One of the few remaining clusters of mature Blue Mountains Ash (Eucalytus oreades)
endemic to the Upper Blue Mountains
[They are listed on BMCC’s Significant Tree Register
..including the dozen or so killed to widen the highway]
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What a steaming crock Blue Mountains Council’s (BMCC) Significant Tree Register is!
The 73 listed trees or listed tree communities on BMCC’s register listed as ‘significant‘ means exactly what? ‘BMCC significant’ is a lying euphemism for ‘big‘ and ‘expendable‘, confirmed by the fact that every time anyone wants to kill one of the listed trees, they can.
The ‘Register‘ should be renamed a ‘Remnant‘, reflecting the reducing remnancy of the Blue Mountains forests under the control of BMCC.
And many trees on the Register are indeed exotic, if not weeds. For instance, listed tree #3 is an exotic Rhododendron, #18 is an exotic cherry tree, #28 is a Radiata Pine – a listed environmental weed in another department of BMCC.
BMCC’s Significant Tree Register?
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BMCC’s Significant Tree Register dates back to 1988, probably because of Australia’s bicentennial heritage goodwill of that year, and the likelihood of BMCC getting grant recognition for its register. That would have been a purely political froth event of no substance nor perpetuity.
‘This Development Control Plan has been prepared pursuant to Council’s resolution of 17th November, 1987 and was adopted on 21st June, 1988. The Plan encompasses the Register of Significant Trees, established in 1984. (BMCC File 7717C-4)…This Development Control Plan is to apply to all land within the boundaries of the City of the Blue Mountains.’
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Objectives of Significant Tree Register
. The purpose of this Development Control Plan is to:
(a) identify and protect those trees listed on the Register;
(b) promote greater public awareness of the existence of the Register, and the individual items listed;
(c) ensure existing and, importantly, prospective land owners, are made aware of the Significant Trees which may be located on their property; and
(d) ensure correct on-going care and maintenance of those trees listed, through the recommendations included with the significant tree register.’
What disingenuous lying crap!
(a) None of the listed trees is afforded any legal protection. Worse, BMCC does not raise a finger to expend effort or cost to challenge anyone wishing to kill any of the listed trees.
(b) Since 1988, BMCC has done diddly squat to promote any public awareness of either its register or any of its listed trees. Yet, BMCC certainly has killed a few of them. The last time a tree was added to the register was 1991, reflecting the three year extent of Council’s interest, memory and planning,
(c) see (a)
(d) I challenge BMCC to present any record of any “on-going care and maintenance of those trees listed”. Obviously this object clause was drafted by a naive external consultant.
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Listed Trees – Cases in Point
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#5 Blue Mountains Ash
(Eucalyptus oreades)
(Opposite 252 Old Bathurst Rd. Katoomba Opposite Lot 2 DP707, listed 6.5.84, since chainsawed)
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#29 Smooth Barked Apple, Red Gum
(Angophora costata)
(Opposite 363 Great Western Highway, Bullaburra, opposite Lot 173, DP13407, Listed 17.7.85,
condemned by the Roads & Traffic Authority in September 2008 to widen the highway into a 4 laned Trucking Expressway)
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New South Wales Government sentence imposed upon this Angophora:
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“The Angophora (Sydney red gum) tree: the large tree is situated to the east of Boronia Road.
To retain the Angophora tree the highway would have to be widened either towards the railway line or the private properties. In both cases, land would have to be acquired, either from RailCorp or private land owners. The tree’s overhanging branches would have to be trimmed and there would be construction activities around the tree.
Arborist advice is that the consequent loss of tree roots and the pruning would instigate the decline of the tree. Angophora are highly sensitive to construction impacts such as changes to draining patterns and soil compaction. For road construction and safety reasons the tree will have to be removed.”
[Source: ‘Great Western Highway Upgrade – Community Update September 2008, ‘Bullaburra East – Ridge Street, Lawson to Genevieve Road Bullaburra, by Roads and Traffic Authority]
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Ed: Well, humans can find ways of justifying anything when it suits them – ecological destruction, genocide, wars, anything. Governments and road making organisations like the RTA are collectives of people with mandates that are self-serving.
The RTA (since rebranded) does not have to widen the highway through Bullaburra. It is only doing so to encourage greater truck and car traffic and so that such road traffic can flow faster. Bigger and more roads is the mandate for this road maker. The tradition of slowing down through local towns and villages has been dismissed. Utilitarian convenience is supplanting local rights and values. Other options have been deliberately ignored such as upgrading rail freight logistics and public transport (the rail runs adjacent to and follows the same route as this highway). Land acquistion is an easy process for the RTA. It’s management is just choosing not to take this option because it sees no value in the tree nor in Bullaburra’s amenity.
The tree’s overhanging branches would not have to be trimmed and construction activities could be well away from the tree, if the RTA management so choosed.
The RTA’s standard justification “safety reasons” had to be the clincher. the RTA relies on the ‘safety justification’ as its fallback to get its way, because it has convinced that no-one can reasonably challenge such a justification. That the M4 Motorway with its six lanes has become one of the most deadly RTA roads in New South Wales does not seem to trouble the RTA sufficiently to invest in making the M4 safer.The RTA is hypocritical about road safety.
The value of encouraging faster and bigger trucks and more cars to race through Bullaburra at 80+kph is more important to it than conserving some tree. That this particular tree has been dated by a specialist arborist as being older than300 years and so would have stood when the Three Explorers first crossed the Blue Mountains in 1813, is dismissed as worthless by the RTA and the New South Wales Government. Labor and Liberal are no different in this world view of ‘progress’. Bullaburra is set to be transformed into a Blaxland with bigger trucks racing through it. Bullaburra will become even more divided that what it is now.
If this tree were a war cemetery, there is no question that the cemetery value would be respected and a trucking expressway would not be carved through it.
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Les Wielinga
NSW Roads and Traffic Authority Chief (2006-2012)
Executioner of Bullaburra’s Angophora
and Strategic Planner of the Trucking Expressway juggernaut through the Blue Mountains
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#33 Scribbly Gum
(Eucalyptus sclerophylla/Eucalyptus piperita hybrid)
(Cnr St Georges Cres. & Adeline St. Faulconbridge, Lot 5 DP8526 , Listed 24.8.85,
condemned in Sep 2011 for selfish dual occupancy housing development)
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Blue Mountains Council arborist has condemned the tree as having ‘extensive decay’.
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Trial by Ordeal?
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Local residents protesting to save the tree, believe this native Scribbly Gum to be quite healthy and that the arborist’s so-called ‘decay‘ is in fact a natural fungus. The residents believe that Council’s arborist’s assessment has incorrectly condemned the tree and that only after the tree trunk is chainsawed will the proof of the tree’s health be revealed.
It will be akin to being a Medieval Trial by Ordeal imposed on those suspected of being a witch. An example is where a priest would demand a suspect to place his hand in the boiling water. If after three days, God had not healed his wounds, the suspect was guilty of the crime.
In the case of this Scribbly Gum, if after chainsawing it, the trunk shows no signs of internal decay, then it can be confirmed as having being healthy, but by then it will be dead.
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The Council’s assessment:
“It should also be noted that the significant tree has been assessed as not being viable for retention in any case as the result of extensive decay throughout the trunk. This matter isdiscussed in more detail in the body of the report.”
[Source: Blue Mountain Council, Business Paper, Using Land for Living Item 20, Ordinary Meeting, 20110628, Development Application No. X/443/2010 for a detached dual occupancyconsisting of a singe storey dwelling and a two storey dwelling on Lot 5 SEC. 2 DP 8526, 47 St Georges Crescent, Faulconbridge, File No: F06738 – X/443/2010 – 11/85977, Clause 44, p.214]
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#61 Blue Mountains Ash
(Eucalyptus oreades – once was a ridgetop forest)
(Railway Reserve opposite Katoomba Hospital, Listed 6.11.89,
half the trees chainsawed in 2008 to widen the highway into a Trucking Expressway.
What’s left is a token coppice so that the RTA can claim on paper that it respected the ‘significant’ status.)
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Relevance and future of the Significant Tree Register
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In November 2011, Blue Mountains Councillor Janet Mays presented a Notice of Motion to Council:
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“That the Council receives a report detailing the role and relevance of Council’s Significant Tree Register, including the cost of both managing and maintaining that Register.”
Background
The recent decision by the Land & Environment Court, to uphold an appeal by the applicants at 47 St Georges Crescent, Faulconbridge, includes permission to remove a tree that is listedon Council’s Significant Tree Register that decision brings into question the relevance of this Register.
The report should outline the role and relevance of the Register in providing decision-making capability to Council’s Planning Officers. The role and relevance of the Register should then be considered in terms of benefits and cost of maintaining this Register. Dependant on the benefits and the costs, the future utility of the Register should also be discussed.”
[Source: Blue Mountains Council, Business Paper, Notices of Motion, Item 26, Ordinary Meeting, 20111122, Subject: Council’s Significant Tree Register, File No: F06745 – 11/178956, p.173]
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Ed: Meanwhile, anthropocentric prejudice sees the National Trust of Australia (an organisation supposedly committed to promoting and conserving Australia’s indigenous, natural and historic heritage) recognise people as ‘National Living Treasures’. No thought is given to Australian native trees, many which have stood longer than any colonist set foot on Australian soil. Surely, a 300+ year old native tree has more claim to being a national living treasure.
On 4 March 2012, two days ago, we hear that Queensland mining magnate Clive Palmer has been named a National Living Treasure. Palmer has made is fortune exploiting Australia’s landscape for his personal gain. Clearly, Australian Governments continued to be dominated by 20th Century Baby Boomer exploitative world views.
No chance!A B-Double crosses the wrong side of the Hume Highway and slams head-on into a car killing all three occupants
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Last Friday, a brick-laden truck crossed a grass embankment, crashed through a guard rail and ended up on the opposite side of the Menangle Bridge on the Hume Highway south of Sydney. It slammed head-on into a car killing the three people inside.
It is only a matter of time before such a tragedy befalls the Great Western Highway in the Blue Mountains as more and more B-Doubles ply this regional route.
Driving along many highways throughout Australia has become deadly as more and bigger trucks travel faster just a metre away on the other side of a white line or two. Not only are there more semi-trailers, but trucking companies are increasingly putting larger capacity B-double trucks on the road, which can weigh over 70 tonnes.
When 70 tonnes hits you it is an instant wall of death.
A speeding semi ploughs into the front yard of a home in Rosanna, in eastern Melbourne on 21st September 2010
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Yet both Liberal and Labor governments at both national and state level are pouring billions of taxpayer dollars to facilitate more road freight on Australian highways, while ignoring the comparative line haul efficiencies and inherent safety of rail freight.
In 1998, the New South Wales Labor Government announced a 12-year $360 million ‘upgrade’ of the Great Western and Mitchell Highways between Penrith (outer Sydney) and Orange in the central west of NSW. In addition, the Federal Liberal-National Coalition Government committed an extra $100 million as part of its Auslink National Network.
The ‘upgrade’ meant transforming the two lane regional highway over the Blue Mountains into a four lane 80kph expressway to facilitate greater and faster trucking – a ‘trucking expressway‘. The then promoted features of this new trucking expressway were to be:
Widening of the highway to a four lane, divided road between Penrith and Katoomba
Widening the highway to mostly three lanes between Katoomba and Mount Victoria (including Blackheath)
Providing additional overtaking lanes along stretches of the highway
Improving pedestrian and traffic facilities at intersections crossing the highway in townships
providing bicycle facilities along the highway
Extensive landscaping and urban design initiatives within Blue Mountains towns and villages.’
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[Source: NSW Roads and Traffic Authority Great Western Highway Upgrade’ brochure, January 2002]
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Well, the widening is certainly carving through Blue Mountains communities and bushland. Pedestrian walkways and crossings are few and far between and the few cycle lanes are within a metre of B-doubles hurtling along at 80kph – those that stick to the speed limit. Who’d be a cyclist on the Great Western Highway now unless one had a death wish?
Destruction in progress yesterday at Boddington Hill, east of Wentworth FallsGreat Western Highway Blue Mountains
(Photo by Editor 20120201, free in public domain, click photo to enlarge)
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In September 2008, the then Federal Labor MP Bob Debus for the Macquarie electorate (covering the Blue Mountains region) committed another $450 million on the Great Western Highway to bypass the village of Mount Victoria and River Lett Hill near Lithgow.
Debus revealed the purpose of the widening on his website:
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“The bypass will halve times between Mt Victoria and Lithgow, reduce accidents by two-thirds, and improve freight transport from the Central West .
