CITATION: Michael O’Brien

The award has been given for the leadership that Michael O’Brien has shown to the engineering profession in this State, a profession that has largely remained silent about the standard and the relevance of much of the technical information on water engineering and risk management presented to and provided by the Queensland Commission of Inquiry into Flooding. 

The continuing pressure that he applied upon the Inquiry to include particular facts, to give those facts due weight, and to link the reasoning by that Inquiry where relevant to those facts, denied other interests the unimpeded advocacy of constructions that would have left the people of Brisbane at continuing risk of unnecessary and dangerous flooding.