Restoration of a residential landslide above Mollymook beach is underway a year after the event, and following two months of weather delays.
Contractors are installing metal Gabion baskets filled with rocks.
This will prevent the 35-metre gully that swallowed Sadhana Goulston’s vegetable garden behind her Bannister Head house a year ago from opening up again.
Video: Sadhana watches Steve Saunders and Nigel Whicker put the rocks in place.
Three sections of baskets filled with large rocks are being placed in step formation, after a section of the landslide was dug out and levelled about 15 metres down the slope.
Hisway Earthmoving contractors are placing approximately 50 tonnes of rock into handmade-to-fit metal cages in the 36-cubic metre space.
Wayne Ebsworth controls a small bucket loader which he fills with the rocks from the top of the slope, then lowers them to the cages.
Below Wayne, Steve Saunders and Nigel Whicker hand place the rocks from the bucket once they are dumped, to ensure stability in a pattern designed not to hold runoff water.
They construct the large cages with the help of a tool call a hog ring gun, which winds heavy metal wire into a series of hinge-like joins.
“I’ll be very happy when it’s finished and I don’t have to walk so carefully around the edge of the drop off.”
- Sadhana Goulston
Ms Goulston is pleased her personal danger zone will finally be closed up.
“I’ll be very happy when it’s finished and I don’t have to walk so carefully around the edge of the drop off,” she said.
Far more so than when the gully opened after torrential rain last August, causing Sadhana a couple of nervous nights, although a geotechnical engineer reassured her that the house was secure.
“Now I’ve moved the vegetable garden round the front.” The house faces Mitchell Parade at Bannister Head.
She plans to revegetate the restored slip area above the beach with native plants.
It has a taken a year for repairs to start.
First there were negotiations around her development application for repairs.
Then since late May, Sadhana had anticipated the start of the project but regular bad weather kept the earth too soft to start work for almost two months of consecutive Mondays.
Mr Ebsworth estimates the job will be finished in a couple of week if the weather holds.