The bypass will provide a route on the western escarpment more suited to the operation of heavy vehicles than the current Victoria Pass…”
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[Source: ‘Bob Debus for Macquarie E-news #2‘, Bob Debus MP website, ^http://www.bobdebus.com/newsletter2.html (page since defunct since Debus has resigned from Federal Parliament]
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The joint Labor-Liberal policy focus on developing road freight and ignoring rail freight is short-sighted 20th Century truck thinking. But it is also meaning our regional highways are morphing into bigger and faster freight routes – trucking expressways. Local communities are having to share regional roads with huge trucks.
The trucking industry has allowed itself to become largely contract based where drivers instead of being paid for their time driving are paid on a trip rate. This means that the more trips a driver makes and the faster the delivery times, the more money the drivers earn. This work arrangement only encourages truck drivers to drive faster, often too fast, with disastrous consequences.
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‘It is a statistic that will alarm police and governments dealing with a string of fatal road accidents: almost two thirds of long haul truck drivers interviewed for a national study say their employers pressure them into using unsafe work practices.’
[Source: ‘Truckies pushed into danger zone’, by Andrew West, Sydney Morning Herald, 20100109, p.2]
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Recent fatalities on NSW roads , including the death of an 11-year-old boy, have sparked a renewed call for action on trucks in the Mountains.
Deputy Mayor Mark Greenhill moved a matter of urgency at Blue Mountains City Council (BMCC) meeting 31st January 2012, calling on state and federal government representatives to meet with BMCC to discuss “means and methods by which large trucks can be limited or controlled in terms of behaviour on the Great Western Highway over the Blue Mountains” following several shocking incidents in other areas of the state.
Clr Greenhill: “While the courts have not yet had a chance to determine guilt or otherwise, and I don’t seek to either, recent accidents on NSW roads stand testimony to the awesome power of these trucks,” he said. “In the Campbelltown area a large truck went over the top of a car and killed three people. They had no chance. In coastal NSW a boy was killed while sleeping in his house when a large truck ploughed through it.”
Eleven-year-old boy killed when a B-double crashes through his bedroomAnyone living within 100 metres of a highway has got cause for concern
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Penrith residents are mourning the death of Max MacGregor, the 11-year-old killed when a truck loaded with bananas crashed through his bedroom on the state’s mid-north coast. Max was asleep in the holiday home his family were renting in Urunga when, at 5am on Sunday, a B-double semi collided head-on with a ute before swerving into the holiday home (100 metres from the highway).
Clr Greenhill: “When things go wrong and [trucks] are out of control, they are an uncompromising and deadly weapon. “In that context, people have been killed in significant numbers in the Blue Mountains. It is a scandal to me that governments are not doing more to control tucks on the highway across the Mountains. “This should especially be the case while the highway works are under way.”
Clr Greenhill released BMCC figures in September last year that showed trucks were over-represented in local crash statistics and motorists were three times more likely to die in a collision with one. The statistics showed that from 2005 to 2009, trucks represented nearly a third of all vehicles involving deaths despite being less than a third of vehicles on local roads. Three per cent of all truck crashes were fatal, compared to one per cent of crashes by all other vehicles, the figures showed.
Clr Greenhill said he had reports from local residents about large trucks “even braving the Old Bathurst Road bends”, and said he would like to see vehicles such as B-doubles off local roads for the time being.’
[Source: Letter to the Editor, Blue Mountains Gazette, 20120201, p4]
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The tragic accident involving a 25/26m B-double truck at Menangle last week reaffirms the fact that the Great Western Highway, even after the upgrade to Katoomba is completed, will never be suitable for these massive trucks.
Yet the federal government is funding stage one of a multi-billion dollar highway bypass between Mt Victoria and Lithgow, the main purpose being to allow 25/26/30m B-double trucks carrying up to 77 tonnes to use the highway through the Blue Mountains. Despite overwhelming community disapproval the federal government is pushing ahead with stage one, a purpose built 25/26/30m B-double bypass at River Lett Hill.
The Blackheath Highway Action Group along with many other Blue Mountains Groups successfully lobbied for an independent review to be conducted on the proposed Mount Victoria to Lithgow highway bypass and the future of the highway west of Katoomba. In July 2011 the NSW government appointed Evans and Peck, a firm with local knowledge to conduct this review. the review was completed in November so why is the federal government stalling on its public release?
The federal government refuses to fund a $5 million rail study, a key recommendation of the Central West Transport Needs Study. Rail deserves the same funding, tax incentives and regulatory framework as is currently given to support long haul trucking.
For the sake of safety, local amenity and the long term sustainability it’s time to give rail a fair go and permanently abandon plans to spend billions to turn our highway inot a 25/26/30m B-double freight corridor.’
~ Michael Paag, Chairman, Blackheath Highway Action Group, Blue Mountains
‘A driver has died after a truck caught fire and exploded following a head-on collision between the tabletop truck and B-double took place about 24 kilometres south of Dubbo at Mountain Creek Road about 4am, emergency services said. The Newell Highway in Dubbo is closed in both directions between Mitchell Highway and Tomingley Road. The tabletop truck was carrying food and plastic food containers, and the B-double was carrying fertiliser, Ms O’Connor said.’
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‘Orange truck rollover’
Truck Roll Over at the intersection of Burrendong Way & The Northern Distributor Orange, Central NSW, 20100629
[Source: ‘Orange truck rollover’ by Steve Smith, Rural Fire Service, Canobolas, ^http://www.canobolas.rfs.nsw.gov.au/dsp_content.cfm?cat_id=131107]
‘One woman was killed and five people were injured in two accidents involving B-double trucks. Engineers were called to the scene of a dramatic accident on the Gateway Motorway at Boondall in Brisbane about midday yesterday, when a B-double truck exploded after it and a car collided. The intensity of the explosion and subsequent fire was so severe that parts of the truck fused together, raising concerns about damage to the road and overpass bridge underneath, a police spokeswoman said.
(Meanwhile) on the Bruce Highway near Rockhampton, a 19-year-old woman died and four people were injured when a car and a B-double truck collided. Police said the station wagon tried to turn into the southbound lanes of the Bruce Highway at Marmor just before 8pm on Friday when the car and truck, which was travelling in the northbound lane, collided.
The 19-year-old driver was killed, while her three female passengers, two aged 19 and one aged 18, were taken to Rockhampton hospital. The three are in a stable condition.The 65-year-old driver of the B-double was taken to hospital for precautionary treatment and has been released.
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‘Three trucks involved in two separate highway collisions’
A 50-year old man was taken to Dubbo Base Hospital with serious injuries after a collision between a B-double truck and a utility vehicle, occurred about 1.15pm on the Newell Highway just south of Gilgandra.
Earlier in the day, in a separate accident, two trucks collided 25 km outside of Dubbo on the Golden Highway. A UD truck crashed into the back of a Mitsubishi Canter turning right at the Barbigal Road turn off to Wongarbon about 11.40am yesterday.
At the scene, Ballimore RFS deputy captain Col Buckler said the Golden Highway was not currently built for trucks and “most definitively” needed upgrading.
“This is the official B-double road to Newcastle (and) the roads need to be built to carry trucks,” Mr Buckler said. “It’s time they spent money to make it safer because of the amount of trucks that use it.”
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‘Fatal crash between car and truck causes explosion, closes Pacific Highway’
AT least one person has been killed in the fiery collision between a car and a B-double truck at Warrell Creek, about 10km south of Macksville, just before 4am today.
“The B-doubles can’t pass using the diversion as the rail overpass is not suitable for their weight,” a spokesman for the Roads and Traffic Authority told AAP.
The truck involved in the crash was carrying chemicals and exploded in flames on impact, but Fire and Rescue NSW extinguished the blaze. One person from the car has been confirmed dead, but police say it’s not clear how many people were in the car when it crashed.
‘A Canberra man was lucky to escape without serious injury after the B-Double truck he was driving along the Boorowa Rd overturned at 6.15am on Wednesday morning. The 42 year old man lost control of the vehicle 2km south out of town and ran off the road, before the entire truck overturned and spilled out over both lanes of the road.
The overturned truck was carrying furniture and concrete slabs and left more than a dozen slabs scattered over the road. Local resident Russell Denning said he heard a ‘monstrous bang’ when the truck crashed on the road near his home.
Senior Constable John Newton said a lack of attention from the driver appears to be the cause of the accident but police are still investigating.
“At this stage it appears the driver was distracted but there are still final enquiries to be completed,” he said. “My understanding is the driver will receive an infringement for negligent driving.”
The site of Blue Mountains Significant Tree #5 – it was a massive Eucalyptus oreades
~ Our endemic heritage woodchipped into oblivion
Lest we forget!
(Photo of Editor 20120111, free in public domain, click photo to enlarge)
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This mature native tree was respected enough to have been listed on Blue Mountain Council’s Significant Tree Register. Indeed it was the 5th such listed tree on Blue Mountains Council’s Register of Significant Trees back in 1988.
So what is the meaning of a ‘Significant Tree‘ on Blue Mountains Council’s register?
Well back on 21st June 1988 the Register of Significant Trees was adopted by Blue Mountains Council as an integral part of its Development Control Plan, which proclaimed significant trees be protected under Clause 6 ‘Protection of Items Listed in the Register of Significant Trees‘ so that:
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‘No person shall ringbark, cut down, top, lop, injure, wilfully destroy or cause damage to the root system off any tree listed on the Register of Significant trees without consent of Council.’
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Perhaps the current Blue Mountains Council mayor may care to publicly explain why its Significant Tree Number 5, a locally endemic Eucalyptus oreades (Blue Mountains Ash) of some stature located opposite 252 Old Bathurst Road Katoomba (Lot 2 DP707) has been woodchipped into oblivion?
Was formal Blue Mountains Council consent given to kill it?
If so, when was this Blue Mountains Council consent given to kill it?
What Blue Mountains Council documentation is publicly available to validate such consent?
What public notice was provided by Blue Mountains Council for community consultation about its killing?
Does Blue Mountains Council give a bleeding toss?
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The objectives of Blue Mountains Council’s Significant Tree Register include:
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(a) identify and protect those trees listed on the Register
(b) promote greater public awareness of the existence of the Register, and the individual items listed
(c) ensure existing and, importantly, prospective land owners, are made aware of the Significant Trees which may be located on their property
(d) ensure correct on-going care and maintenance of those trees listed, through the recommendations included with the significant tree register
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The following tree is not even on the Blue Mountains Council Significant Tree Register, so has even less chance of protection.
Katoomba’s most significant (grandfather) Eucalyptus oreades, beside Megalong Street
Pitifully it manages to survive as an extremely rare relic of the once magnificent Oreades Forest
This tree is ‘endemic’ to the Central Upper Blue Mountains at Katoomba
(That is, it grows naturally nowhere else on the friggin Planet!)
(Photo of Editor 20120111, free in public domain, click photo to enlarge)
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But this tree is perpetually being subjected by Blue Mountains Council approved industrial development after industrial development – the road widening, the recent expansion of the bus depot across the road and now some ‘mega industrial’ estate behind it. Blue Mountains Council pro-development forces are mounting against it.
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The Mega industrial development immediately behind this magnificent native tree
~ but what would BMCC care?
(Photo by Habitat Investigator 20120111, free in public domain, click photo to enlarge)
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The Theo Poulos promoted ‘Mega Industrial Park’
excavated right behind this rare, significant Eucalyptus oreades,
~ as if the developer or Theo Poulos gives a crap!
(Photo by Habitat Investigator 20120111, free in public domain, click photo to enlarge)
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But then Blue Mountains Council’s so-called Significant Tree Register has always been a crock of deceptive community greenwashing!
As soon as any tree on its register becomes slightly inconvenient, our pro-development Blue Mountains Council, strangled by Liberal-Labor Party vested interests, easily turns a blind eye to significant Blue Mountain heritage and no more significant tree.
Is it any wonder that as the Blue Mountains is allowed to be developed and its natural amenity destroyed that outsiders no longer see the Blue Mountains as a significant attraction, but more as an extension of Sydney sprawl? They just speed past on that forever faster, noisier and more dangerous Trucking Expressway!
A native Scribbly Gum of Faulconbridge, Blue Mountains, Australia
…perhaps over 200 years old, healthy and in its natural setting.
(Photo by Editor 20111226, free in public domain, click photo to enlarge)
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.…but simply because land developers want to destroy the bush for selfish housing, they legally claim the tree is ‘potentially dangerous’
It seems the New South Wales Court Commissioner has sympathised and condemned the tree to a chainsaw death.
(Photo by Editor 20111226, free in public domain, click photo to enlarge)
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Court Presumptuous?
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The New South Wales Land (before) Environment Court has demonised and stigmatised this native Eucalypt tree as a “hybrid” (i.e. as a ‘half cast’ in human terms). The Acting Commissioner has ruled a death warrant upon this native old growth Eucalypt in its natural bushland setting on the following three bases:
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Basis #1. Blue Mountains ‘Significant Tree’ protection ignores claims of a tree being somehow dangerous (however contrived, false and self-servingly malicious the rationale)
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“While the provisions of (Blue Mountains Council’s) Development Control Plan (DCP) 9 must be considered as a fundamental element in the decision process…it does not necessarily follow that the tree should be retained under any circumstances.
“DCP 9 is silent on how to address trees that are potentially dangerous or unhealthy although Clause 6 provides the opportunity to “cut down”… any tree on the Register of Significant Trees” but with the consent of Council.”
(Ed: Blue Mountains Council had unanimously rejected the development application – so the ‘acting’ Commissioner is presuming any real opportunity and by raising such weak argument is siding with the developer).
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Basis #2. The ‘acting’ Commissioner rejects the tree’s scenic quality instantly without due consideration and with a presumed fear of trees
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“Accepting that the Hybrid adds to the scenic quality of the site and the surrounding area, this benefit needs to be balanced against the likely longevity of the tree and its health. (Ed: The Court has no grounds for estimating the longevity of this tree, and seems to be surmising on the basis of personal prejudice).
In this case, I have little trouble in concluding that the balance falls in favour of the removal of the tree . The conclusions of the two tomograph (xray) tests and the evidence of Dr McDonald and Mr James, and supported by the council officer, leave little doubt as to the appropriate outcome.
(Ed: Tomograph tests and evidence withheld in Court decision, so how do we know the tree is unhealthy?)
“I do not accept that the retention of the tree, irrespective of the scenic quality links to the area, should be preferred when there is a serious and legitimate question over the safety of the tree. (Ed: The “serious and legitimate question over the safety of the tree” is unsubstantiated and appears presumptive).
“In my view, the overwhelming expert and scientific evidence clearly suggests that the tree is dangerous and presents an unsafe situation for future ocupants of the site.”
(Ed: ‘Overwhelming‘ from what independent qualified and scientifically relevant source and where is the report? The ‘acting‘ Commissioner’s presumption of ‘future occupants of the site‘ suggests a high probability of judicial bias).
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Basis #3. Tree canopies are inconsistent with housing safety
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“Even if a dwelling is constructed outside of the area covered by the tree canopy, I am not satisfied that (it) sufficiently overcomes the potential danger from the tree. It would be clearly impractical to fence off the area under the canopy, given the limited area remaining for a dwelling on the site and the need to provide ancillary matters such as private open space and building setbacks.” (Ed: The Court is prejudging that the developer proposal for dwellings (x2) and proposed private open space and building setbacks have precedent values over the natural values of pre-existicng native bushland including a Council-protected significant mature native tree, native vegetation and bushrock).
“The suggestion by Ms Hobley that a dwelling could be located underneath the (tree) canopy is misconceived, given the weight of evidence for branch failure and which is supported by the obvious example where an existing branch has failed and only remains because it is held up by another tree on the site. I am not satisfied that Ms Hobley has given proper consideration to the potential for injury in her assessment of the tree.”
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(Ed: The ‘acting’ Commissioner conveys an preconceived view that trees are dangerous. Details of “an existing branch” failing are not available in the Court’s decision.)
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A native Eucalypt, condemned as a ‘hybrid’
by those who themselves are but hybrid descendants of colonists
because human invasion is enshrined in law as having a superior value than existing native old growth.
(Photo by Editor 20111226, free in public domain, click photo to enlarge)
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The Habitat Advocate is pleased to support the efforts of local people in Faulconbridge trying to save this grand native tree from being killed. For further information visit: ^http://savethetree.org/
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‘Native Cleansing’
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Clearing native trees for human development is a value judgment of convenience. Philosophically native tree cleansing is no different to ethic cleansing of one human ethic group of another.
Native forest deforestation (ethnic cleansing)– at record levels across New South Wales
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‘Ethnic Cleansing’ is a process in which advancing army of one ethnic group expels civilians of other ethnic groups from towns and villages it conquers in order to create ethnically pure enclaves for members of their ethnic group.
‘Serbian military commander in Bosnia, a war criminal sought by the War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague, Ratko Mladic, sometimes issued specific orders to his subordinates to shell a particular village more than others, because there is less Serbs and more Muslims living there. Often, refugees of one ethnic group previously “cleansed” from their homes by other ethnic group are made to live in freshly “cleansed” territory of that other ethnic group.’
‘It’s not just humans who have rights, all beings do. The right not to be polluted is a right that belongs to us as well as to the Earth, to the air we breathe and to future generations. There are other rights which apply to us all, the problem is that they are not yet recognised internationally. But this is rapidly changing and you can find more information about the campaigns and progress of this fast developing arena of humanitarian and environmental law, called Earth Law.’
Noisy by day, nightmarish by night: Mt Victoria residents (Blue Mountains) near this 24-hour Caltex service station are being disturbed round-the-clock by truck drivers parking on their doorstops.
[Source: Blue Mountains Gazette, 20040924]
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As alternating Labor and Liberal governments ignore rail investment across Australia and instead encourage and invest hundreds of million of our taxes in bigger roads for truck freight, regional highways are being transformed into noisy and dangerous trucking expressways.
Year on year, the regional Great Western Highway over the Blue Mountains for instance, has seen a steady increase in the number, size and frequency of trucks using it for long-distance linehaul. Produce, fuel, sand, soil, cement, grain, steel, concrete pipes, shipping containers are getting carted by road, some from as far away as Darwin and Perth, over the highway that runs through Blue Mountains towns and villages. There are many different speed zones to ensure the safety of local road users. All of these freight types could be carted by rail, which for the most part runs alongside the highway, but is mostly only used by passenger trains. The only commodity still banned is uranium but with federal Labor recently allowing uranium sales to India to resume, is it only matter of time before radioactive uranium is carted through Blue Mountains towns and villages?
There are commuters, school zones, buses, cyclists, pedestrian crossings and increasingly 19 metre B-double trucks hurtling along the same highway driven by ‘trip-rate’ pay incentives. Tail-gating is an all too frequently noted dangerous habit of many of these truck drivers, yet the NRMA suggests that “you try not to let the size of the vehicle intimidate you“. (Karen Fittall, NRMA’s ‘Open Road’ magazine, September/October 2005, ^http://www.mynrma.com.au/cps/rde/xchg/mynrma/hs.xsl/heavy_going.htm).
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Trucks behaving badly Pacific Highway (and Great Western Highway)
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Somehow the Transport Workers Union has allowed the hourly rate to go out the window in favour of the employer’s convenient fixed cost ‘trip rate’. So to a truck driver it’s more trips for more money based on commercial incentive arrangements. This incentive structure has become the motivation driving faster trucks and therefore more dangerous trucks to push and exceed speed limits. Across the Blue Mountains, both Great Western Highway and Bell Line of Road, highway signposted speed limits are systemically unenforced.
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Where’s the speed governor? Where are the road patrols?
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At the time of Bob Debus MP as NSW Labor Member for Blue Mountains (1981 – 1988, then again 1995 – 2007), then federal Labor member for Macquarie (2007 – 2009), the once prohibited B-double trucks surreptitiously started using the Great Western Highway. How was this allowed? Now 19 metre B-doubles are at such frequency along the highway as to be standard, but there has been no local community consultation nor local community approval. It has been an undemocratic impost. What is stopping 26 metre B-doubles creeping in?
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Exhaust Brake Noise is Rife!
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Many trucks drivers on the highway apply their noisy engine brakes (engine compression braking) because they are told it saves on the cost of brake pads. Engine brakes in heavy vehicles are auxiliary brakes installed as important backup safety braking to reduce the load on service brakes on a steep descent. But many truck drivers have then engaged automatically so they kick in as soon as the driver takes his foot of the accelerator pedal. (This Editor holds a Class ‘HC’ Heavy Vehicle Drivers Licence, so is aware of this lazy habit).
Many truck engine brakes are noisy and the ‘bark’ characteristic of the noise reverberates considerably at night. Truck drivers selfishly use these even as they drive through Blue Mountains towns and villages. So 24 hours a day, often in the wee small hours, these exhaust brakes can be heard reverberating for miles around, keeping many Blue Mountains residents awake.
The police do nothing – they say it’s not their job. The Roads and Traffic Authority (RTA) does nothing, except put up tokenistic signs – ‘Trucks – limit engine braking‘, which is flatly ignored and not enforced. The Blue Mountains Council does nothing – it say it’s not it’s job, even though it accepts operating as an agency for the RTA at Katoomba.
Possibly the most ignored sign on a highway
One sign means the RTA can avoid the cost of enforcement
while pretending to and meet its local government development guidelines
– on paper.
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So truck owners apparently save on the cost of renewing their brakes, but selfishly at the expense of Blue Mountains residents trying to get a good night’s sleep. This editor lives a kilometre from the highway yet almost nightly hears some lousy trucker’s exhaust brakes as it moans up to the red lights outside Council chambers. Selfish bastards they are! I bet there’s been complaints, but typically none of these agencies has done squat about it.
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Dodgy Truck Rest Area
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Big linehaul trucks are destroying the Blue Mountains. Not only by their noise and dangerous speeds, but intimidating tail-gating to keep schedule and parking day and night outside residents homes.
At Mount Victoria in the Blue Mountains, the RTA and Blue Mountains Council approved of 24-hour Caltex Service Station and allowing truck drivers to use the adjacent highway shoulder to park and sleep. The shoulder was even widened to accommodate and encourage its use as a dodgy heavy vehicle rest area.
Since December 2003, Caltex at Mount Victoria was somehow allowed to become a round-the-clock operation with drivers of passing trucks, semi-trailers and B-doubles using the road shoulders to park their vehicles, often directly in front of residents’ front doors.
Local residents have complained to their members of parliament about the constant truck noise, of truck drivers leaving their rubbish by the side of the road and some even using front yards as a toilet – urinating and defecating!
In 2004, Liberal MP Duncan Gay, then Shadow Roads Minister, met with local community representatives at Mount Victoria, confirming that:
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“The RTA, who are responsible for fatigue management need to provide proper rest points”
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Now in 2011, with the Liberal Coalition in power, still nothing has been done. With speed being the main cause of at least half the recorded crashes, and the NRMA confirming a need for increased enforcement of heavy vehicle speed limits, Duncan Gay back in 2004 also advocated the installation of two new speed cameras ‘to convince motorists to take more care.’ Nup, not yet done either!
Then NSW Liberal Party Shadow Minster Duncan Gay (centre)
meeting Blue Mountains community representatives at Mount Victoria in 2004.
All care and no responsibility.
(Source: Blue Mountains Gazette)
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The RTA, while headlong enthusiastic about channelling hundreds of millions into capital works widening sections of the highway, highway maintenance and traffic enforcement has always been the RTA’s unsexy Cinderella. Fatigue is one of the biggest causes of crashes for heavy vehicle drivers and the RTA is the delegated authority responsible for overseeing heavy vehicle driver fatigue management on New South Wales roads. This necessarily includes providing for the necessary rest facilities.
Suitable rest areas are important for heavy vehicle drivers to take long and short rest breaks, use amenities and check loads and vehicles. Heavy vehicle drivers must conform to fatigue management legislation that specifies strict resting requirements. In order to fulfil these requirements they require suitable rest area facilities that are regularly spaced along key freight routes. (Source: ^http://www.rta.nsw.gov.au/heavyvehicles/safety/hvfatigue/index.html)
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RTA reneging on its duty to provide suitable Rest Areas
On 29th September 2008, Australia’s National Transport Commission (NTC) introduced new Heavy Vehicle Driver Fatigue laws national-wide. This came about as a consequence of many crashes involving heavy vehicles on designated national freight routes and fatigue identified as a key cause. The Audit of Rest Areas against National Guidelines (Austroads 2006) had found that many rest areas on freight routes across Australia (many in NSW) were deficient in being suitable to provide for appropriate rest breaks to address driver fatigue. One of the key freight routes is Great Western Highway /Mitchell Highway (Nepean River to Dubbo).
