A wet September as an El Nino recedes and a lot of people have been caught off guard. A steady week of rain and much of the infrastructure is found wanting. Some of these problems are historical and some of them are more incidental. Urban landscapes are always difficult for flood mitigation because they so rarely comply with the fundamental law water takes down the path of least resistance. This is exacerbated by the percentage of hard surfaces which allow rapid and compounding run-off rather than any absorption or dissipation. One of the major historical difficulties exacerbating this in Ballarat is not just urban density but the geographic anomalies created beneath these hard surfaces in alandscape torn up and reshaped from gold mining. In the lust for wealth little consideration was given to the natural flow of water and anything that would divert it from where the gold was. A century and a half of building to redress this and not everything has worked.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
Driving around Ballarat this week and seeing multiple huge build-ups of water show just how poorly some of the infrastructure serves this end. Where the culverts are shallow or the drain entrances are narrow, or blocked there is the inevitable build up that has so many nearby residents worried. Sometimes the issue is maintenance and sometime the issue is about building the right infrastructure in the first place.
By contrast it is worth looking at the magnificent bluestone gutters, one of Ballarat’s trademark heritage features, to realise how prescient the urban designers and builders were with this most basic of street architecture. Some in Soldiers Hill might be closer to moats and create some access issues for those less nimble of foot but this is a small price to pay for the purpose they serve. The need for small bridges or even the annoyance of keeping your front wheels out of the gulf are a small sacrifice to pay for infrastructure that was built for a lot more than the one in a hundred year flood event. Of course they require maintenance, improvement and even just simple clearing but on days like these their undersung value should be reassessed.
Quite apart from their heritage value, it is commendable that their practical merit (which some might see as “over-engineered”) will be preserved in the face of the other pressing demands for more carapaces. No one wants a car space which in the wrong conditions is more likely to see their car floating away.
