, then-opposition leader Peter Beattie promised a 300,000ML dam on the Burnett River within five years. Dam operator Sunwater estimates 1.5 million megalitres of water a day — about the equivalent of three Sydney Harbours at full tide — spilled over the wall at the flood's peak, churning at the base of the concrete spillway for days.It was almost two months before the overflow eased enough for inspectors to get close to the wall's base, where they found a 15-metre cavity carved from rock and concrete.Erosion beneath the dam's apron after the 2013 flood.
"You move it with a conveyor or a truck, you push it with a 'dozer and you compact it with a road roller, hence roller-compacted concrete." That decision had a profound and immediate impact on the region, which in 2019 received just 320mm of rain, its lowest since 1942.Little did they know what they were demanding, that the spillway stay at its original height, could put their community in grave danger.The region's producers could barely believe the increased water access they'd lobbied for and celebrated was about to be reduced by almost half.
As debate raged, the Queensland government in 2019 ordered a commission of inquiry while farmers failed in a legal bid to stop the remediation work.The RCC layers lacked sufficient "shear strength" and were at risk of sliding along their joints. Experts from the US, Canada, New Zealand and Australia were engaged as a technical review panel to assess the next steps.
"There was significant uncertainty as to whether we'd be able to rely on that in the long term … to withstand the extreme weather events that we need the structure to be able to pass," he says.The problem? RCC dams by design have less cement but Paradise Dam has among the lowest in the world. As the cement turns to limestone and washes out, what remains swells and shrinks through humid wet seasons and baking dry months, causing irreversible "microcracking and degradation".
"Dams, if they're unsafe they're hazardous, there's no two ways about that – not only to life and limb but also for the economy as well.Like the grinding flood at the bottom of the Paradise Dam spillway in 2013, questions still churn in the community.since the wall was lowered, says Sunwater, adding it's now rated to withstand a 1-in-5,000-year flood. The 2013 flood was a 1-in-200-year event.
"We have sought advice on that … and unfortunately the entities that would be responsible are no longer in a legal state that we could seek compensation from them," he said."The advice from engineers to us is that there is no similar example anywhere in the world of a dam being built the way this one has and I would prefer to be able to pursue those responsible for building it in such a terrible way.
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