26 May 2011

Wetlands cost blowouts as boneheaded bureaucracy cocks up

| johnboy
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The Canberra Times has a sad, predictable, story of the inner city dam building project getting hit with feature creep and associated cost blowouts.

A budget estimates hearing heard yesterday that a bigger pipe was needed to link the ponds at Lyneham and Dickson with those further north after sport and recreation officials revised the amount of water they would need to keep sportsgrounds irrigated.

Environment Minister Simon Corbell told the committee yesterday that the project relies on the ability to pump water from the two inner-north ponds to the other ponds upstream located close to Flemington Road, close to the showgrounds.

”To achieve that outcome, there is a need for a rising main, basically a very large pipe in simple terms, to transfer that,” MrCorbell said.

”There’s been revisions to the scope of size of the pipe required to transfer that water upstream.

”It has to be a much larger pipe.”

Considering they’ve justified the destruction of beautiful parts of Lyneham with the assurance that they’d thought everything through this is not good news.

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averagejoeaussie9:57 pm 01 Jun 11

If these imbeciles that are overseeing these “expert” reports/contracts were running a household costing they would be drawn and quatered. How can a costing run that far over budget and no-one loses their job? In private enterprise you would be butchered for life; but in local government, O.K, let’s just cover it at the taxpayers expense and get on with it. As a taxpayer, I want to see someone cop it for abusing that much of my money. I run a local business and if I did a deal like that I would go broke – because it’s my money – well, this is no different. It’s my money and I want the bloke responsible to tell me why; it’s quite simple – either the evaluation was way out or the contractor is taking you for a ride. These are the only two reasons; someone’s neck needs to be in the noose and I don’t see why this pussy government isn’t going for the jugular……….

Have the guys who stuffed up the GDE bridge job now got a gig laying pipes?

They should get into set-top boxes and solar panels too!

niceplacetolive5:00 pm 26 May 11

There should be a thorough investigation on these cost blowouts, and it should include reviewing original quotes from contractors. I bet there were genuine contractors who quoted for work here at genuine prices in good faith, and then the lowest quote accepted…. and those who ended up winning the quotes ended up being paid more than they quoted because they will say that the quote didn’t include this or that. This is the sort of stuff that puts genuine small businesses out of work.

Amazing. It is really, really basic engineering to calculate how much water there will be and how much of a pipe you will need to carry it.

Maybe those genius engineers believed some of the more extreme climate change propoganda and thought the drought wasn’t just a drought but an actual climate shift. Ergo – less rainfall, less runoff, smaller pipes. Pity the drought broke.

gospeedygo said :

Chuck an owl at it. That will solve this kerfuffle.

Seems to me that there are already enough ‘owls’ running the project…

Chuck an owl at it. That will solve this kerfuffle.

Ummm… I thought the goal of this man-made wetland was to ‘beautify’ the landscapes around Dicko, Lyneham, and O’Connor.

Since when did it become a facility for irrigating sports grounds?

Is someone trying to pass off two different project as one?

Ummm, surely they could just use the smaller pipe but run the water through for a bit longer?

I thought we were paying some joker 625k a year in John Mckays fiefdom to look after and manage these water infrastructure things.

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