The Australian Rail Track Corporation is capitulating to some community flooding concerns over parts of the inland rail raised seven years ago after record recent flood events in northern New South Wales and the start of the federal election campaign.
In late March landholders received correspondence from the ARTC identifying potential new areas for flood mitigation works after years of the organisation insisting it had “the utmost confidence” in the inland rail’s flood modelling.
Landholders Stephen Campion, from Gilgandra, and Anthony Corderoy, from Narromine, could see more of their farms acquired as part of 200 new drainage control areas proposed along the alignment.
Both received emails which said the drainage control areas “are a relatively new concept which is why these areas have not been identified on previous maps”.
Campion said when the route was first proposed in 2017, he and his neighbours had wondered why it had not followed higher ground in the area, which would have avoided the water that comes from the south-east onto his property.
However, the new flood mitigation measures do not reassure him.
“It’s an afterthought really,” Campion said. “They should have worked all this out beforehand. It’s just an afterthought. That’s the way the whole project is run. They’ll leave it till later and work it out then.”
Peter Holt, special counsel to NSW Farmers and the Country Women’s Association, said these developments were “very late in the context of public consultation”.
An independent report commissioned by the NSW Department of Planning, Industry and Environment (DPIE) for the Narrabri to North Star section of the inland rail identified in July 2020 that ARTC had defied normal practice as flood standards should have been addressed prior to the commencement of the environmental impact statement, not after its exhibition.
In the report Drew Bewsher, the director of Bewsher Consulting with 40 years experience as a flood specialist, wrote to the department that “this is an ad-hoc approach to planning and is unlikely to achieve optimum outcomes for the Inland Rail programme or the community”.
“In our opinion, it was inappropriate for ARTC to have allowed the project to proceed to the current stage without having the [Quantitative Design Limits and Flood Management Objectives] settled,” Bewsher wrote.
He said basing the assessment of impacts on ARTC’s flood management objectives instead of the higher standard required by the EIS meant that ultimately the flood “implications to the project are not fully known”.
An ARTC spokesperson told Guardian Australia: “ARTC stands by the work which has been undertaken in regards to flood modelling. This work has complied with all necessary planning and environmental processes.”
Andrew Knop, a member of the Narromine community consultative committee, said the most recent meeting on 28 March revealed the planning department had told the ARTC that there were problems with its flood modelling for the Narromine to Narrabri section as well.
A spokesperson for the department told Guardian Australia it had requested ARTC undertake further modelling of the project’s hydrology and flooding impacts.
The ARTC would have to submit this new modelling to the department in a preferred infrastructure report, the spokesperson said.
“We continue to work with ARTC and its hydrologist, through a hydrology working group established by the department, to work through the concerns over flooding,” the department spokesperson said.
An ARTC spokesperson said the department had input on the EIS process.
“This is a normal part of the EIS process and helps inform the design for inland rail. ARTC welcomes this input as we continue to work with the NSW government to seek the best outcome for this project,” the spokesperson said.
Communities along the rail have expressed continual frustration at the planning and construction of the project which forms the centrepiece of the Nationals infrastructure policy offering.
The former independent MP Tony Windsor and inland rail advocate Everald Compton recently backed five independent candidates in regional electorates in a bid to change political representation on or near the proposed route.
Barbara Deans, a councillor at Coonamble shire council and a member of the Gilgandra community consultative committee, said the community had warned the ARTC from the first information evening in 2015 about the flooding danger posed by its chosen route.
Deans said the farmers in the area told the ARTC “from day one” that they were going to have problems putting a levy bank around the Warrumbungle mountain ranges with one of the fastest flowing rivers in NSW, the Castlereagh.
The role transport infrastructure can play in making floods worse was highlighted recently as flood victims on the NSW north coast threatened to mount a class action lawsuit against the state and federal governments over concerns the newly completed Pacific Highway upgrade acted as a “dam wall”.
Deans said “that’s exactly what we’re worried about”.
She said the ARTC “didn’t listen to us until DPIE made them listen to us”.
Holt said the “farmers were right and the farmers had told ARTC for an extended period of time that there was more water there than the ARTC modelling had predicted.”
However, even with the proposed solution of drainage control areas, Holt said he had to write to ARTC on behalf of a number of landholders to ask for additional clarification as to what was required on these areas of land.
Corderoy said “all we’ve got is an X on the map”.
ARTC’s email said it anticipated to “be able to minimise, if not remove these drainage control areas through our detailed design process” – despite the problem of high-velocity water movement identified in the same email.
Campion was worried about the potential for soil erosion on his farm if the velocity of flood water through the culverts was too high.
Knop said the issue of soil erosion was very serious, as it could create deep gullies in paddocks that could prove life-threatening when farmers were mustering stock on motorbikes.
Corderoy said the ARTC’s modelling of flood water in Narromine at 50cm was a long way off his father’s remembrance of the flood of 1955, which was deep enough to drown a draft horse in the telephone line, which was six to eight feet off the ground at that time.
An ARTC spokesperson has said that “the proposed Drainage Control Areas (DCAs) are being developed for the New South Wales Department of Planning and Environment to assist in refining the reference design regarding drainage solutions at some locations along the Narromine to Narrabri section”.