The NTC Guidelines for Major Heavy Vehicle Rest Areas includes the following principles:
Sites generally at no more than 100km intervals. Geographical and other physical constraints may require a range between 80 and 120km with the maximum limit generally being 120km.
Sites are to be provided on both sides of the road on those parts of the network that have high levels of demand, while those with lower levels of demand will not require provision on both sides of the road.
Sites are to be well signposted for heavy vehicle drivers and have suitable access for ingress and egress.
Sites are to have designated hard stand parking for heavy vehicles and an appropriate number of parking spaces dependent on demand.
Sites are to meet the basic needs of heavy vehicle drivers including provision of sealed pavements particularly for ingress and egress lanes/ramps, at least one toilet on each site, shade, shelter, rubbish bins and tables and chairs.
The RTA restated these two years later in its public document ‘RTA Strategy for Major Heavy Vehicle Rest Areas on Key Rural Freight Routes in NSW, January 2010‘.
A RTA model heavy vehicle rest area
‘Station creek’ rest area north of Karuah, Pacific Highway, NSW
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A RTA dodgy heavy vehicle rest area
‘Mount Victoria’ outside resident properties #45-47, #49, #51, #143, #147, #151.
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RTA dodgy (unconscionable) heavy vehicle rest area in front of residents’ homes
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The RTA is obligated to provide for a Major Heavy Vehicle Rest Areas along the Great Western Highway accessible from each side of the highway at the intervals and with minimum standard of facilities as prescribed under the 2008 NTC Guidelines. Similarly, heavy vehicle drivers are required to have breaks at the frequencies, duration and under such conditions as prescribed under the 2008 Heavy Vehicle Driver Fatigue laws, basically to ensure that they ‘fit for duty’ and not too tired to drive safely. In NSW this is law under the Road Transport (General) Regulation 2005, which in relation to trucks applies to trucks with a Gross Vehicle Mass of 12 tonnes. Under the regulation, Basic Fatigue Management, starts with a solo driver required to have a 15 minute ‘stationary rest‘ after no more than 6 hours and 15 minutes at work, driving or otherwise. Longer work shifts have increasing rest break requirements. ‘Stationary rest‘ is defined as rest time that the driver spends out of the heavy vehicle or in an approved sleeper berth of a stationary regulated heavy vehicle.
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However, along the Great Western Highway, which the RTA deems to be a ‘key rural freight route‘, the entire route of 200 km between outer Sydney (Penrith) and Orange provides no current rest area facilities, either westbound or eastbound that meet the 2008 NTC Guidelines. There should be two sites at no more than 100km apart, and on both sides of the highway, not just one side, with suitable access for ingress and egress. The sites should have stand parking for heavy vehicles and an appropriate number of parking spaces dependent on demand, as well as offering drivers a toilet, shade, shelter, rubbish bins and tables and chairs.
But the RTA simply doesn’t care. The RTA is prepared to ignore the problem of fatigue, to configure exemptions to avoid legalities and otherwise spend millions on the more politically sexy capital works upgrades. Three years after the NTC Guidelines, and many crashes later (involving heavy vehicles), the RTA has spent hundred of millions widening the Great Western Highway into a trucking expressway for bigger and more trucks to use, but has provided no facilities to address heavy vehicle driver fatigue. So the RTA is telling truck drivers to take proper breaks, but providing them with stuff all places to properly have a break. The RTA is negligent. It is also sly at claiming private enterprise facilities as its delivery of rest areas.
So the RTA is not just negligent. It is unethical.
No heavy vehicle facilities provide by the RTA for 200 km between Penrith and Orange
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Along the Great Western Highway freight route between Penrith and Orange, a distance of over 200 km, the RTA provides no dedicated rest areas for heavy vehicles to the NTC Guidelines. The only RTA-built rest area is an unshaded paved vehicle check area just west of Faulconbridge with no facilities except two rubbish bins.
Only private enterprises are providing any form of adequate rest facility eastbound between Orange and Penrith that is accessible by heavy vehicles – the BP Service Station at Mount Lambie and the Caltex Service Station at Mount Victoria, but neither provide space for a heavy vehicle to park so the driver can sleep. The only heavy vehicle rest facility between westbound between Penrith and Orange is the Shell Service Station at Yetholm where there is ample off road parking, a roadside restaurant, toilets and an adjoining motor inn, but this is a commercial operation, not one provided by the RTA.
The RTA is thus contributory in culpability for heavy vehicle crashes due to driver fatigue along the Great Western Highway.
The RTA map below (which can be viewed full size by the link provided) shows the Great Western Highway from Penrith to Bathurst, with only two rest stops (‘Driver Reviver‘ sites in yellow) – one at Glenbrook (westbound only), and one at Faulconbridge (eastbound only). Neither are any more than roadside parking areas without facilities – big of the RTA!
RTA’s key rural freight route supposed ‘rest area’
for Heavy Vehicles at Faulconbridge – westbound access only.
(Photo by Editor 20111019, free in public domain)
No toilets
No shade
No shelter
No tables
Two bins, but who empties them and how often?
Not signposted as ‘Rest Area’ but as ‘Vehicle Checking Area’ I wonder why? (see next zoom photo)
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RTA key rural freight route truck stop Faulconbridge
Not signposted as ‘Rest Area‘ but as ‘Vehicle Checking Area‘
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Back to the January 2010 ‘RTA Strategy for Major Heavy Vehicle Rest Areas on Key Rural Freight Routes in NSW’, the RTA lists the facilities available or not available for heavy vehicle drivers along the Great Western Highway between Penrith and Orange in two tables – one Westbound (p.19), one Eastbound (p.20).
‘Victoria Pass Parking Area‘ is nothing but a widened road shoulder outside the Caltex Service Station at Mount Victoria outside residents homes. There is no shade or shelter. The Caltex Service Station provides for refuelling/vehicle inspection, but no place for drivers to sleep in the vehicles.
At the time of writing, there are no current facilities at River Lett Hill – the statement of there being ‘a rest area…on both sides of the road including a toilet‘ is false and misleading.
At the time of writing, the Raglan Service Centre (Shell) is currently closed and is under construction as a BP service station. It is to be a private facility, not provided by the RTA.
RTA: “No existing rest area meets or can be upgraded to meet the required 10 parking spaces in one site in this section (due to existing site constraints). The recommendation is for heavy vehicles to utilise and upgrade existing rest areas, in the interim, with the RTA investigating the potential, to construct in the long term, a major rest area as part of the Great Western Highway upgrade – Mount Victoria to Lithgow project.”
Ed: Given this will cost about $1 billion, it is unlikely to be funded or built any time soon, and so is a poor excuse by the RTA for doing nothing.
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Eastbound (north side of the highway)
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(Click to enlarge table)
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There is no heavy vehicle facility between Orange and Bathurst. The RTA’s mention of upgrading the Larra Lee rest area is a proposal only, just to fill in space in the table to mask its failure to provide a facility.
‘Raglan Service Centre’
At the time of writing the ‘Raglan Service Centre is closed. It was a Shell Service Station for heavy vehicles. It is currently under construction as a BP Service Station, but it is not a facilty provided by the RTA. The RTA’s branding of this facility as a ‘Raglan Service Centre’ is deceptive and misleading.
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Caltex Service Station at Mount Victoria
The only facility that the RTA mentions is “Parking bay east of Mount Victoria (existing). Food, toilet, shade, shelter provided at adjacent service station“.
This false and misleading. The facilities are not that of the RTA. The only service offered by the Caltex Service Station for heavy vehicles is refueling, vehicle inspection, a roadside cafe and toilet. There is no shade or shelter either on the Caltex site or along the road shoulders. The “parking bay” is the road shoulder. What a deceptive fabrication!
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RTA’s excuse for perpetuating its Dodgy Rest Area at Mount Victoria
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Standard Politic Tactic #1: Blame lack of Federal Government – will sit well with NSW Roads and Transport Minister of the day
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RTA:
‘Implementation of the RTA’s Strategy for Major Heavy Vehicle Rest Areas on Key Rural Freight Routes in NSW is largely dependent on the availability of funding from the Federal Government.
The Federal Government’s 2008/09 Budget outlined that the Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government would provide $70 million across Australia over four years to fund a range of heavy vehicle safety initiatives. This funding is being allocated under the Heavy Vehicle Safety and Productivity Program (HVSPP) in two rounds with Round 1 covering 2008/09 – 2009/10 (complete) and Round 2 covering 2010/11 and 2011/12 (current). Under the HVSPP Guidelines a key consideration in allocating the funding is the extent to which state and territory governments commit to match the Federal Government’s funding contribution.
As part of Round 1 of the HVSPP, on 8 May 2009 the Federal Minister for Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government and the then State Minister for Roads announced $16M (50% Federal and 50% State) for NSW. Of this, $15M is currently being spent on 6 new rest areas and 22 rest area upgrades with the balance on bridge assessments for higher masses. In Round 1, NSW received 26.6% of $30 million available.
In applying the principles set in the RTA’s Guidelines for Provision of Major Heavy Vehicle Rest Areas a summary of needs across key rural freight routes in NSW is outlined in Table 2. Currently, on these routes 101 rest areas qualify as major heavy vehicle rest areas and 76 sites have been identified for enhancement. A total of 61 existing rest areas have been identified for upgrade to qualify as a major heavy vehicle rest area and 15 sites identified for new heavy vehicle rest areas. The strategic cost ($2009) to undertake required works that are not anticipated to be delivered as part of a major infrastructure proposal is estimated at around $50 to 60 million.
Delivery of works at all 76 identified sites is significantly higher than this strategic estimate.’
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So what is the RTA’s ultimate excuse:
‘The RTA investigating the potential, in the long term, for a major rest area as part of the Great Western Highway upgrade – Mount Victoria to Lithgow.‘.(Ed: Given the $1 billion pre-blowout estimate, the RTA can focus on its more sexy capital works highway upgrades)..
Meanwhile, back at sleepless Mount Victoria, the Blue Mountains Council was told that the real estate profession had refused to place a valuation on the homes because of the problem and that the homes had been ‘effectively rendered worthless‘.
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[Source: ‘Mt Vic’s truck dilemma’, by Len Ashworth, Lithgow Mercury, Tuesday 20081125]
There is a ‘baby boomer‘ political penchant to encourage more and more freight to travel by truck, which has dominated Australian Government transport planning for the past sixty years since World War II.
It is a short-term tactical stop-gap measure. Compared with rail freight, road linehaul for large volumes, over long distances, in the long term is price uncompetitive, and Peak Oil driving up fuel costs will eventually prove road linehaul a strategic economic blunder.
Speeding B-doubles increasingly dominate the highway over the Blue Mountains‘Woe betide anyone who gets in my way!‘
(Photo by Editor, free in public domain)
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Yet ‘road-centric’ freight policy dominates the infrastructure planning, simply because it is being driven by the self-centred vested interests of the trucking industry – influenced (read ‘bought‘) by ongoing substantial monetary donations (read ‘bribes’) to the electoral campaigns of alternating Labor and Liberal governments. Visit ^http://democracy4sale.org/ and choose either:
Money talks, hence the political penchant to favour road freight. Whereas rail, entrenched as a government monopoly, has long denied any community say. Rail has become the Cinderella to Road where only a small honourary volunteer lobby, the Australasian Railway Association (ARA) has not the funds to compete against the collective corporate might of trucking donors. Read about the ARA: ^http://www.ara.net.au/site/index.php
The Liberal-Labor Party’s Auslink National Transport Plan since 2004 professed ‘a new strategic framework for the planning and funding of Australia’s roads and railways to meet long term economic and social needs.’ However, in reality the funding has all but gone into building bigger and more highways.
News is, we are about to enter the year 2012, so we should have advanced somewhat from post-war trucking thinking.
Yet in the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney, well over $1 billion is forecast to be spent to build a massive highway viaduct and tunnel; simply so that larger and faster trucks can cart freight, fuel and ore over the Blue Mountains and to bypass the village of Mount Victoria. The fact that a rail line following a similar route exists and has long been used to cart copious quantities of coal over the Blue Mountains, is ignored by a truck-centric political mindset. The planned Mount Victoria bypass is just one of the multiple ongoing highway widening sections being constructed by Roads and Traffic Authority (RTA) contractors over the Blue Mountains and ultimately extending from Penrith in Sydney’s outer metropolitan west to the New South Wales central-west regional town of Orange, 250km away.
