What follows is a summarised rant about the IMO totally unacceptable, and really poorly managed + executed + communicated roadworks outside our place, that have been going on for the past 3 months and counting now! 🤬
While I accept that roadworks sometimes have to take place, the manner in which this has whole process has taken place has been nothing short of appalling, and completely unacceptable IMO. (It's all the more surprising, when the council had only just spent a bunch of money getting another bunch to resurface the whole road like 2 years earlier, to the point I thought that we wouldn't need any further works for another decade!)
It's also somewhat galling to finally find that the company ("Hunter Civil") who won that contract / tender, did so on a "Restricted Tender" project (i.e. the council, for all intents and purposes, could've effectively shoulder-tapped those bastards to offer them this "juicy nugget" project - covering a whole bunch of streets, over 6 months... to what extent that is / isn't true is not really something that can be easily found out just yet though - yeah, there's the LGOIA (Local Government Official Information Act) provisions for finding out such shit, but yeah... it turns out you have to pay them to hire / divert a staffer to gather that info for you... and then they charge *per page* copied in addition to their hourly rate around minimum wage-ish spent doing all that... 🙄)
A Summarised Timeline
1) This whole ordeal starts in late January / early February, when I come home from work one Monday to find that they've suddenly put up signs announcing an purported "3 week, full closure" of our street (having not heard *anything* from the council about even the remote potential for such works in our suburb or anything),
2) They then proceeded to not give any more details OR formal written notice on either the scope or plans for said work until only 3 days before works started (and yeah, that was on the *morning* of a long weekend too!)
3) Then proceeded to set up some of the most overkill "clear the zone" type fencing that prevented vehicle access to ALL the properties on half of our street (BOTH lanes I must add, with no cutouts for maintaining driveway access like on most other streets), and terminating with the driveway beside ours, where they proceeded to plonk their "worker smoko-room container + portaloo). A few unlucky neighbours were unable to get their cars out in time, and now have flat batteries!
They did maintain footpath access - along either side of the street only... So, if you needed to get in or out, you could only walk. That nonsense they spouted about "advising them if you had any need for emergency vehicle / deliveries" - yeah nah... the chance of that actually happening was slim, when their chicken-wire fences lined each side of the street, their 3 massive diggers straddled a massive gaping trench, and all their supplies + pumps + shit littered each side of the street! RIP anybody who may have needed an ambulance!)
As for the other half of the street that they hadn't officially closed, that was also barely usable for parking (as they'd all park their work utes everywhere during the day, and then open the gate and leave a convoy of large trucks sticking out the other end)... Also, there were then the residents who'd double-park other folk, hemming cars in, which made it a hazard to park too close too!
4) Oh, and then, don't get me started on the fucking generator + pump system they ran, which droned away at the volume of a "very loud lawnmower" all day long (*except* for when they started work at 6 am, until they finished at 6pm... and/or on those early mornings when they brought in a truck with an even louder motor that must've been doing 120+ dB, and left my ears ringing for a few hours after it had left!)
Well, I guess they had to run those generators, as there were some really foul "offensive odours" coming out of the ground from near one of those... 🤢
5) 3 Weeks duly stretched into some 5-6, before they finally admitted that they were way behind schedule as "weather + ground conditions were worse than expected"... yeah right! (And they only admitted this, as they were announcing that instead of just a 3 week project on this half-street, they now needed to close lots more streets nearby!)
6) And while all this was carrying on, one day, without warning, they made *more* markings outside our gate one morning (just before I headed out for work), and by that evening, had cut the concrete (ready for digging the next day or two)... Again, with absolutely NO warning that they were about to start this new stage of works...
Most worrying was that one of those featured a big arrow pointing inside our property line saying "2m" (or was it 3 or 4m?), while the neighbours got a large circle (with cross) drawn inside their driveway! Oh, and both sets of markings ended up straddling our driveway to the point where it was clear that if they excavated those early the next morning, we'd be boxed in, and potentially end up suddenly without power, water, AND/OR internet (as all the markings indicated that all those things ran right across the ditch they were gonna dig)
Yeah, at that point, having endured two weeks of really disruptive shaking + noise as the works go even closer, I was finally forced to move out! Late at night!
Truth be told... I'd even considered maybe moving out a week earlier, as they'd suddenly erected a bunch of new cones on the next segment of road where I'd been parking - i.e. did I mention we had to walk about 2 blocks to find any parking? But, I also really didn't want to leave the house unattended.
7) Yeah, you read correctly. Even before finishing our half-street, they were closing off all the other nearby streets too for similar works, displacing even more residents who were all already struggling to find anywhere to park (as many of the new builds were going up without adequate off-street parking already)... Heck, the street behind us had closed about 3 months earlier, and they were *still* working on on it with no end in sight as they started our stretch, and then tried to close off even more side streets!
This is one of those areas where their total and utterly botched project management really showed! They were seemingly taking on / starting up more worksites than they had capacity to finish, even when their existing ones were running behind schedule, and left in a complete mess!
8) After moving out, it ended up taking them another 2-3 weeks before they finally "finished" our segment, closing up the trenches with temporary tar-sand (but NOT resealing the pavement outside our driveway I might add)... Thus it was, that pretty much an extra month to the day when they had said that we would have vehicle access back, did that actually happen!
9) BUT, because of the bad way they've arranged things, we *still* cannot quite get in and out easily, as all the neighbours end up forming about 5 lanes of parked cars across the road: Supposedly, if they would only park in 3 lines we could still get in and out... but NOO.... the Indians next door (yes... I've seen the guy with my own eyes on multiple occasions) end up parking in the accessway left between two parallel lines of cars, which then causes another car to park behind him, and then... no one goes anywhere!
Oh, and there's all this muck on the road surface that is pretty much a mix of dirt + potential contaminated-by-septic-waste-sludge/dirt, along with streams / puddles of questionable brown-ish fluids pooling in the gutters... 🤢
For now... we wait to see if they will finish next week as planned... Personally, I suspect it will be at least Anzac day (i.e. 2 more weeks), but potentially, this could stretch out to mid-March instead! (And then, there are still 2 more major roads nearby that then need to be worked on until the end of July!!!) F***K!!! 🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬
