Bitumen bedlam leaves freight links in decay

ABOUT 1,500 kilometres north-east of Kalgoorlie a B-double crawls through the sparse red desert carrying supplies for Newmont’s Tanami gold operations.

This is well and truly beyond the black stump, with the closest town of Halls Creek 370km away, as the crow flies.

Searing heat beats down on the spinifex plains, frigid chills rise from the red dirt at night.

There is plenty of time out here to stew on your thoughts.

Given the state of the notorious road G&S Transport has been hauling on for 32 years, you would fancy a bet on that crow making the journey to Halls Creek faster than the imposing Kenwood truck.

“The corrugations at times can be more than a beer can deep,” NT Road Transport Association executive officer Louise Bilato, who also works for G&S Transport, said.

“In one of their new, 22 or 21 model Kenworth, top of the range, hugely expensive, very solidly constructed, they have broken steer arms, which are difficult to break, and they broke a front axle.

“They sent the whole bit … to the United States, because they had never seen that steel under that sort of tension in a new vehicle, so they couldn’t fathom how it could have broken.

“That is what the road does, that is the extreme condition of the road.”

The Tanami Desert is emblematic of the problems facing Western Australia’s brittle freight network – bulging budgets, crumbling infrastructure and lengthy delays.

Infrastructure WA chief executive Phil Helberg puts it bluntly.

“We need to accept we cannot simply build our way out of the situation,” he told a recent federal inquiry.

“It is not physically or financially realistic to seek to create a system robust enough to completely withstand all natural hazard events that may occur.

“Accepting this premise means a need to focus on providing more resilient and smarter infrastructure design, including design that enables graceful failure of infrastructure during these extreme events.”

Decade of delay

When Main Roads WA fronted the federal inquiry into the impact of natural disasters in August, the agency revealed a telling insight into the state’s road maintenance backlog.

“About $100 million of resurfacing, maybe a quarter of a billion dollars of pavement rehabilitation and the rest is bits and bobs,” Main Roads WA regional operations director Brett Belstead said.

“To actually pull that through would be a five-to-10-year exercise to catch up.”

Mr Belstead put much of that delay down to resourcing – both workforce and materials – while also pointing to heavier axle loads and natural disasters among contributing factors.

Force majeure incidents in recent years to cripple the state’s freight network include tropical cyclone Seroja in the Mid West, Martuwarra (Fitzroy River) flooding in the Kimberley and the Eyre Highway fires in the Goldfields.

Severed arteries

Highways are the lifeblood of WA’s huge, sparse landscape but the bulk of our towns live in a precarious state where one road closure causes chaos.

Take Broome.

The northern tourist mecca and export hub is six hours from Port Hedland.

The stretch between the two towns is known as cyclone alley for a reason, and lengthy wet season closures can turn a six-hour drive into a near 60-hour journey, akin to driving from Moscow to Morocco.

Then there is Kununurra, which every wet season is cut off by road due to the Martuwarra’s swallowing of the Great Northern Highway.

This was brought into focus this year when the Martuwarra, swollen by record rains, wiped the Fitzroy River bridge off the map, severing Australia’s Highway 1 in two.

But even outside of natural disasters, problems are brewing.

“I was in a meeting six, eight months ago talking about Great Northern Highway between Newman and Hedland,” Western Roads Federation chief executive Cam Dumesny said.

“It was built in the mid-1980s and was premised on 30 road trains a week; we now have over 1,000 heavier road trains a day.

“Roads are not keeping pace with the economy and with the nature of the activities going on and, as a result, this increases the deterioration of the road.”

Cross-border access

Another concern which has reared its head in recent years is the lack of access for interstate freight.

WA only has two sealed roads in – the Eyre Highway straddling the south coast, and Victoria Highway, 1,700km to the north, near Kununurra.

Outside of that you have the unsealed options: the Outback Way from Alice Springs to Laverton, Trans Access Road from South Australia to Kalgoorlie, the Tanami from Alice Springs to Halls Creek and Moonamang Road from north-west Northern Territory to Kununurra.

There’s also the train – the Trans Australian Railway, which runs alongside the Trans Access Road.

It is a problem.

In the story of 2020, a tandem bushfire and cyclone in WA won’t be remembered as a big deal but the disruption they caused to road freight was enormous.

The fires cut off Eyre Highway and the train, while the cyclone cut off the rest.

Had the Outback Way or Tanami been sealed, both options could have served as alternative entries.

“Every time we have a disruption to the freight network we get bare shelves in WA,” Mr Dumesny said.

“During the Eyre highway fires … in one fridge trailer there was close to $70,000 worth of stock.