Great Western Highway, Wentworth Falls, March 2010
This trucking section just $115,000,000 (pre-blowout estimate)
(Photo by Editor, free in public domain)
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The widening of the highway has caused the destruction of much native vegetation and has ruined the bushland amenity of the villages and towns of the Central Blue Mountains. Construction has caused irreversible sediment contamination of many Blue Mountains waterways that drain from the highway ridgeline downstream into the Blue Mountains National Park and World Heritage Area.
Leura, January 2006
– collateral stormwater pollution of downstream creeks to serve the Trucking Expressway
(Photo by Editor, free in public domain, click photo to enlarge)
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Since 1996, the widening of the Great Western Highway over the Blue Mountains has cost over a billion dollars already. Yet the highway runs parallel to an existing dual rail line, which for the most part runs right alongside one another. One justification argued for the massive cost and widening of the highway is to relieve traffic congestion for motorists, but there is a low population base in the Blue Mountains as settlement is confined to the ridgeline over the Blue Mountains where the highway and rail run together. Steep terrain either side prevent a large population expansion.
Katoomba, May 2009– collateral vegetation damage to serve the Trucking Expressway
(Photo by Editor, free in public domain, click photo to enlarge)
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Before construction began, the only systemic traffic congestion on the highway was at weekends when tourists from Sydney ventured west in their cars. Spending billions to encourage domestic regional tourism has not been the real justification. The real justification has been and continues to be to encourage more truck freight along the Great Western Highway.
Yet the public is still waiting for a cost-benefit analysis, a calculation of any return on investment, an end-to-end journey analysis of the freight options, an holistic comparison to rail.
Instead, not only has there been a road-only freight focus, the trucks have got bigger. Governments are now permitting and encouraging the use of 19 metre ‘B-doubles’ along the highway. It is only a matter of time before 26 metre B-doubles turn up. In Victoria they are permitting B-triples – basically road-trains! Successive Labor and Liberal governments at both national and state level have maintained a truck-centric mindset since the 1980s when the NSW Greiner Government abandoned and close down much of the State’s rail infrastructure, including the closure of rail depots at Valley Heights and Junee.
This baby boomer political penchant has been encouraged and lauded by baby boomer himself, Bob Debus, long-time Labor politician for the NSW seat of Blue Mountains then the Federal seat of Macquarie, both covering the Blue Mountains region. Bob Debus has since retired, yet the Labor boomer mindset perpetuates with its truck-centric fervour.
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“It is with dismay that I watch the Mountains stand by as the RTA fulfills Bob Debus’ promise of an “upgraded” highway (read Trucking Expressway) – by his own admission – built to carry 26m B-double trucks. The RTA admits that when the western container hubs are finished they will generate 4000 extra B-double movements per day. Parked end to end they would stretch 102 km – every day! Goondiwindi, Toowoomba and many other towns don’t allow them but we will see them roaring through every Mountains town – past schools, shops and homes.”
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~ Dennis Plink, Hartley Vale (letter ‘B-double agenda‘ in Blue Mountains Gazette, 20090304, p.8.
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The widening of the highway into a trucking expressway is wrecking the Blue Mountains. And certainly, those trucks have increased – in number, in size and length and in speed. These bigger, faster trucks are not policed. They are turning the Great Western Highway into a dangerous death zone.
Speeding B-Double truck overturns on Lapstone Hill
– at an already widened section of the Trucking Expressway
Zoom, zoom, zoom!
(Photo by Top Notch Video).
Last July, on the highway at Lawson near Queens Road, truck driven by a 66-year-old Murrangaroo man collided head-on with an eastbound car trapped a female passenger, followed by a separate collision between a truck and a car near Boland Ave at Springwood. On Friday, 29th July 2011 on Lapstone Hill the driver of a semi-trailer failed to negotiate a left-hand bend while travelling east and crashed into the concrete median barrier. The impact caused the truck’s trailer — containing a full load of bark — to tip over the barrier and slide a short distance into the path of a westbound Mitsubishi Lancer, driven by a 30-year-old Hazelbrook woman, who remained trapped before being rushed to Westmead Hospital. Traffic chaos ensued as all westbound lanes were closed for more than eight hours and one eastbound lane also shut for the clean-up operation. Lapstone Hill is one of the widened sections of the highway.
Increasingly we are reading in local newspapers of road trauma involving trucks. Across Australia, during the 12 months to the end of March 2009, 248 people died from 229 crashes involving heavy trucks or buses. These included:
Here are just some of the tragic road trauma incidents involving trucks across Australia over the past year:
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‘Truck burns at Yelgun’ … two days ago!
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Flames engulf a postal truck at Yelgun on the NSW north coast on December 18, 2011. The driver stopped the truck after noticing smoke pouring from the engine bay. He collected his belongings and departed the vehicle before the flames took hold.
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[Source: ‘Truck burns at Yelgun”, by Kalindi Starick, ABC, 20111220, ^http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-12-19/flames-engulf-a-postal-truck-at-yelgun-on-the-nsw-north-coast/3737752]
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‘Teenage driver killed in truck collision’…two days ago
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One woman was killed and five people were injured in two accidents involving B-double trucks.
Engineers were called to the scene of a dramatic accident on the Gateway Motorway at Boondall in Brisbane about midday yesterday, when a B-double truckexploded after it and a car collided.
On the Bruce Highway near Rockhampton, a 19-year-old woman died and four people were injured when a car and a B-double truck collided. Police said the station wagon tried to turn into the southbound lanes of theBruce Highway at Marmor just before 8pm on Friday when the car and truck, whichwas travelling in the northbound lane, collided. The 19-year-old driver was killed, while her three female passengers, two aged19 and one aged 18, were taken to Rockhampton hospital. The three are in a stable condition. The 65-year-old driver of the B-double was taken to hospital for precautionary treatment and has been released.
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[Source: ‘Teenage driver killed in truck collision’, by Date: December 18 2011, Ellen Lutton, 20111218, Sydney Morning Herald, ^http://www.smh.com.au/queensland/teenage-driver-killed-in-truck-collision-20111217-1p0ax.html?skin=text-only]
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‘Truck crash closes Melbourne freeway’
Melbourne’s Monash Freeway is closed in both directions after a semi-trailer crashed into a bridge pylon in the suburb of Mulgrave in the city’s south-east.
Two people have died in a crash on the Pacific Highway near Yamba on the NewSouth Wales north coast.
A 62-year-old man and a 51-year-old woman from the Leeton area died when two cars collided about 11:00am (AEDT) today. A woman and three children who were in the other car have been taken to the Coffs Harbour Hospital. Police say a truck driver who was involved in the accident but failed to stop, was later pulled over at Ballina. Police are interviewing him. Rebecca Walsh, from the Traffic Management Centre, says the Pacific Highway is closed in both directions and vehicles are being diverted along the Summerland Way at Grafton.
‘Chemical alert after truck rolls in Blue Mountains’
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Fire crews are battling to contain a major chemical spill on the Great Western Highway at Katoomba in the Blue Mountains, after a truck overturned and 20,000 litres of a bright green industrial chemical poured out.
Protective bunds have been built around the spill site to stop the chemical, which is possibly a type of hydraulic fluid, reaching the iconic Leura cascades. The chemical is described as biodegradable, but it can be a toxic irritant to skins and eyes if touched.
Six fire crews were at the site at 5pm, plus a hazardous materials unit from St Marys, a spokesman for Fire and Rescue NSW said.National Parks rangers, Blue Mountains council staff and fire crews are monitoring the extent of the spilled fluid, some of which entered the drainage system. Council staff have poured gravel around the edge of the spill area to try and contain it. The truck rolled over at about 2pm, and the driver’s condition is unknown, although he or she was understood to not have been trapped in the vehicle.
Editor: Subsequent reports by a Katoomba resident reported observing the green hydraulic fluid flow in quantities down Govetts Creek. The contaminant would probably have ended up in the World Heritage Area of the creek within the Grose Valley, but would the RTA, Blue Mountains Council or the National Parks Service care?
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‘Truck overturns at Tabbimoble’ (Maclean)
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A woman suffered minor injuries when the truck she was driving overturned on the Pacific Highway at Tabbimoble yesterday morning.
The B-double truck carrying general freight was heading north on the Pacific Highway and was about 2km south of the New Italy complex and 25km north of Maclean when it rolled shortly before 5am. The 46-year-old woman who was at the wheel of the Volvo semi-trailer complained of back pains and was taken by ambulance to Lismore Base Hospital. The highway was partially blocked for four hours while emergency service cleared away the debris. The accident occurred on what has become a notoriously black stretch of road where several fatalities have occurred in recent years. .
M4 Motorway (aka Trucking Expressway) on approach to the Blue Mountains
Photo: Adam Hollingworth
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One man has died after a truck veered into a group of cyclists on the M4 motorway.
Fatigue may have caused a truck driver to veer into the breakdown lane and mow down a group of cyclists, killing one, on the M4 in Sydney’s west. Police said a group of four cyclists were riding in the breakdown lane of the M4 near the Northern Road overpass at South Penrith when they were struck by a B-double truck about 7.40am today. A male cyclist died and the three others sustained serious injuries. The injured were taken to Nepean Hospital.
A WorkCover spokesman said a preliminary investigation was under way to ascertain whether driver fatigue caused the accident. Police said the male truck driver was taken to hospital for mandatory blood and urine tests. Police are investigating the cause of the crash.
‘Overtaking gamble cost highway driver his life, police believe’
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One person has died after a truck carrying chemicals exploded after colliding with a car on the NSW north coast this morning.
Police believe a car driver’s early morning gamble in trying to pass a B-double truck on a no-overtaking stretch of the Pacific Highway cost him his life. The sedan was travelling southbound at Warrell Creek just before 4am when it appeared to pull out into the oncoming lane to overtake the truck. It then crashed head-on into a second, northbound, B-double carrying chemicals, Senior Constable Brian Carney of the Mid North Coast Crash Investigation Units aid.
The Pacific Highway on the New South Wales north coast will be closed until New Year’s Day while crews clear a fuel tanker that exploded and killed the driver.
The tanker hauling 40,000 litres of fuel overturned and exploded on what is regarded by truckies as a notorious stretch of the highway, near Tintenbar, 10 km north of Ballina.
Authorities have set up a one-kilometre exclusion zone around the burning tankerand more than 100 firefighters equipped with breathing apparatus were sent to the scene.The ambulance service says the truck driver was killed in the blast, while two people have been freed from a nearby car after being trapped when powerlines came down on their vehicle. The second trailer of the B-double was thrown into a paddock where it leaked fuel into a nearby wetland, and police still cannot get to the cabin of the burnt truck where the driver’s body remains inside.
Another tanker driver, Gary, says the driver is one of their own but they do not know who.”It is sad to be holed up on the side of the road like this. And it’s sad for a driver that’s not going to go home to his family,” he said.
The truck was laden with diesel and unleaded fuel, which has now been mostly contained. Police say they will not be able to assess the damaged road until the scorched truck is moved, but they expect the Pacific Highway to be closed for the rest of today. Six other trucks are banked up behind the accident site unable to turn around.
‘Truck lobby donations seem more important than people’s lives!‘
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~ Dennis Plink, loc. cit.
Native Angophora 300 years old.The RTA’s Environment Manager says it’s in the way – Chip it!
– collateral damage for the Trucking Expressway
…note railway line on left
The Blue Gum Forest’s fire-scarred trees of December 2006
some of which have graced the Grose Valley in the Blue Mountains for hundreds of years.
Photo: Nick Moir (Source: Sydney Morning Herald, 20111211, Front Page)
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The following articles are drawn from those by Gregg Borschmann, the first of which hit the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald on Monday 11th December 2006, following the massive bushfire conflagration that coalesced in the Grose Valley on 23rd November 2006.
From the community’s perspective, no noticeable lessons have been since learned by the Rural Fire Service (RFS) responsible. The prevailing bushfire management culture is that unless private property is directly, bushland is not valued and so not defended from bushfire. Indeed the approach is to let a bushfire burn as a defacto hazard reduction, so long as it doesn’t threaten human life or property. The RFS does not consider bushland an asset worth protecting from bushfire no matter what its conservation value, so with such a mindset such an ecological tragedy could well happen again.
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‘The ghosts of an enchanted forest demand answers’
‘More than seventy years ago this forest inspired the birth of the modern Australian conservation movement. Today Blue Gum Forest stands forlorn in a bed of ash. But was it unnecessarily sacrificed because of aggressive control burning by firefighters focused on protecting people and property? That is the tough question being asked by scientists, fire experts and heritage managers as a result of the blaze in the Grose Valley of the upper Blue Mountains last month.
