Letters

Council ignoring Iluka residents

Ed,

 

With the Clarence Valley recovering from recent flooding events and concerns from Council and residents regarding unprecedented flooding from the Clarence River and stormwater flooding, I would like to take the opportunity to highlight some concerns of residents in Iluka in light of your article (CVI 16/3/22) ‘Park Ave DA deferred’, for one reason.

During the rainfall events, there were a number of properties in Iluka that were flooded by stormwater and people that have lived in the area for many years have never seen properties flood like this before. With aging stormwater assets that are not maintained and a new development in the area everyone is questioning how on earth did this happen?

Letters and phone calls from residents have been sent to Council requesting assistance and investigation, but no one has received any response and no action has been undertaken at all. Iluka residents are being ignored, but why?

Many new developments are utilising infiltration swales as part of their stormwater management and there is a belief that all stormwater on these developments is contained in the swales on site, this is not true, it is discharged from the site to neighbouring greenspace and infiltrated to groundwater.

As physics tells us, water flows downhill, so it then flows into the local stormwater network, which the network is not designed to take. Its hard not to draw the obvious conclusions, that new developments are having unintended impacts on stormwater flows and impacting properties during high rainfall events.

There is also the question on the impact to groundwater. In Iluka, we have a high groundwater table which is also receiving additional water from infiltration swales, we now have properties that have water pooled in back yards, it’s the groundwater table! Another unintended impact.

Iluka is not the only area experiencing these impacts as reported in the Clarence Valley Independent with the Park Avenue development in Yamba that is being put on hold to develop an emergency evacuation plan, which is sensible, but it needs to go further and address the impact to existing assets and whether these are up to the task. Once there are houses on these developments and the increase in hardstand, the issue will get a lot worse, and we can’t just sit on hour hands and wait for the next event.

 

Mark Jones, Iluka