Thread: They are doing something about the road!

Access to my place is via about 17km of road from the bitumen that is maintained or perhaps not maintained, by NPWS. It used to be not too bad as long as you kept off it after heavy rain, but lack of maintenance and damage during firefighting in 2007 left some parts pretty questionable.

I have spent a considerable amount of time and effort on correspondence with my elected representatives over the years, and have had a couple of wins over the years, for example, testifying in person to a Legislative Council committee resulted in improvements to the worst creek crossing a couple of months later. One of the major assets in recent years has been the promulgation of standards for firefighting access roads about five years ago. As this road is the backbone of firefighting efforts in this part of the forest, and clearly does not meet the standards, pointing this out helps. Latest communication from the state government via my local member was that the road would be brought up to this standard by the end of September, 2022. (I only got sent this from the local member recently when I gave the pot another stir recently.)

Of course the wet weather over the last couple of years has not helped. About this time in 2018, I think it was, two fire trucks on an exercise got bogged on the road. They were there for about three months, and the mess that was made recovering them was only equaled by the mess made recovering the recovery vehicle.

Then we had the rain last summer. I did not even dream of using the road for many months (I can get out through next door, but there are nine gates, a creek and a river that way!), but as it dried out and became usable (sort of) I find that it is in far worse condition than it has ever been in the thirty years I have been using it. It is barely passable to Landrovers. (My eldest grandchild brought her siblings up for the school holidays on Monday in their family's D2, but got me to drive it across the creek half a kilometre outside my gate.)

Yesterday, on my way into town, I found a strange ute on the road coming towards me. They pulled off and stopped, so I did as well and talked to them. There were two men in hivis in the ute. They are starting work on the road, and told me that I would see more equipment further back towards the bitumen, and also gave me the UHF channel to call to ask them to let me past.

Sure enough, further out, a hundred metres or so off the bitumen there was a whole collection of equipment and just off the bitumen about twenty truckloads of coarse gravel and several truckloads of rocks up to half a metre across.

Originally Posted by Graeme

Ah, little ones, not the 9"+ ones that I encountered.

The "energy dissipaters" I mentioned were considerably larger than that.....