June 14, 2013
South Burnett residents who registered for SMS alerts about the Blackbutt Range received a welcome message on their mobile phones on Thursday … the major construction works are now complete.
This simple message marked the the end of a massive – and costly – engineering task to re-align the highway after the 16 landslips that occurred in January 2011.
Now there will be a three-month maintenance period while engineers monitor as the roadworks “bed in”.
Representatives from Aurecon, who administered the construction contract, and the Department of Transport and Main Roads took Member for Nanango Deb Frecklington, South Burnett councillor Deb Palmer and media representatives on an inspection of the completed work on Thursday morning.
Senior Site Engineer Andrew Cummings said engineers had been forced to shift the road alignment 30m to the north to find stable land as the geology of the area was so heavily folded and faulted.
The original road, built in the 1940s, had been constructed on fill. During the 1974 floods, many slips had occurred and these had been repaired to the standards of the time.
Mr Cummings said the 1974 repairs had actually held up reasonably well, but the new work – carried out by VDM Construction – had been designed to current engineering standards with only a one per cent chance of failure.
A massive 18,000 tonnes of concrete were used in the job; most of the rock utilised came from on-site.
The new road runs through a corridor resumed from forestry land, but the felled timber was not wasted, either.
“All the big trees went back to forestry for use,” Mr Cummings said.
The new road has a high-tech flavour. Sensors have been placed along it to measure water flow and to watch for subsidence; solar-powered base units then transmit the data back to the Department of Main Roads and Transport.
But nature hasn’t been forgotten either. Although the concrete slopes will remain a stark tribute to human engineering, the cleared areas of soil have been sprayed with native seed, and already plants are starting to grow back in the denuded spaces.
And when the traffic stops for a moment, you can still hear the bellbirds …
- Related article: Roadworks Finished … At Last!
