Why Australia’s Doomed Dam Can’t Be Fixed

Paradise Dam is doomed.

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[AlbertaGeek]

Concrete that is later found to be of insufficient quality almost always means that someone cut corners and pocketed the difference.

[leonkernan]

Anyone else from Australia here who's never heard of this??

[DM-yjqf]

i'm sure the consultants, contractors and politicians responsible for the first dam cashed out and aren't being held accountable.

[monketok]

Sadly in Australia we hear about a lot of half assed construction project more often than we should

[Lovehandles]

I personally worked onsite at Paradise Dam doing repairs after the first big flood event, was a big push to make it safe before the summer storms returned.
Many don’t realise just how much rain fell upstream preceding that flood!
They have a mini-hydro electric power generator rated around 3megawatts as I recall, and the whole structure went underwater. (We worked on that part also). The engineer told me if the could have harnessed all the energy during the spill it would have generated 61gigawatts!
Used $1million of just concrete supply to fill the 21metre deep hole that was created at the base of the spillway 😮

[ianbishop]

What about the Commission of Inquiry Report (COIR) from 2022? If you knew anything about RCC dam construction and governance processes for major State Government infrastructure projects and you read the Commission of Inquiry Report you would know that this project was destined to be a failure PRIOR to the acceptance of the Consortium which constructed the dam. The truth of this major engineering failure (costing $1B+) has never been publicly exposed. The reasons for this failure (which can easily happen again with the new replacement dam) are a combination of the following decisions: previous Queensland Premiers including Bettie were responsible for outsourcing dam design and construction to the private sector, creating a company in the first instance to own the dam but who knew nothing about dam ownership, selecting a consortium which used a dam design that had never been constructed on this scale in Australia, no rigorous testing of the RCC was undertaken, there was no site supervision of the work to ensure it was carried out according to the contract conditions, there were only two South African engineers who had any experience with constructing a dam of this type while the dam was being constructed around the clock and finally the COIR showed that many contractural conditions were never followed (the dam was designed by an American engineer). In other words the COIR was a white wash (because of the terms on the inquiry and the Commission's inability to understand these issues) and to date no person or company has ever been made accountable for this disaster. Finally, as far as I know, the location of the new dam being 70m downstream of the original dam must also address poor foundation conditions.

[bzaps]

Make sure you are sitting down if you ever talk to a Bundaberg farmer about this topic.. The management of this project by the Queensland government was an absolute disgrace. Thank you Fred for covering a topic that not many people know about.

[ibrahim-sjcr]

not once did i hear "trouble in paradise" i know its low langing fruit but still

[stephenspackman]

So the original plan was to strengthen the plasticine using chickpeas, but in a surprise turn, it transpires that tinned chickpeas don't have the same strength as fresh ones.

Now question on my mind is, are they leaving enough space for the third dam?

[Thepriest]

The original engineers and contractors should go to prison over this.

[pearpenguin]

The Mad Max franchise, Australia's greatest cultural export, has made the whole world aware of how precious water is to them.

[kahliepurnell]

queenslander here, can confirm flooding is a real threat.
every 5-10 years we have a 1:5000 event, then approximately each 1-2 years its a 1:200 event.
quite a few people i know have ptsd and have lost houses, the last bad flood my friend lost the lower level of their house with all their memories and keepsakes.. its a common problem up and down the east coast of australia.
when it gets bad the "mud army" comes out and everyone rallies around and helps the community.

[rags]

No one can piss away money better than an Australian politician.

[TheOtherSteel]

There was no discussion of holding the original builder accountable for the errors leading to the shorter projected lifespan and the need for a replacement dam.

[icey_u]

This is honestly better infomation than the local state gov is giving out.

[JonKino]

This is a common occurrence in Australia.
All they do is feasibility studies, build something that is inadequate or has potential issues. Then another feasibility studies, followed by repairs. This goes on and on.
All to enrich the well connected contractors.
Welcome to the lucky country.

[rajrigby]

For any other non-Queenslanders who have never heard of this, it might be because the project was approved in 2002 by the Liberal party by a personal friend of John Howard, David Kemp. Outside of Queensland, the Mudoch and Nine-Fairfax press (which was headed by Peter Costello) has been silent about this debacle. 🤷🏾‍♂️

[jakobrebeki]

I watched the one on the swiss dam. That was good as well. thanks for posting....

[KD-xofx]

Wow... between this and the lack of oversight in the high-rise building industry, Australia has a shocking amount of incompetency...

[Palizoid]

Sounds like a standard Australian project