Tweed Shire Council says Old Lismore Road will be upgraded to improve safety and restore local rainforest habitat.
Council is about to start work on a 240 metre section of Old Lismore Road in Murwillumbah that will give the Hundred Hills community a wider road, a lit footpath and 4,000 new native plants on the land beside it.
The section between North Arm Road and the bottom of the hill is narrow enough that cars must stop to let each other pass. There is no footpath, so children, families and cyclists share the road with traffic under a dense canopy that keeps the road surface in shade and damp for much of the day. The surface itself has reached the end of its life.
The upgrade will widen the road for 2-way traffic, install new stormwater drainage to protect the new surface, and build a footpath with lighting that links to the existing footpaths further along Old Lismore Road and on North Arm Road.
‘This is one of the last gaps in the footpath network in Hundred Hills and it is a gap on a hill with no shoulder. Anyone who has walked it with a pram or a child on a scooter knows why we need to fix it,’ Manager Roads and Stormwater Danny Rose said.
Trees
The work means removing 152 trees and shrubs along the road verge. Of the 113 large trees, 83 are camphor laurels, an invasive species.
Tweed Council’s design team reworked the plans several times to keep as many native trees as possible, including a large white fig in the gully on the eastern side, a dense patch of Davidson’s plum, and a native beech, native elm and hard quandongs on the corner of North Arm Road.
‘We went back to the drawings again and again to pull the footprint away from the natives,’ Mr Rose said. ‘The three large native trees that do have to come out sit hard against the road edge and there was no design that could keep them and still make the road safe.’
In their place Tweed Council will plant 2,800 native rainforest trees and shrubs on the western embankment and on the Council land beside the SES facility to the east, plus 1,200 Lomandra to hold the new batter slopes. That is 25 native plants for every tree removed, including the camphors, and about double the canopy area lost.
The plantings restore the lowland rainforest that once covered the site, a threatened ecological community.
‘Most of what is coming out is camphor laurel. What goes back is the rainforest that belongs here. Every threatened plant affected is replaced three for one, and we look after the whole site for three years to make sure it takes,’ Council Environmental Scientist Jason Searle said.
Mulch from the cleared trees will be used on site to suppress grass ahead of planting. The planting and restoration contract has been tendered and will be awarded shortly.
For more information visit tweed.nsw.gov.au/old-lismore-road-upgrade or call 02 6670 2400.
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