“It was compost by the time that the road opened again, and it wasn’t just one trailer, it was probably 30 or 40 road trains.”

Main Roads WA acting general manager Des Snook is aware of the need to resolve this.

“(The Outback Way and Tanami) are important for us not only because of the local connectivity that they give but also because they will provide alternative access for us when the main highways are cut,” he said.

“For instance, the Outback Way will be an alternative access into the state when the Eyre Highway is cut.

“Similarly, when sections of the Great Northern Highway are cut, the Tanami Road will provide assistance to us with that alternative access.”

Bitumen can’t come soon enough for those using the Tanami.

The cost of carting on the road is a burden to those used to it, and crippling to those who are not.

“(If you) break down it is a $30,000 recovery if they can get the vehicle back to Alice Springs, or they’ve done $50,000 worth of damage on a float and almost wiped the business out,” Ms Bilato said.

“The cost of doing business on the Tanami Road is up to six times what someone who is totally only on the bitumen.

“It takes two days to run that road train through the workshop and fix all the things that have been damaged on that one trip out and back.”

Budgets busted

Financing of maintenance and construction is being acutely felt by all levels of government.

A WA Local Government Association report in June revealed the bill for the 127,000km of local roads had ballooned above $1 billion for the first time in 2021-22.

Nearly half of that came from local government coffers, with the rest made up of state (23 per cent) and federal (29 per cent) grants, and private funds (0.5 per cent).

The report found a $282 million shortfall in funding to prevent further deterioration of the network.

Only the resources-rich Pilbara was meeting its maintenance fund requirements.

The Shire of Victoria Plains knows all too well how quickly road budgets can get out of hand.

In March 2021, 111 millimetres of rain damaged a quarter of the Wheatbelt shire’s unsealed roads.

With an estimated $4.5 million damage bill, the shire, which draws in $3.5 million in annual rates, was left facing a budget black hole.

Shire chief executive Sean Fletcher said delays to disaster relief funds meant little progress had been made two years on.

“What we’ve been able to do so far is just cosmetic … making it so they can at least travel on them to some extent,” he said.

“(It) wasn’t made clear to us what the problems were until about this time last year.

“The criteria being applied is the current criteria, not the criteria that was applicable when (the disaster declaration) was in play originally.”

Mr Fletcher said the shire was made to jump through “unreasonable” hoops, which in August led to a grievance motion in state parliament by the WA Nationals.

State of play

WA will have more sealed interstate highways, but not until the next decade.

The federal government has committed $678 million to complete sealing of the 2,720km Outback Way by 2031, with WA, the NT and Queensland governments to tip in a further $260 million.

Some $434 million in federal cash has also been earmarked to seal the Tanami Road but, again, that is not due for completion until at least 2033.

For existing roads, new materials with better waterproofing and crack resistance are being rolled out.

“We’ve been using the crumb rubber for a few years now, and through our materials engineering branch we’ve developed some really good knowledge on how to do it,” Mr Snook said.

The state government is also bringing road maintenance crews in-house.

That has already been achieved in the Wheatbelt and Mid West.

The Goldfields, Pilbara and metro regions are expected to follow suit this year Mr Dumesny said there was hope those crews could go some way to getting on top of the 10-year backlog.

And on funding, Mr Dumesny has a line he likes to remind people of every time the topic comes up.

“The WestConnex freeway in Sydney cost $20 billion for 33 kilometres,” he said.

“The current budget to seal the Great Central and Tanami is around $3 billion to $4 billion. “So, one saves about three or four minutes on commuter traffic and the other one opens up a nation, which one do you want?”

Solutions

Everyone agrees more resilience needs to be built into the road network.

That means building back to a higher standard when a road is damaged, and forward planning to respond to changing climate and road use conditions.

“In the past, when we have lost road, we’ve probably put it back as it was and lost it again,” Mr Belstead said.

“If you look at the recent event in the Kimberley … we lost three kilometres of embankment and there was severe damage to another seven kilometres.

“Where we had rock protection at the top of the embankment in the past from previous events, that basically survived and there was minimal damage; where we didn’t, we lost the lot.

“We are now going back, and we have a submission … to the federal (government) for betterment to put rock protection along the entire length.”

There is a case to look at dispersion of taxes such as fuel excises and registration fees, too.

“You have got the feds collecting tax, the state collecting tax, but the bulk road owner which is local government has no revenue base,” Mr Dumesny said.

“It is not a case of us paying more, it’s a case of dispersing those funds appropriately.”

That point is one Mr Fletcher agrees with.

He said cutting red tape and nonsense requests to access government funds could greatly speed up road repairs without more cash outlay.