Tweed levee to be rebuilt

A LEVEE wall decimated by unprecedented flooding more than two years ago will soon be repaired.

Tweed Shire Council has called for tenders to restore the South Murwillumbah Levee.

It will be the council’s last major infrastructure project after the March 2017 flooding, brought on by fierce exTropical Cyclone Debbie.

It has taken experts quite a while to assess and redesign the levee – thankfully there’s been no flooding to contend with, as even a relatively minor event may have proved devastating.

Both private and public assets could have eroded into the Tweed River.

The levee remains at risk of collapse, but the council’s manager of roads and stormwater Danny Rose said work should start in July and take about four months to finish.

“It’s in much the same state as it’s been since the flood event in 2017,” Mr Rose said.

“There’s a lot of erosion and slippage on the river frontage. We’ve made some temporary repairs to try to make sure large volumes of water would be sundered off from those areas.

“A lot of property along there (the riverfront) is at risk if there’s a follow-up event.”

Mr Rose said “early in the piece” the council engaged the NSW Public Works Advisory to tackle an “investigation and detailed design”.

“It’s taken about two years to get the technical investigation done. It’s really been a very involved design process,” he said.

Mr Rose said concrete barriers were used to temporarily “fill the gaps” of the most badly damaged sections of the levee.

Some of the damage has been attributed to trees which toppled in the flood.

The levee was built with one-in-five-year flood events in mind – “fairly regularly occurring flooding”.

Flooding in 2017 represented a one-hundred-year flood event.

Mr Rose thanked private landowners who had already given the council the thumbs up to commence work