Alan Dickens, Ballina
A Byron Shire Council engineer has placed an article on the Brunswick Community page giving dates that the contractor Interflow will return to Mullumbimby to reline sewer gravity mains.
On the Council’s website, there are statements that the sewer gravity mains have been pressure cleaned and CCTV videos done to show the worst areas.
As a previous Water and Waste Sewer Advisory Committee (WWSAC) member, the committee was advised of this.
As a member I asked could if we could see the CCTV footage? The answer was ‘Yes’ but the footage was never made available to the committee despite repeated requests.
The contractor is in Mullumbimby for a month, by the dates supplied, the first time it was reported that relining of the Mullumbimby gravity mains would be undertaken in March 2020.
Former member of the WWSAC, now an elected councillor on BSC, Duncan Dey stated in The Echo that Interflow would be relining the worst sections of the Mullumbimby gravity mains system first and the lesser affected sections next.
After this work was supposedly completed the first serious rain event caused the inflow to the Brunswick Valley Sewage Treatment Plant (BVSTP) to reach eleven times dry weather flow.
The latest figures available on Council’s website on 23.02.2022 show the inflow to BVSTP was 8,438.54 kilolitres, normal dry weather inflow on 22.02.2022 was 1,971.09 kls.
There are also reports of high-level warning lights flashing at sewer pump stations 4001 and 4003, these lights are to signal that the sewage level in the sewer pump station has reached a level that could create a risk of overflows in the gravity systems, plus possibly have an adverse affect on the ability of households in low areas to flush their toilets.
We are three years into the five-year strategy, at a cost of $250,000 per annum, and the strategy seems to be achieving nothing but more rhetoric from Byron Shire Council engineers that ‘everything is fine we are solving the I/I problem’. Well, the inflow figures show the opposite.
Can someone employed on BSC, such as the Director of Infrastructure and General Manager, have an information night where they can show the CCTV footage supplied by Interflow as an example of previous relining, and where this relining was done in the Shire? Also current CCTV footage of relining and where this relining has taken place?
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
