June 21, 2012
The D’Aguilar Highway through the Blackbutt Range will re-open to two lanes tomorrow.
Member for Nanango Deb Frecklington welcomed the news after wet weather delayed the road opening earlier this month.
“The reconstruction of the Blackbutt Range has been an enormous engineering task,” Mrs Frecklington said.
“In January 2011, the highway was impacted by numerous landslips on this section of the range, which presented a big feat to reconstruct it in terms of geotechnical, design, construction, safety, and environmental elements of the engineering process.
“The difficulty of the project was compounded by further wet weather impacts, especially during the last wet season when the contractors were unable to work on site for many days at a time.
“There has been more than 600mm of rainfall since Christmas 2011 and 100mm of this has occurred in the past month. The project has lost a total of 19 days, or four weeks due to rain since Easter this year alone.”
Mrs Frecklington said works on the range included long-term geotechnical stabilisation, drainage and pavement works.
“Traffic is now driving mostly on the finished alignment of the highway through the range,” she said. “It is expected that the reconstruction project will be completed late this year, weather permitting.”
