WHILE La Nina has helped to provide welcome rainfall (to some anyway) over the past year, the wet season has hit with a vengeance since the start of the new year, providing high totals in rain gauges around the district.
Our local canegrowers would have been amongst those who were not so welcoming of the rain, with heavy falls from the start of the 2022 crushing setting the season onto the back foot for most of the year and then having to endure even more falls through December and into the final weeks.
While the majority of Wilmar’s local crop (99 per cent) was harvested, it only came though patience and perseverance in between varying falls of rain throughout the region.
However, while the completion of the majority of the harvest was met, there have been a number of complaints from local residents about the aftereffects of the seasonal rain.
One Fourteenth Avenue resident pointed out that they had “water inundation into the garage and a lake out the front of our house” as they looked for assistance from the council for their problems.
Unfortunately, drainage in Fourteenth Avenue has been a problem for many of the elected Councils over a long period of time and it always seems to go into the “too hard basket” because of the cost involved, while council proceeds with upgrading other areas of the shire.
Other complaints referred to the obvious repercussions of any rainfall—the overgrown sides of local roads and highways and also private properties, especially in the Central Business District of Home Hill.
While Council has contractors who are mowing where and when they can in between the flooded water tables along local roads, while farmers also do their best to maintain road shoulders around their own properties, it is unfortunate that the start to the wet season also comes at the same time as a major part of the council’s work force takes annual leave.
However, our complainants are also quick to ask why the overgrown grass is “not as obvious on the Ayr side of the river?”
Then there was the query about the highway entrance into Home Hill from the south with it noted that “it is not a welcome site for visitors to the town to see the sides of the road in such a state”.
It is to be hoped that the Main Roads Department also has their contractors on the job as the wet season progresses—just to help present Home Hill in a much better way to the many travellers who pass through at this time of the year.
