Report on road ready

The final geotech report on a Teviot Valley road that has subsided into a coal pit has been completed but it could be some time before any decisions are made, Central Otago District Council infrastructure manager Jon Kingsford said.

The content of the report would not be made public until it came before council, possibly in December, he said.

Coal Creek road, a loop road near Roxburgh, has been slowly subsiding over the years but bad weather this winter and last sped up the process and now the original public road has been lost, fallen into Harliwich Holdings Limited's coal pit.

The road was closed over a year ago but residents lobbied the council to let them use what was left of it, though the school bus could not use it.

Neither could stock trucks. At the beginning of winter this year, when the latest slip occurred, the road was officially closed again.

Mr Kingsford said the report contained a couple of options around re-establishing the alignment of the road and it would be tabled at a stakeholders meeting soon.

He had been given a development plan by Harliwich representatives which detailed where the company wanted to go with the mine and that would also be tabled at the meeting.

He had previously said it seemed mining operations were the cause of the slip that claimed the road and mine owner Ken Harliwich admitted: ''I suppose we were close enough to the road''.

In August, Mr Harliwich said he wanted the road to be ''pushed back'' as he owned land on the other side of where it had been and intended to mine it.

Once he had finished the mining, he would backfill the land and return the road to its original position.

- sarah.marquet@odt.co.nz

 

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