Our road was built by returned soldiers after the first world war with basicallyy picks and shovels, primarily to get produce down to Palmwoods to put on the train and to the Coast. The top quarter of the road has a gradient of 1:10 and the road consists of hairpin bends and very sharp drops. Cyclists love it, well they used to love it, as it will not re-open now until mid 2013. And it has been closed for 18 months already.
There has been a history of landlips near the top (can be viewed on Picture Queensland, State Library of Queensland website but nothing too drastic until a couple of years ago. Main roads repaired the road right up near the top, and in addition to widening the water culvert that diverts stormwater from the road, they also changed the watercourse. Record rain and floods saw the huge volume of water channel it's way to land that used to be covered in morning glory but no trees (it had choked the trees out). The man above us, instead of killing it and replanting with trees, chose to burn it every year, so there wasn't a lot of vegetation on top of basalt rock to provide a lot of stability. To cut a long story short, his place slipped over the road onto part of ours, quite a big part actually. Lovely red clay landslip that dried rock hard but turned into pea soup every time it rained. So this is the landlip area I have been revegetating the last year or so. Some of the trees are up to 6 feet high now, but those that were in the gluggy clay have struggled a bit. It will need weeding until it gets canopied, say for another 18 months. We have 2 lovely creeks that flow from above to below the property, one of which is seasonal. The significant roadworks they have done re the landlip onto our place, comprises 100's of rock gabions (which look quite nice really) and a veritable wall of bluestone rock to support the road. All was OK until it's first test this year with the wet season. Yes, they replaced an 18 inch culvert with a metre wide one, and despite all the rocks and gabions, part of last years slip slipped forward again. On some parts of the slip, even after a year, it still isn't really firm, even after planting all that asian sedge. The road was OK though. I have spent the last last couple of weeks planting lomandras and sandpaper figs on this years slip to help stabilise it. The property down the hill (vertically) from us is the guy with the goat, and all the extra water has caused a slip on his place and a HUGE one just below him. His cutting all the trees down just magnified the problem.
It has been somewhat of a saga and after much thought, I have decided that the problem lies with main roads. They have 5 different contractors each doing their own thing, but individually they haven't thought about the consequences of changing water courses and wider pipes. It might have solved the problem at the top, but has caused a domino effect on roads and properties beneath. While I am peeved about it all, it could be worse. A guy up the road from us paid $850,000 for 20 acres a couple of years ago. It now has no road access and has slipped down the hill onto the property is front of it also. Main roads took 5 acres off him as they have to re-route the road. He hasn't had any access to it for 18 months and it is still impossible to walk on most of it. The poor bloke had planned to build on it but it is now in mortgagees hands. I had a chat to the real estate agent and they hope to get 250-300 thousand for it. I would be beside myself. All you can do with it is revegetate it and re-stabilise it. So I guess we can consider ourselves lucky.
The landslips from above us have flowed down towards the 2 creeks on either side of the house, which is built up on a rocky knoll, so it's quite high off the ground on steel posts that are drilled into bedrock. From the air, the only thing visible is the house roof, the rest being rainforest, and of course a bright red/orange clay landslip. So we should be fine, but I'll keep on planting just in case.
I still haven't worked out how to post images. I browse and import them from the folder but when I preview message they are nowhere to be found. Hope this is not too boring.
