Cr Ron Owen response to Council’s response, dated 11th April 2006 to Report by LSA for Gympie Securities (Mc Fail St) received and approved by Council staff within one day. This must be a record. Why such haste?

Why was a report in Favour of Gympie Securities supplied within one day? Does Council want to Flood the residents?

Councils Letter Accepting The Report.
1. Report from LSA dated the 7th April received on the 10th April and the letter approving or accepting the remedial work was given on the 11th of April 2006.
Questions

a) With only one day for perusal and checking the figures how can busy Council staff be assured that all the information supplied is correct?

b) How can “Council accepts the proposed drainage/ remedial works in principle”, when the report or the proposal has not been before Councillors in Council?

2) How can Council state, “No modelling should have ever been carried out assuming the dam on Decker’s site would remain” when it was in included in Council’s own report by KBR and then sent to LSA and the LSA figures using that model were approved by Council?

3) The note included with the report states “Do not copy the report, as it will be changed”
a) Who will change the report?
b) What benefit or use can Council put this report to when it is to be ‘changed’?
c) We are not told what the changes, how can it have Council acceptance and approval?
d) Is Council accepting the present report or the next report?
e) Which report gets the Companies Registered Engineers Authority ( the number from the Board of Engineers) the present one or the next on and if they are different, and there would be no point of changing them if they were not, does that mean one of them is incorrect and has been prepared and authorised improperly.

4) Item no 10 of Council’s letter states that the owner of Lot 168, “indemnifies Council against flooding that may arise from its omission”.
a) Surely Council or the developer should be indemnifying the owner of Lot 168 against flooding of their property?
b) We have provisions of Standard Footpath in the Cooloola Shire’s Development Manual if we deviate from these requirement which include cross sectional diagrams would the precedent give every Developer the ability to design footpaths as they like?
c) When we have a legal precedents issued by the Courts of the land that resolve Concentrated, not god produced but man produced, water cannot travel on to another persons property. The Court will not care if it is a 1 in 50 or a 1 in 100, they will not care if it in there homes, it is enough that it is on their property. How can we force a landowner to have his property, driveway garden, etc changed to cope with concentrated water from others onto his property?

5) Item No 12. Councils letter asks for confirmation that. “No water will enter houses in the event of a 1:50 storm”. When really no water should enter any private property land or house in a 1: 50 and anything above this should be catered for by the roads or Freeboard.
a) Why is Council giving this supplementary expansion of the normal conditions?
b) As we know, in this development there is no Freeboard, it storms and concentrated water goes onto other people property, why are we accepting, on behalf of the residents, that concentrated water is allowed to go through their properties.
c) Is this an attempt to confuse the readers or this document?

The LSA Report.

6) Page 2. 2.00 Background, 3rd para
Letters in Appendix B are dubious as same people wrote to Council and said that they did have water in homes and one of the authors of Appendix B letters showed the water damage to Councillor Jocumsen and the editor of the Weekly Observer. See photo’s
5th Para
In the LSA report it states use of BJS data as constructed information. No credibility can be given on this report if it is based on information that has found to be in the past, unreliable> The list of problems from this company is immense, not just Mc Fail street but the Corella Swamp, Fisher Road and many others. Also in Practice Note-Project Certification by Engineering Companies. It states in Background,
“Under the new Act (changes to Professional Engineers Act 2002) registration of Companies and Units has been discontinued and companies which have contracted to carry out engineering work covered by the Act are unable to provide certification in their own name. As a consequence Clients and Approval Authorities have been asking for personal certification in the name of the individual engineers involved. This practice creates the anomalous situation in which individual staff are being asked to personally fulfill a contractual obligation entered into by their employer. The employer may also find itself unable to complete its contractual obligations as its existing staff have no obligations (under the existing conditions of employment) to provide such certification.”
Practice Note issued by the Board on 26th August 2004.
I have been informed by Council Staff that neither BJS Consultants or the Directors of BJS are registered with the Board of Engineers and as above the view by the Board is that it is anomalous when the employees represent the Company when they have no contractual obligations themselves, I believe that the acceptance of any information on this basis is dubious and should be investigated by Council as to its legality under the Professional Engineers Act and Councils obligations to the Titles Certificates.
a) If BJS has no standing with the Engineers Board how does Title certificates for developments legally stand?
b) What authority could be given to this report if the information has been based on Registration with the Board of Engineers that does not really exist?

