Not guilty plea over Myer saga

THE company behind the Myer redevelopment has pleaded not guilty to charges relating to the collapse of the Hobart Rivulet wall at the CBD construction site last year.

In the Magistrates Court in Hobart yesterday, lawyers for E Kalis Properties entered not guilty pleas to one count of failure to notify adjoining owners of proposed building work and protection work, and one count of carrying out building work without protection work as agreed or determined.

The matter will go to a hearing, expected to be in February next year, and which is expected to last four days.

In June, Director of Building Control Dale Webster announced legal proceedings against E Kalis Property for allegedly breaching the Building Act 2000 in relation to the rivulet wall collapse.

On July 27 last year, the city woke to find sections of the Hobart Rivulet wall had fallen in a pre-dawn collapse into the Kalis-owned construction site.

The collapse brought down walls and floors in shops in the Cat and Fiddle Arcade and sent millions of litres of water rushing into the construction site.

The new Myer building in Liverpool St — the centrepiece of the city’s revamped retail precinct — was shut down after water from the Murray St site flooded the basement and an electricity substation.

The store had reopened only eight months before — eight years after the building was destroyed by fire in 2007.

The collapse created traffic chaos in the city’s CBD. Surrounding shops and businesses were without power for days, some for weeks, and many lost custom and money during the protracted clean-up.

Hutchinson Builders conducted a remediation program, with trucks delivering hundreds of tonnes of rocks to finish a road across the flooded construction site to allow an excavator to remove the tonnes of debris that had fallen from collapsed sections of the arcade.

It was four weeks before Myer reopened. The Government ordered an audit of documentation after asbestos was discovered on the Murray St Myer site in August last year.

The audit was to establish the level of protection work in place before the catastrophic breach of the Hobart Rivulet wall.

Explosive findings from the audit, released last October, revealed that cracks started appearing in the floors of shops in the Cat and Fiddle Arcade above the Hobart Rivulet three weeks before the collapse.

The audit found parties in the Myer redevelopment project knew that “not insignificant damage” had occurred to shops in the Cat and Fiddle complex 22 days before the Hobart Rivulet wall collapsed.

E Kalis Properties will come before the court again on November 21 for mention ahead of the hearing next year.