There were approximately 130 landslides that affected the Lismore road network following the big flood twenty-two months ago. Today, one of the more critical flood recovery landslip rebuilds was officially opened by Member for Lismore Janelle Saffin and Mayor Steve Krieg.

(Mayor Steve Krieg and Member for Lismore Janelle Saffin cutting the ribbon at today's opening with CMC and council staff watching on)

Nimbin Road suffered two massive landslips that wiped out half of the road and required major engineering feats (planning, design and build) to stabilise the area. The road closest to the Nimbin village is once again a two-lane road.

The second site is four kilometres east with similar work needed to complete the project but with less space. This is estimated to be finished in March 2024.

(The worksite known as Km4 on Nimbin Road in October with the soil nails in place that will support another wall so the second lane can be reconstructed)

To give you an indication of the work involved Project Manager Adon Dinsmore described the last six months.

"It was quite messy when we got here. Just the logistics of getting machines in there and cleaning it up and having a look at what the actual issue was. It's obviously hard to do too much investigation for the designs while it's still covered in the landslip and whatnot. So, the first task was to get the site cleaned up, and then get in here with a piling rig and, you can't see much of it, it's all above the ground, but there's a fair bit that's been done below ground to stabilise the material and build a solid foundation for what you can see behind us which is an impressive retaining wall and a new road."

"There are 213 anchor poles in the ground here. They're roughly every one metre under that concrete slab and they go up to 30 metres in depth and they're reinforced steel with grout casing. And then we built an almost a half-metre thick slab on top of that, that's got some pretty heavy-duty steel. That gives us the foundation where we can go from there and build the retaining wall and the embankment and finally the road."

The retaining wall is made up of approximately 500 blocks of varying sizes.

"They're made locally," Adon said, "They're from a supplier in Ballina. So, they're all trucked in and placed with an excavator. It's like putting a big jigsaw puzzle together."

CMC is the company that has been given the enormous task of fixing our landslip-affected road network. The team has a lot of local Northern Rivers workers who have been given rock-star treatment by the residents of Nimbin who have been waiting for this moment since February 28 2022.

"The patience from the community has been amazing. It's been an inconvenience for them for a long time and it's just become part of their daily routine, driving through our construction site. Just like today, people have driven past here tooting their horns and waving at us, which is refreshing," Adon said.

"We had a bit of a gathering at the bowls club last week just to celebrate a job well done by the team and an unknown to us the local community got together and made us a cake in the shape of the job site with roadwork figurines and whatnot. They got us up in front of everybody and made some speeches and congratulated us and gave three cheers to CMC, which was quite overwhelming at the time. It's it's something that I've never experienced before. It was just really good to see how much of the community appreciate it."

As you can imagine, there have been many challenges throughout this landslip journey, one being how to keep grout flush out of the environment.

"Each one of those piles, it's full of grout so we had to drill into the ground and then it gets flushed out with the grout. So, there was about 30,000 litres of grout flush a day while we were down here building this wall and just trying to manage that onsite. Obviously, we don't want to be discharging dirty water or grout into the environment. That was probably one of the biggest challenges that we had here."

Member for Lismore Janelle Saffin said the Nimbin Road project was another federal and state government funded project worth $14.9 million.

"You know, there's a lot of landslips in our region and right across the electorate, I think it's over 130 odd in the electorate of Lismore, and eight of them critical. This was one of them. So the residents here, I just want to pay tribute to them, for their absolute patience all the way through. I'm just delighted that it's open for Christmas. I mean, what a great Christmas present."

Mayor Steve Krieg thanked the federal and state government and remembered his first drive to the area to check out the damage.

"I remember driving out here and just seeing half the road swept away down the side of a cliff and I'm thinking, how the hell are we going to fix this? Thank God there are much smarter people in the world than me. And through the great work of CMC and in cooperation with Lismore City Council. I have to give credit to Brendan Logan, our Chief Operating Officer, who has a very daunting task of the reconstruction of our LGA and he chipped away at it every day and we talk regularly and some days are worse than others but today is a good day. On behalf of Lismore City Council and all the staff Merry Christmas to the Nimbin residents and the people that use this road on a daily basis. I'm sure it will be in first-class condition for many, many years to come through the good work of the crew that built it."

The man leading council's flood recovery when it comes to infrastructure Brendan Logan was also a happy man today.

"Extremely happy. We've got tangible outcomes, things on the ground, things people can see, things people can swim in. So, yeah, very happy."

"I was saying to the mayor the other day, I think 2024 is going to be hard, but it won't be as hard as this year because so many of the issues we've had to deal with this year in terms of funding, relationships, getting momentum, that should be one-off problems and we've dealt with them. And so 2024 will be hard, but it shouldn't be as hard as this year, which should see more tangible outcomes on the ground."

(Mayor Steve Krieg, Chief Operating Officer LCC Brendan Logan, Member for Lismore Janelle Saffin, Project Manager Adon Dinsmore and LCC General Manager Jon Gibbons)

What is in store for the first half of 2024?

"We're going to have between 15 and 20 CBD renewal projects finished between the start of next year in June, you're going to have a lot of activity in that buildings restoration space. And for us, that's good timing because by the time you restore those CBD assets, our water programs, our waste programs, and indeed our roads programs will be starting to get momentum. So, we'll have all those CBD restorations done in the first half of the year pretty much and then we'll turn our attention to those bigger assets."

As all levels of government have mentioned before and residents know only too well, the flood recovery journey will be long and we should celebrate the wins, big and small, when we can.