As the fate of the forest hangs in the balance, the State Government is facing demands for an independent review of the blaze amid claims it was made worse by control burning and inappropriate resources.
This comes against a backdrop of renewed warnings that Australia may be on the brink of a wave of species loss caused by climate change and more frequent and hotter fires. There are also claims that alternative “ecological” approaches to remote-area firefighting are underfunded and not taken seriously.
In an investigation of the Blue Mountains fires the Herald has spoken to experienced fire managers, fire experts and six senior sources in four agencies and uncovered numerous concerns and complaints.
It was claimed that critical opportunities were lost in the first days to contain or extinguish the two original, separate fires.
Evidence emerged that escaped backburns and spot fires meant the fires linked up and were made more dangerous to property and heritage assets – including the Blue Gum Forest. One manager said the townships of Hazelbrook, Woodford and Linden were a “bee’s dick” away from being burnt. Another described it as “our scariest moment”. Recognising the risk of the backburn strategy, one fire officer – before the lighting of a large backburn along the Bells Line of Road – publicly described that operation as “a big call”. It later escaped twice, advancing the fire down the Grose Valley.
Concerns were voiced about the role of the NSW Rural Fire Service Commissioner, Phil Koperberg.
Members of the upper Blue Mountains Rural Fire Service brigades were unhappy about the backburning strategy.
There were doubts about the mix and sustainability of resources – several senior managers felt there were “too many trucks” and not enough skilled remote-area firefighters.
Scientists, heritage managers and the public were angry that the region’s national and international heritage values were being compromised or ignored.
There was anecdotal evidence that rare and even common species were being affected by the increased frequency and intensity of fires in the region.
Annoyance was voiced over the environmental damage for hastily, poorly constructed fire trails and containment lines, and there were concerns about the bill for reconstruction of infrastructure, including walking tracks.
The fire manager and ecologist Nic Gellie, who was the fire management officer in the Blue Mountains for the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service during the 1980s and ’90s, says the two original fires could have been put out with more rapid direct attack.
“Instead, backburning linked up the two fires and hugely enlarged the fire area … what we saw would be more accurately described as headfire burning, creating hot new fire fronts. While it protected the town of Blackheath, the plateau tops burnt intensely – and that created new problems both for management of the fire and the protection of biodiversity.
“When extreme fire weather, hot days and high winds arrived as predicted, the expanded fire zone was still not fully contained – and that was the cause of most of the high drama and danger that followed.”
In that dramatic week, Mr Gellie confronted Mr Koperberg with his concerns that the commissioner was interfering with the management of the fire by pushing hard for large backburns along the northern side of towns in the Blue Mountains from Mount Victoria to Faulconbridge, along what is known in firefighting circles as the “black line”.
The Herald has since confirmed from numerous senior sources that “overt and covert pressure” from head office was applied to the local incident management team responsible for fighting the fire.
There were also tensions relating to Mr Koperberg’s enthusiasm for continuation of the backburning strategy along the black line – even when milder weather, lower fuel levels and close-in containment were holding the fire.
Several sources say the most frightening threat to life and property came as the fire leapt onto the Lawson Ridge on “blow-up Wednesday” (November 22) – and that those spot fires almost certainly came from the collapse of the convection column associated with the intensification of the fire by the extensive backburns.
The Herald has also confirmed that
The original fire lit by a lightning strike near Burra Korain Head inside the national park on Monday, November 13, could not be found on the first day. The following day, a remote area fire team had partly contained the fire – but was removed to fight the second fire. The original fire was left to burn unattended for the next couple of days;
An escaped backburn was responsible for the most direct threat to houses during the two-week emergency, at Connaught Road in Blackheath. However, at a public meeting in Blackheath on Saturday night, the Rural Fire Service assistant commissioner Shane Fitzsimmons played down residents’ concerns about their lucky escape. “I don’t want to know about it. It’s incidental in the scheme of things.”
Blackheath escarpment broadscale backburn – “incidental in the scheme of things“?
(Photo by Editor 20061209, free in public domain, click photo to enlarge)
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Mr Koperberg, who is retiring to stand as a Labor candidate in next year’s state elections, rejected the criticisms of how the fire was fought.
He told the Herald: “The whole of the Grose Valley would have been burnt if we had not intervened in the way we did and property would have been threatened or lost. We are looking at a successful rather than an unsuccessful outcome.
“It’s controversial, but this is world’s best backburning practice – often it’s the only tool available to save some of the country.”
The commissioner rejected any criticism that he had exerted too much influence. “As commissioner, the buck stops with me. I don’t influence outcomes unless there is a strategy that is so ill-considered that I have to intervene.”
Mr Koperberg said it was “indisputable and irrefutable” that the Blue Mountains fire – similar to fires burning now in Victoria – was “unlike any that has been seen since European settlement”, because drought and the weather produced erratic and unpredictable fire behaviour.
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Phil Koperberg
NSW Rural Fire Service Commissioner at the time of the Grose Fire
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The district manager of the Blue Mountains for the Rural Fire Service, Superintendent Mal Cronstedt, was the incident controller for the fire.
Asked if he would do anything differently, Mr Cronstedt answered: “Probably.” But other strategies might have also had unknown or unpredictable consequences, he said.
Jack Tolhurst, the deputy fire control officer (operations) for the Blue Mountains, said: “I am adamant that this fire was managed very well. We didn’t lose any lives or property and only half the Grose Valley was burnt.”
Mr Tolhurst, who has 50 years’ experience in the Blue Mountains, said: “This fire is the most contrary fire we have ever dealt with up here.”
John Merson, the executive director of the Blue Mountains World Heritage Institute, said fire management was being complicated by conditions possibly associated with climate change.
“With increased fire frequency and intensity, we are looking at a fundamental change in Australian ecosystems,” he said. “We will lose species. But we don’t know what will prosper and what will replace those disappearing species. It’s not a happy state. It’s a very tough call for firefighters trying to do what they think is the right thing when the game is no longer the same.
“What we are seeing is a reflex response that may no longer be appropriate and doesn’t take account of all the values we are trying to protect.”
Grose Valley incinerated 23rd November 2006
(Photo by Editor 20061209, free in public domain, click photo to enlarge)
‘A bushfire scars a precious forest – and sparks debate on how we fight fire in the era of climate change.
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“Snow and sleet are falling on two bushfires burning in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney.” ~ ABC Radio, November 15 (2006).
The news report was almost flippant, something that could happen only in Dorothea Mackellar’s land of drought and flooding rains. Later that evening, two weeks from summer, Sydney had its coldest night in more than a century.
Over the past month – as an early summer collided with a late winter and a decade-long drought – NSW and Victoria have battled more than 100 bushfires. But of them all, last month’s Blue Mountains blaze reveals tensions and systemic problems that point to a looming crisis as bushfire fighters struggle to protect people, property, biodiversity and heritage values in a world beset by climate change.
The tensions have always been there – different cultures, different ways of imagining and managing the landscape. Perhaps they are illustrated by a joke told by two Rural Fire Service crew in the Blue Mountains. “How does the RFS put out a fire in your kitchen? By backburning your sitting room and library.” The joke barely disguises the clash between the imperative of saving lives and homes, and the desire to look after the land, and the biodiversity that underpins our social and economic lives.
For fire managers, whose first priority will always be saving people and property, the equation has become even more tortured with a series of class actions over fires in NSW and the ACT. As one observer put it: “These guys are in a position where they’re not going to take any chances. No one will ever sue over environmental damage.”
For bushfire management the debate tentatively started a couple of decades ago. The challenge was to do what poets, writers and painters have long grappled with – coming to terms with a country whose distinctiveness and recent evolutionary history have been forged in fire. Drought and climate change now promise to catapult that debate to centre stage.
It is perhaps no accident that such a defining fire has occurred in one of the great amphitheatres of the Australian story, the Grose Valley in the upper Blue Mountains. Charles Darwin passed by on horseback in 1836, and described the valley as “stupendous … magnificent”.
The Grose has long been a microcosm of how Australians see their country. In 1859 some of the first photos in Australia were taken in the valley. Proposals for rail lines and dams were forgotten or shelved. The first great forest conservation battle was fought and won there in 1931-32.
But now the valley is under threat from an old friend and foe – fire.
Ian Brown has worked on dozens of fires in the Blue Mountains. He is a former operations manager for the National Parks and Wildlife Service.
“All fires are complex and difficult, and this sure was a nasty fire … But we need lots of tools in the shed. Those hairy, big backburns on exposed ridges so close to a blow-up day with bad weather surprised me. Frightened me even.”
For Brown, even more worrying is the trend.
“Parts of the Grose have now burnt three times in 13 years and four times in 24 years. Most of those fires started from arson or accident. Many of the species and plant communities can’t survive that sort of hammering.”
Ross Bradstock, a fire ecologist, agrees. Professor Bradstock is the director of the new Centre for the Environmental Risk Management of Bushfires at the University of Wollongong, which is funded by the Department of Environment and Conservation and the Rural Fire Service. He says Australia stands out as one of the countries whose vegetation may be most affected by climate change.
Bradstock says that in south-eastern Australia the potential for shifts in fire frequency and intensity are “very high … If we’re going to have more drought we will have more big fires.”
But the story is complicated and compounded by the interaction between drought and fire. The plants most resistant to fire, most able to bounce back after burning, will be most affected by climate change. And the plants that are going to be advantaged by aridity will be knocked over by increased fire frequency. “In general, the flora is going to get whacked from both ends – it’s going to be hit by increased fire and climate change. It’s not looking good.”
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Wyn Jones, an ecologist who worked for the wildlife service, says the extremely rare drumstick plant, Isopogon fletcheri, is a good example. There are thought to be no more than 200 specimens, restricted to the upper Grose. Last week, on a walk down into the Blue Gum Forest, Jones found three – all killed by the fire.
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The NSW Rural Fire Service Commissioner, Phil Koperberg, has been a keen supporter of Bradstock’s centre. Asked if he agreed with the argument that the Grose had seen too much fire, Mr Koperberg replied: “It’s not a comment I disagree with, but had we not intervened in the way we did, the entire Grose Valley would have been burnt again, not half of it.”
The great irony of the fire is that it was better weather, low fuels and close-in containment firefighting that eventually stopped the fire – not big backburns.
Remote area firefighting techniques have been pioneered and perfected over recent decades by the wildlife service. In 2003 a federal select committee on bushfires supported the approach. It recommended fire authorities and public land managers implement principles of fire prevention and “rapid and effective initial attack”.
Nic Gellie, a fire ecologist and former fire manager, has helped the wildlife service pioneer ecological fire management. The models are there – but he says they have not been used often enough or properly.
Doubts have been expressed about the sustainability of the current remote area firefighting model. It is underfunded, and relies on a mix of paid parks service staff and fire service volunteers. Most agree the model is a good one, but not viable during a longer bushfire relying on volunteers.
The Sydney Catchment Authority pays $1 million for Catchment Remote Area Firefighting Teams in the Warragamba water supply area. It has always seemed like a lot of money. But it looks like a bargain stacked against the estimated cost of $10 million for the direct costs and rehabilitation of the Grose fire.
Curiously, one unexpected outcome of the great Grose fire may be that the valley sees more regular, planned fire – something the former wildlife service manager Ian Brown is considering.
“If climate change means that the Grose is going to get blasted every 12 years or less, then we need more than just the backburning strategy. We need to get better at initial attack and maybe also look at more planned burns before these crises. But actually getting those burns done – and done right – that’s the real challenge.”
.Distribution of Isopogon fletcheri is restricted to a very small area in the Blackheath district of the Blue Mountains.
Given restricted distribution, it is susceptible to local extinction due to environmental and demographic uncertainty and in particular pathogens such as Phytophthora cinnamomi.
What needs to be done to recover this species? Continued habitat protection.
http://www.threatenedspecies.environment.nsw.gov.au/tsprofile/profile.aspx?id=10440
The Blue Gum Forest stands tall, straight and surreal in a fire-ground of still smouldering ash. Three weeks ago it was intensely burnt during bushfires in the Grose Valley. The future of the iconic forest – some trees are thought to be 200 to 300 years old – now hangs in the balance.
Last week the massive white-trunked blue gums were dropping their scorched leaves to reveal a stark and unrecognisable forest of tall trunks, bare limbs and fallen logs.
The director of the Colong Foundation for Wilderness, Keith Muir, did not speak out during the fires, but now he wants answers.
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“Could the Blue Gum have been saved using other firefighting strategies that also protected life and property?