7) In the last paragraph on page 2 the report mentions twice Surveyors, 3D Cad Solutions I have made inquiries and found much information about software programes of that name but no Surveyors.
a) Has Council staff checked that these surveyors exist?
b) Has this been put in this way to mislead Council?
c) With LSA basing their report on this information if Surveyors 3 D Solutions do not exist how would this affect the legality of the report from reputable Engineers?

8.) Page 3
Para 3.1
States that “official printout from the station was unavailable. Radar imagery for the Gympie area has been obtained and in included in Appendix E . Inspection of imagery during the event indicates the rainfall to be substantially more intense on the south side of Gympie than at Toolara.”
Appendix E 03:20 to 09.50. Hours AM
This is misleading as the storm in question was at 4 pm in the afternoon. Rain charts provided in Appendix E only go from 03:20 hours 09:50 hours that is AM in the morning and show only light rain for Gympie. The worst rain recorded that day was only Moderate Rain???
What has this information to do with the storm at 4 pm in Gympie the 1st of December.

9) Page 7
4.2
As water has a magical quality of spreading and finding its own levels. When we look at the Slab levels we notice that they admit home innundation at the highest level and deny it at all other listed lower levels???!!

4.3
As noted above flow in the roadway at a minimum of 350 allowing for 150 for the kerb means that footpath has a 200 mm rise 8 to 10 % in elevation this is beyond the 25 allowed in the Development Manual. When the owner keeps losing his exhaust on his driveway due to the hump and it will only take one pedestrian to fall over the hump in the dark and the Council will be at fault not the developer.

10) Page 10
5.1 Surely LSA realise that the Overland flow water from the Decker development is their responsibility as their concentrated water flows into that property for above. Under the Development Manual Gympie Securities have the responsibility of handling all incoming and out going concentrated water. Deckers Dam could never be a part of the calculations but Council had allowed it to be used in its own KBR report.
5.2 States “That model results are to a satisfactory level of accuracy”. Does this mean they predict that the design will place concentrated water over a many properties in the Mc Fail area. They should have their Registration pulled.

11) Page 11
5.3.2
It is noted capacity of constructed Detention Basin “capacity is less than design”. All flows from Exhibition Road is not going to flow up hill to go into the Detention basin before or after the event. This para 5.3.2. is misleading and incorrect. It is a contradiction, they admit the Detention Basin was full so if water from Exhibition missed the Detention Basin it would make no difference if it bypassed it or not.

12) Page 13
6.2.1
States, ” Cause local back up of flows in the allotments where there is a capacity in the trunk drainage system.” This is an admission that they believe that it is acceptable for concentrated
water to traverse the allotments, trimming bottoms of paling fences to allow water to flow easier is not correcting the initial problem in any way. It should not be there. Why have a fence with a 50 mm gap at the bottom? Would it keep the Cat in? Why should residents have a fence with its bottom removed.

13) Conclusion
This report should have been sent back to them immediately as inadequate, misleading and time wasting. This report was written for Gympie Securities and does not change anything for the residents or future residents of this area. It does not improve the Cooloola Shire Councils legal exposure as the supervising authority. The same undersized pipes will still be in place, the same if not more water will be hurtling down the streets and footpaths the requirement for the body catching fences is still needed the next storm could be the same or worse. There is still the same risk that children or the infirm could be washed away.
a) This report blames the weather which is not in anyway substantiated,
b) it blames the neighbouring Development which has done no wrong,
c) and blames people for complaining falsely, with dubius information.
d) Blames plastic bollards for blocking the flow of water and causing turbulence when in reality they slowed the flow and prevented for thirty minutes or more water rushing into an external wall of a house in Castlereagh St.
As a professional report it should be reported to the Engineers Board for lack of substance and professional integrity. It solves nothing and is just an attempted ‘cop out’, of causing the situation.