RABY Bay residents have labelled repair work on crumbling canal walls a fiasco and asked Redland City Council for engineering and funding issues to be debated at an open council meeting.
Canal resident Zrinka Johnston said council had been trying to fix the 21 kilometres of canal walls for four years and had failed regularly.
She said she had had many meetings with mayor Karen Williams and council staff but could not understand why preventative work could not be done.
Repairs to canal walls had been under way for 20 years and more than $10 million had been put into council funds by residents yet problems continued.
“Council is waiting for failures to occur and then responding with the biggest engineering fix for which it could find contractors,’’ she said.
“Some recent fixes cost well over $2 million per property and used over 20 huge steel pylons to bolster short one metre to two metre walls across one property boundary.’’
Mayor Karen Williams did not respond but chief executive Andrew Chesterman said repair costs had never reached $2 million.
Rather, they had ranged from $400,000 to $1 million, with the average being less than $500,000.
Ms Johnston said council had routinely over-budget and under-delivered on canal walls every year in what was bad project management.
“The whole effort defies common sense,’’ she said.
Ms Johnston said trials were being run to find cheaper engineering fixes but meantime it was not known where and when they would be implemented because there was no map of canal walls showing differing wall characteristics and potential for failure.
“This on-going mega-buck fiasco is a major failure of our council,’’ she said.
Mr Chesterman said trials were under way on a repair technique which, if successful, would likely reduce overall costs for revetment walls.
Council had an annual monitoring program which showed that of this month, there were five properties needing repair. Monitoring allowed timely intervention which minimised repair costs.
Mapping was created from the data collected from monitoring and improvements to this were being sought as part of the repair trial.