A damning new report into a catastrophic explosion at a Queensland power plant has raised serious questions about the management in the lead up to the blast.
The 2021 explosion at the Callide Power Station blacked out nearly 500,000 customers when a backup battery system failed at the coal-fired plant.
Within minutes the decision was made to evacuate the plant. No one was injured or killed.
An explosive new draft report, which has been hidden since last year, has laid out the issues plaguing the plant leading up to the blast.
It finds that the state-owned operator, CS Energy, failed to address the safety risks posed by equipment at the plant.
The report, published by CS Energy today, contained the word “failure” 20 times in the executive summary.
It described the turbine’s explosion like a “missile event” as it tore itself apart.
The report also found a critical risk program aimed at safety and launched in 2018 “started off well” but “lost key resources and funding” and as a result “left the organisation not having a comprehensive view of the risks it faced on the Callide site”.
“This is one of the greatest scandals we have seen in this state for a long, long time,” Opposition Leader David Crisafulli said.
“We’ve got a power station that had a catastrophic explosion that could have killed its workforce and thank goodness it didn’t,” shadow energy minister Deb Frecklington added.
Energy Minister Mick De Brenni said the government had taken action.
“Well the board has been replaced, the CEO has been replaced, the operations manager has been replaced. They are the actions the Miles government has taken.”
The report specifically says CS Energy was “focused on cost savings”, and while it had conducted some safety reviews, responses “tended to be cosmetic, and rarely addressed underlying causes”.
De Brenni argued that “maintenance funding provided by the government has been increasing year on year”.
Almost three years since the explosion, Callide Unit 4 is still not up and running.
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