Was the fire that burnt this very special forest made more intense, unpredictable and extensive by massive backburning operations?
Was the Blue Gum sacrificed for the sake of a de facto fuel reduction exercise that didn’t consider heritage values?
We need answers. We need an independent inquiry. This is too important to happen again.”
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In the early 1930s the Herald supported a campaign by bushwalkers to save the Blue Gum from grazing and agricultural development. It was the first successful Australian conservation campaign to protect an almost pure stand of tall mountain blue gum ( Eucalyptus deanei) on about 40 hectares of river flats in the rugged Grose Valley of the upper Blue Mountains. The bushwalkers raised £130 to buy the lease covering the forest and create the Blue Gum Forest Reserve.
The Herald visited the Blue Gum Forest again last week with a forest ecologist, Wyn Jones, and Ian Brown, former National Parks and Wildlife Service operations manager with overall responsibility for fire management. In 1994 Jones, then an ecologist with the service, helped to describe scientifically the rare and newly discovered Wollemi pine. He first saw the Blue Gum Forest more than 40 years ago. He has been involved with it professionally and as a bushwalker ever since.
He said the forest would re-shoot and regrow, but it remains to be seen when and how. He predicted its immediate future would be decided over the next six months. That would depend largely on the vagaries of climate. Severe wind storms, a hot dry summer or even persistent rain, fungal growth and insect attack could all compromise the forest’s ability to bounce back quickly.
More uncertain and potentially bleak is the long-term prognosis. Jones said changing fire regimes caused by humans could be further complicated by climate change, a recipe for more frequent and hotter fires.
The Blue Gum Forest has been burnt four or five times in less than 50 years: by wildfire in 1957, possibly 1968, and in 1982, 1994 and 2006.
“Without human interference , this forest may have been burnt once or perhaps twice in 50 years, not five times,” Jones said.
Jones is convinced cracks in majestic gums were caused by the fire. If they are deep enough to effectively ringbark the surviving trees, then the demise of the forest promises to be a slow and painful affair.
“The old Blue Gum Forest is gone,” he said. “We don’t know what the Blue Gum of the future will look like. We could be heading for strange and very different days.”
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‘Friends of the giants’
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In 1931 the Herald’s conservation reporter, J.G. Lockley, writing under the name Redgum, led a campaign to save the Blue Gum Forest.
“To destroy the trees would be unforgivable vandalism .. if they are permitted to stay, they will stand straight and true for many generations … Every acre on which those grey gums are growing should be reserved for the distant days, when the nation will know the true worth of the giant trees, which are not understood.”
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‘Blue Gum Lessons’
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(Editor’s letter in the Blue Mountains Gazette, 20061220)
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‘One of our most precious natural heritage assets, the Blue Gum Forest, has been allowed to be scorched by bushfire. This demands an independent enquiry into current fire fighting practices to ensure such a tragedy is not repeated.
Not a witch hunt, but what is needed is a constructive revision into improving bushfire fighting methods incorporating current research into the issue. The intensity and frequency of bushfires have become more prevalent due to disturbances by man, including climate change.
An enquiry should consider the assets worth saving; not just lives, homes and property but natural assets of the World Heritage Area. Fire fighting methods should seek to protect all these values. It seems back-burning, however well-intentioned, burnt out the Blue Gum. This is unacceptable. What went wrong? The future survival of our forests depends on how we manage fire.’
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A Grose Valley Fire Forum was held at Mount Tomah on Saturday 17th February 2007, but the public were denied entry.
An independent enquiry was never conducted. A public enquiry was never conducted.
“I wish to explore what remains for most – and has been for me – a terra incognita, a forbidden place, a heart of darkness that civilised people have long attempted to repress – that is, the wilderness within the human soul and without, in that living profusion that envelops all creation.”
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~ Max Oelschlaeger, The Idea of Wilderness: From Prehistory to the Age of Ecology (1993)
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Pinnacle of Mount Wellington, Tasmania
(Photo by Editor 20111001, free in public domain, click photo to enlarge)
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In 2007, former United States Vice President Al Gore‘s campaign to educate citizens about global warming was portrayed in an award winning documentary film ‘An Inconvenient Truth‘.
The subject matter, global warming, has indeed become an inconvenient truth because the global scale of the problem is such that the powers that be have so far been finding it difficult to comprehend. They have been told that it demands a response so systemic as to be transformational, which is highly inconvenient for them to say the least. The transformational response is mostly inconvenient to the powerful vested interests in polluting industries that are key contributors to global warming – particularly oil, gas, coal, heavy manufacturing, transport and weapons industries.
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‘Deluded Convenience’
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On the flip side of this inconvenience of the truth, powerful vested interests understandably, are hell bent on maintaining their convenient business as usual practices, choosing to ignore, reject and deny the truth. It is their short term interests to do so, because change is expensive and threatens to diminish their power, influence and wealth. But in the long term, by perpetuating practices that are shown to be damaging to the Earth’s climate, the imperative of maintaining a convenient business as usual approach is a deluded one, as everyone will be adversely affected by global warming. They are only deluding themselves. Such harmful business-as-usual practice is a ‘deluded convenience‘.
Harmful business-as-usual practices that are contributing to global warming were once branded aspiringly in the 18th, 19th and 20th Centuries as ‘industrial progress‘. The widespread Western culture from Western Europe and the United States has for over three hundred years idolised the ‘civilised’ advances of the Industrial Revolution, capitalism and economics. Western economies now have many conveniences of lifestyle, but attaining them has caused considerable cost to societies and ecology. Globalisation has destroyed family-based enterprises, local markets and village communities and caused wars and immense suffering. Industrialisation has destroyed many forests, rivers, valleys, coastlines and species. These have been the cost of convenience, the cost of civilisation; and we are now paying the price.
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“It is fairly widely accepted today that environmental destruction ultimately becomes self-destructive as a sick and impoverished global environment in turn sickens and impoverishes the human members of that ecosystem.
..Why, despite warning signs from a stressed global ecosystem, mounting scientific evidence, and public education campaigns, does degradation of the environment continue to persist and mount?”
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~ Catherine M. Roach, 2003, ‘Mother Nature: Popular Culture and Environmental Ethics.
Bushphobia is a composite term emanating from Australia, which combines two words ‘bush’ meaning the native forest and scrub environment of Australia’s unique animals and plants, with the non-clinical use of the term ‘phobia’. Phobia (from Greek φόβος, phóbos: fear, phobia) is an anxiety association, a negative attitudes towards, a dislike, disapproval, prejudice, discrimination, or hostility of, aversion to, or discrimination against something. Bushphobia is borne out of learnt acculturation adopting two distinct attitudes:
A deep fear of the bush due to its propensity to burn and cause horrific wildfires
A dislike of Australian native vegetation due to its wild untamed appearance which is so different to exotic trees and landscapes that have a more symmetrical and accessible character
An Australian native tree discriminated against by a pro-development Court ruling…because it may be dangerous
^http://www.savethetree.org/
In this case a discrimination against the bush, where the word ‘bush’ is an Australian term for native forest and scrubland. Bushphobia was first used with its modern meaning in 2008 in the Blue Mountains in eastern Australia which represents an intolerance and prejudice against the natural Australian bush vegetation mainly because of its susceptibility to burning in the case of bushfires and the consequential fire threat to life and private property.
The combined meaning is to have a persistent irrational fear specific fear or loathing of the natural (bush) environment. There are three classes of phobias: agoraphobia, social phobia, and specific phobia (Wood 521). Bushphobia is a specific phobia associated with a fear of natural environment.
Bushphobia is a socially learnt fear and loathing toward the bush common amongst rural volunteer bushfire fighting organisations which is instilled in new recruits as part of the training tans assimilation process. Bushphobia has thus become a form of learned cultural prejudice amongst the rural fire fighting fraternity throughout Australia. This attitude becomes deep seated and a motive to regard native forests, not as valued natural assets and habitat for native flora and fauna, but only as a combustible fuel that is prone to burn and thus a menace and ‘hazard’. The standard myth conveyed about the bush that inculcates bushphobia is that if the bush is not destroyed and allowed to grow naturally then the bush will develop into an uncontrollable fuel that in the event of a bushfire will cause an horrific fire storm and Armageddon. The issue of inadequate bushfire fighting capabilities is conveniently ignored.
Those who only see the bush through a bushphobic mindset desire to burn it, bulldoze it and destroy it at any opportunity when weather permits such action to be done safely. Deliberate burning of the bush has become a ‘prescribed burning’ policy of Australian governments at both state and federal level attracting massive resources. In New South Wales prescribed burning is labelled ‘hazard reduction’. History however has shown repeatedly that many prescribed burning activities frequently escape control lines an end up destroying vast areas of bush.
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NIMBYism – a celebration of ‘think globally, act locally’
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The maxim ‘Think globally, act locally‘ has long passed into the vernacular, urging grassroots activism where thinking about the health of the entire planet is translated into taking action at a local level in one’s own community. The phrase has been originally attributed to Scottish town planner and social activist Sir Patrick Geddes FRSE [1854-1932].
Sir Patrick Geddes (c.1886)
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At a time in the early 20th Century when industrialisation was dramatically altering the conditions of social life, Geddes recognised the role of architectural amenity on urban life, particularly promoting the happiness, health and comfort of all residents, rather than focusing on roads and parks available only to the rich. He applied this in his design of Edinburgh, Tel Aviv and Bombay. Geddes was an advocate of nature conservation and strongly opposed to industrial pollution. Some historians have claimed he was a forerunner of modern Green politics. At a time of rapid urban growth, Geddes coined the term ‘conurbation’ observing how population growth was pushing large towns to merge into one continuous urban and industrially developed area. In Geddes’ 1915 book “Cities in Evolution” his advocacy of maintaining local character in urban planning is clearly evident:
‘Local character’ is thus no mere accidental old-world quaintness, as its mimics think and say. It is attained only in course of adequate grasp and treatment of the whole environment, and in active sympathy with the essential and characteristic life of the place concerned.’
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Prominent American environmentalist and mountaineer David Brower [1912 – 2000] and founder of Friends of the Earth (FOE) in 1969 is believed to have been the first to applied the phrase ‘think globally, act locally‘ in an environmental context as the slogan for FOE. Application of ‘think globally, act locally‘ maxim in this environmental context has manifest itself most prevalently when grassroots activism erupts as a result of inappropriate land use development threats. Local residents opposing inappropriate development are following the thinking of Geddes by recognising the important value of local amenity to the health and happiness of local residents. Developers are quick to deride the rights of local residents to defend their neighbourhood amenity, labelling them as NIMBY‘s – an acronym for the phrase “Not In My Back Yard“, first coined in 1980 by British writer Emilie Travel Livezey in an article ‘Hazardous Waste‘.
Nimbyism is used typically by proponents of a development to pejoratively describe opposition by neighbouring residents. Nimbyism, however is simply acting locally to protect the values of one’s neighbourhood. Standing by and watching an inappropriate development proceed is an option, but why stand by? Residents who plan to live in a locality for some time and perhaps for the rest of their lives, have a democratic right and a say in what happens to their locality and this includes a say its preserving or changing the locality’s amenity and character. It is about holding strong principles of community governance and valuing the rights of locals to participate in decisions that directly affect them. Local residents are the stakeholders who will have to live permanently with a development and so are most deserving in having a louder voice in development decisions to balance corporate developers and their investors.
Amusing variants of NIMBY are:
‘NIMFYE’ = Not In My Front Yard Either
‘NIMTOO’ = Not In My Term Of Office [a favourite of politicians]
‘NITL’ = Not In This Lifetime
‘NOPE’ = Not On Planet Earth
‘NOTE’ = Not Over There Either
‘GOOMBY’ = Get Out Of My Backyard [Common in new suburbs that encroach on industrial sites or airports]
‘NIABY’ = Not in Anyone’s Backyard
‘NUMBY’ = Not Under My Backyard (applicable to mining companies)
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And this Editor’s favourite:
‘BANANA’ = Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything
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‘A recent report has found that nearly 80% of U.S. residents oppose any new development in their community. It’s the highest level of opposition recorded in the report’s six-year history, and the first time since 2008 that the amount of opposition has increased.’
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[Source: ‘As America Ages, NIMBYism Could Increase, by Nate Berg, The Atlantic Cities, 20111017, ^http://www.theatlanticcities.com/politics/2011/10/as-america-ages-nimbyism-could-increase/306/]
Given that Nimyism is a developer term used derogatorily against residents who dare to question and challenge land use development , the counter-language on the side of residents is ‘property rights‘ and ‘planning democracy‘. Many residents out of frustration with the local planning process decide to form an action group. One organisation well experienced in this quest is Sydney-based Save Our Suburbs.
