The News’s outstanding piece, ‘Open the Bridge’, in the News on Friday, April 7, will have left readers astonished that decades of inaction by Strathbogie Shire Council and successive state and commonwealth governments have left local residents and all users of Kirwans Bridge in such a vulnerable position for so long.
The commonwealth and the state were lobbied after the bridge was closed by council in both 2001 and 2011.
Concerted community campaigns won a reopening on both occasions, by pushing the same message that is being shouted loudly again now.
The need for a serious maintenance programme or a replacement for the 133-year-old, heritage-listed timber bridge, has been obvious for the whole of this century.
Council has had at least 12 years to upgrade the so-called alternative link to Nagambie, the infamous and dangerous Weir Rd.
Flood events in 2011 and again last year had that road under water and closed at precisely the time the bridge was also out of action, leaving residents stranded for several days.
The people should not have to tell elected ‘leaders’, again, about the bridge’s importance for fire and ambulance services, for school buses, for the daily commute, for local farmers, or for the tourism that the shire actively encourages by promoting waterways and wine.
The royal commission into the Black Saturday fires of 2009 found that most deaths occurred in places with single escape routes.
Has anything been learned?
Will lives need to be lost at Kirwans Bridge if a fire fanned by north-west wind traps people in the settlement?
Which level of government will accept responsibility if an ambulance journey on the back road, which should have had the bridge available, takes so long as to be fatal?
The standard response, “Our sympathy goes out to the family”, simply won’t cut it.
Will it take a fatality on the narrow, dangerous and unsealed road to prompt serious action from council?
The other message pumping out loudly and clearly is the peril of living in a safe parliamentary seat.
If the residents of Kirwans Bridge were in a marginal seat, there would be no need for ‘people power’ to have to rise once again.
All strength to the residents, and I hope others from all over Victoria join them in the struggle.
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