THE section of the Old Pacific Highway at Somersby that collapsed after violent storms, leading to the deaths of five people last year, could have been fixed for $277,000.
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The danger of collapse had become so obvious to Gosford City Council in 2004 that it got a quotation for reinforcing a culvert, Glebe Coroner's Court heard yesterday.
On August 12, 2004, a company called Tako Water Services told the council the corrugated iron pipes could be reinforced with concrete for $277,000 - and on another approach $290,000 - but the quotation had got lost in the system and no work was done before last year's collapse.
The council's general manager, Peter Wilson, called to give evidence yesterday, said he did not know what had happened to the quote. Neither did the council's director of city services, Stephen Glen, nor Geoffrey Plowman, now self-employed, who was the council's assets engineer from 1991 until 2005, who said he did not even see the documentation.
On June 8, 2007, Adam Holt, 30, Roslyn Bragg, 29, and three young children plunged into the culvert, which had collapsed in heavy rain. All five drowned.
The court heard there had been major subsidences of the road surface in 2000, 2002 and 2004, which should have suggested there was a serious structural problem, but the road was merely filled to level the surface.
Mr Plowman said yesterday he did not recall saying to a council employee, Peter Stark, after the 2002 subsidence that he would try to get special storm funding from the Roads and Traffic Authority to carry out necessary repairs, but he said it would have been a reasonable thing to say.
He agreed that after the 2004 subsidence, an engineer, Luke Reynolds, had sent an email dated March 17 saying there was urgent need for work on the highway at Piles Creek.
Mr Plowman asked for a quote to do road works in his reply of March 30. He accepted, according to a memo of April 1, that someone had arranged funding for more fill to fix the subsidence.
In answer to Robert Weber, SC, for the RTA, Mr Plowman agreed that an email from another engineer, Phil Mitchell, had established "a clear causal link" between the state of the road and the state of the culvert.
He told Paul Menzies, QC, counsel assisting the coroner, that it would have been reasonable for him to say that the problem lay deeper than simply doing more filling, but he was not sure if he had seen the documentation.
Mr Wilson said $290,000 would have been a big variation on the budget, so it would have required a report and a resolution by council, and it would have had to have gone to tender.
The council had installed a new electronic database between 2000 and 2002 but there was no record of the quotation being processed. One possibility, he agreed, was that there had been a failure in the system.
Another was that a deliberate decision had been made not to proceed with the work, but there was no record of such a decision. He had asked Mr Glen, who had not been able to enlighten him.
Mr Glen said that he had only become aware of the condition of the highway at Piles Creek when the road collapsed last year.