Flood victims launch Australia's largest ever class action

Lawyers for more than 4,000 flood victims have filed Australia's largest class action on Tuesday three and half years after their homes and businesses were destroyed.
The lawyers argued that the flooding from Brisbane's Wivenhoe Dam caused a disaster almost completely avoidable if the operators had not released enough water earlier enough.
The case was lodged in the New South Wales Supreme Court against the dam operator and the Queensland government and if successful could net the victims more than 2 billion U.S. dollars in damages.
The decision of legal firm Maurice Blackburn to run the case for the victims of the January 2011 floods follows an evidence- testing program by a team of U.S.-based hydrologists.
The lead lawyer who has been managing the case, Damian Scattini, told The Australian that data proves that this was a disaster that didn't have to happen.
"The evidence tells us that the rainfall that occurred was not a so-called 'black swan' event -- we say that the rainfall that was forecast to fall actually fell, but the operators of the dam had not left any capacity in the dam to deal with it," he said.
"For whatever reason, probably because that was how Wivenhoe Dam had always done it, the operators just let the rainfall keep going into the dam in the weeks before January, and when it stopped raining they were going to drain it off.
"But this time, there was too much rain, and when they realized the dam was almost full and they had lost their buffer, they panicked and let it rip -- they released these huge volumes quickly, and that was the Brisbane flood."
The operators of the Queensland government-owned Wivenhoe Dam have consistently denied any wrongdoing and emphatically rejected claims of negligence.