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Save Our Suburbs
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‘Save Our Suburbs (NSW) Inc is a non-profit & non-aligned group of residents, originally formed to fight against forced rezoning and over-development of Sydney’s suburbs. It has grown to include communities who are fighting for better planning and regulation on a range of development issues, including major infrastructure projects such as road tunnels. Sydney’s beleaguered residents have been fighting an endless string of localised battles against increased density developments (‘urban consolidation‘) and badly planned developments such as unfiltered tunnel exhaust stacks. We have been fighting local councils about local rezoning and local developments, and state government departments about the lack of regulation and planning. Residents are usually the losers in these local battles. If we want to effectively protect the environment and heritage of our suburbs, we need to take the fight beyond our local areas into the State Government arena. This can only be achieved by organised and united residents. Save Our Suburbs (NSW) Inc has been formed for this very purpose.
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Fundamental Objectives:
Return Planning democracy to New South Wales, by allowing true consultation, and giving planning power back to local councils: The people should decide, not a Planning Dictator!
End big developer donations to political parties: We want planning decisions based on merit, not on money!
Save our property rights: Provide just compensation for loss of land, income or amenity, and for change of land use.
End forced urban consolidation- allow sensible land release, with infrastructure funded by the government: Dump the failed planning policies, designed to favour big developers rather than the community.
‘Our urban footprint is encroaching further and further into bushland. The amount of land used as space for community living is decreasing as urban settlements have sprawled. This is affecting the opportunities we now have to meet and interact as communities. The consequences of urban sprawl include a decline in the supply of affordable housing, increased bushfire risk for individuals and property and increasing impacts on the environment.’
Historically, much of the development in the Blue Mountains has encroached well into bushland with little regard for environmental impact and often without supporting infrastructure, such as sewerage and transport systems. This dispersed, sprawling development pattern along ridgelines has been added to by post war residential development, creating many of the ‘suburbs’, particularly in the lower Blue Mountains. As all available sites for new development dry up it is likely that existing urban areas will come under increasing pressure for redevelopment.’
A case in point involves the current issue about a significant native tree facing death due to the threat of housing development in the Blue Mountains village of Faulconbridge.
About midway along the conurbated highway corridor through the Central Blue Mountains lies the urban village of Faulconbridge. Like all the other villages and towns along this highway, Faulconbridge residential housing ultimately backs on to the Blue Mountains National Park, which forms part of the Greater Blue Mountains World Heritage Area.
Faulconbridge juxtapositioned to the Blue Mountains World Heritage Area.[Source: Google Maps]
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A local resident action group in St Georges Crescent, Faulconbridge has been recently formed to try to save a significant native tree situated in its natural bush environment from being killed for housing development. The resident group, lead by local Faulconbridge resident Don Cameron, is simply called ‘Save the Tree‘ and a dedicated website has been designed and set up: ^http://savethetree.org
A mature native tree in a forest but on death rowso that property developers can build a house or two.(St Georges Terrace, Faulconbridge, Blue Mountains, New South Wales Australia,Source: ^http://savethetree.org)
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According the website, the subject tree has been listed on Blue Mountains Council’s Register of Significant Trees since August 1985 – #33. The subject land site where the tree stands comprises remnant bushland including the significant tree as well as three locally rare Faulconbridge Mallee Ash trees (Eucalyptus burgessiana), which is a rare species of flora included on the Australian botanical list of Rare or Threatened Plants (ROTAP).
In early 2010, a development application for two dwellings on the site was submitted to council. The proposal included the removal of a considerable amount of the remaining vegetation including the removal of the significant tree. In that same year, numerous residents submitted objections to the development application. As a result of Council’s notification process, fifteen submissions from local residents were received objecting to the development on the following bases:
Removal of the significant tree from the site
Clearing and loss of vegetation, including threatened
Species of vegetation, and screening of the development
Impacts on streetscape
The lot should become public land
Overdevelopment of the site and the bulk and scale of the development
The proposed development is out of character with the surrounding development
Proposed subdivision into 2 lots
Loss of environmental features of the site
Increased stormwater impacts and local flooding
Pedestrian and traffic safety
Reduced building setbacks
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[Source: Blue Mountains Council, Ordinary Meeting of 28th June 2011, Section: ‘Using Land for Living’, Item 20, Ordinary Meeting, 28.06.11, p.212, 20. 11/85977. Development Application no. X/443/2010 for a detached dual occupancy consisting of a single storey dwelling and a two storey dwelling…Faulconbridge]
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Council Planning assessed the Environmental Impacts of the proposed development as follows:
‘There are currently three (3) FaulconbridgeMallee Ash (Eucalyptus burgessiana) locatedon the subject allotment. This is a rare speciesof flora which is on the list of Rare orThreatened Plants (ROTAP) published by the CSIRO. While it is acknowledged thatEucalyptus burgessiana are a rare plant, theyare not listed as a threatened species undereither the Threatened Species ConservationAct or the Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act.
‘There are also a number of other indigenoustrees on the property including a largeEucalyptus Sclerophylla x Eucalyptus Piperitahybrid which is listed as a significant tree inDCP 9 Significant Trees.The proposed development will result in theremoval of much of the vegetation on the siteincluding two (2) of the EucalyptusBurgessianna and the significant tree.The site also contains a number of significant rock outcrops which are identified by the LEPas a significant natural feature.’
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The proposeddevelopment has been sited to avoid as far aspractical impacts on those outcrops. Inparticular, it is noted that the development has been designed to ensure that both thedwellings and the vehicular driveways arepredominantly clear of the two most significantfeatures, being the outcrop adjacent thefrontage with St Georges Crescent and theoutcrop toward the centre of the lot. Clause 44(4) provides a hierarchy forconsidering any adverse environmental impactwhich may result from any development. Thisclause requires that any development shouldbe designed and sited so as to have no adverse environmental impact. However theclause goes on to provide that where anadverse environmental impact cannot beavoided and no practicable alternative isavailable, it is necessary to consider the proposed use of the land with reference to thezone objectives of the land. In this respect,while it would be possible to reduce the impactsif the development was confined to a single dwelling only, it is considered that there are nopracticable alternatives that would allow all therare species and the significant tree to beretained and at the same time, allow thepermitted use as a detached dual occupancy.
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It should also be noted that the significant treehas been assessed as not being viable forretention in any case as the result of extensivedecay throughout the trunk. This matter isdiscussed in more detail in the body of thereport.’
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Biodiversity incremental degradation encouraged by Council Planners
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The matters for consideration are:
‘ The need to prevent adverse impacts on the near pristine conditions of these subcatchments’
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Council Planning Response:
‘The proposed development is located on an existing vacant lot within the urban area. There will be a significant amount of vegetation removal but this is unavoidable to provide for development of this site. The site will be revegetated and landscaped.’
(Editor: ‘revegetated’ permits destruction of native bushland in favour of creating an exotic urban garden complete with fertiliser and associated runoff).
Both dwellings will be connected to the sewer.
It is considered that the proposed development will not have any adverse impact on the condition of the Grose River Sub-catchment.
(Editor: What is ignored is the collective impact of multiple development applications on Blue Mountains biodiversity and catchments. The planning guidelines fails to factor the collective death by a thousand cuts).
The proposed development is located clear of the areas of surface rock on the property and has been designed to minimise cut and fill by the use of drop edge beams. While the development will result in the removal of two (2) of the Rare orThreatened Plants listed trees, the site is not part of a contiguous area of bushland and it not considered that their removal will have a significant impact on the species.’
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On 28th June 2011, following Blue Mountains Council’s planning assessment, councillors voted unanimously at a General Meeting to refuse the development application on the basis that it breached Council’s local planning laws. The meeting was addressed by: Don Cameron, Robert Leslie, Rama Decent, Terry Barrett.
A motion was moved by Councillors Searle and McLaren that the Development Application No. X/443/2010 be refused on the following grounds:
The proposed development is contrary to the objectives for the ‘Living-General’ zone under LEP 2005 in that it does not maintain and improve the character of the area, or respond to the environmental characteristics of the site;
The proposed development, including the removal of the significant majority of existing trees and other vegetation from the site, will have an unacceptable adverse impact on the established landscape character of the locality;
The proposed development will have an unacceptable adverse environmental impact and is contrary to the provisions of Clause 44 of LEP 2005 in that it has not been designed and sited to minimise impacts on the rare species of plant Eucalyptus Burgessiana and the destruction of rock outcrops on the property;
The proposed two storey component of the development will be visually prominent and have an unacceptable impact on the existing streetscape when viewed from St Georges Crescent;
The proposed development is an over development of the site in terms of the height, bulk and scale of the two storey dwelling fronting St Georges Crescent;
The proposed development does not comply with Clause 2, Part 1, Schedule 2 – Locality Management within the Living Zones, of LEP 2005 by reason that the rear dwelling encroaches onto the 4 metre secondary street frontage setback to Adeline street, and the Council is not satisfied that the objection lodged pursuant to State Environmental Planning Policy No 1 is well founded or that compliance with the standard is unreasonable or unnecessary in the circumstances;
The proposed stormwater management measures proposed are not adequate, given the potential run-off from the proposed development of the land as a dual occupancy; and Confirmed Minutes Ordinary Meeting 28 June 2011, p.21 of 28
The grant of development consent will be contrary to the public interest.
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Upon being put to the Council meeting, the motion was carried unanimously.
Not content with this unanimous decision, the owners of the site appealed against the Council democratic umpire, and in September 2011 the appeal case was heard by The Land & Environment Court of New South Wales.
Specialist arborists gave conflicting reports on the health and viability of the said tree, perhaps according to their respective client motivations. Yet the arborists of opposing parties were engaged as expert witnesses of the Court and so legally presumed to be independent. But legal presumption conveniently ignores contractual undertaking, so the evidence was likely biased to the respective parties.
In the interim findings, the Acting Senior Commissioner agreed that the tree could be removed, notwithstanding its status as a Significant Tree. (Editor: for whose convenience?)
A final ruling on the case will be made after the applicants have submitted a complying landscape plan. One won’t be surprised if the ultimate outcome is from dense mature intact bush to a clearfelled, bulldozed site, and the Court will somehow justify this in favour of the property owners as it normally does.
More information and analysis on this case will be presented in future.
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Oelschlaeger begins by examining the culture of prehistoric hunter-gatherers, whose totems symbolized the idea of organic unity between humankind and wild nature, and idea that the author believes is essential to any attempt to define human potential. He next traces how the transformation of these hunter-gatherers into farmers led to a new awareness of distinctions between humankind and nature, and how Hellenism and Judeo-Christianity later introduced the unprecedented concept that nature was valueless until humanized. Oelschlaeger discusses the concept of wilderness in relation to the rise of classical science and modernism, and shows that opposition to “modernism” arose almost immediately from scientific, literary, and philosophical communities. He provides new and, in some cases, revisionist studies of the seminal American figures Thoreau, Muir, and Leopold, and he gives fresh readings of America’s two prodigious wilderness poets Robinson Jeffers and Gary Snyder. He concludes with a searching look at the relationship of evolutionary thought to our postmodern effort to reconceptualize ourselves as civilized beings who remain, in some ways, natural animals.’
One of the few remaining clusters of mature Blue Mountains Ash (Eucalytus oreades)
endemic to the Upper Blue Mountains
[They are listed on BMCC’s Significant Tree Register
..including the dozen or so killed to widen the highway]
#5 Blue Mountains Ash
(Eucalyptus oreades)
#29 Smooth Barked Apple, Red Gum
(Angophora costata)
(Opposite 363 Great Western Highway, Bullaburra, opposite Lot 173, DP13407, Listed 17.7.85,
condemned by the Roads & Traffic Authority in September 2008 to widen the highway into a 4 laned Trucking Expressway)
Les Wielinga
NSW Roads and Traffic Authority Chief (2006-2012)
Executioner of Bullaburra’s Angophora
and Strategic Planner of the Trucking Expressway juggernaut through the Blue Mountains
#33 Scribbly Gum
(Eucalyptus sclerophylla/Eucalyptus piperita hybrid)
(Cnr St Georges Cres. & Adeline St. Faulconbridge, Lot 5 DP8526 , Listed 24.8.85,
condemned in Sep 2011 for selfish dual occupancy housing development)
#61 Blue Mountains Ash
