Latest news with #sinkholes
The Guardian
12-07-2025
- General
- The Guardian
‘The whole back of my HiLux was covered in rats': what to do about Sydney's growing vermin problem?
Nathaly Haeren has seen patios in Sydney collapse because brown rats have tunnelled under and created sinkholes. She's been electrocuted in the roof of a house after they chewed through air conditioning wiring. She's even visited a hairdresser where they'd gnawed a circle through double brick. More recently, Haeren has started seeing rats standing in the street in the middle of the day, 'oblivious' and unbothered – like they just don't care. 'It's the destruction they cause that blows my mind, that scares me, because I'm competing against them,' the owner of Pesty Girls pest management says. 'Rats need to keep gnawing to keep their teeth down. Their strength is like iron. And they can flatten to the size of your thumb – they've got hinged ribs … I need to be 10 steps ahead.' Haeren says rats have become a problem 'all across Sydney'. And her requests have spiked to record levels since the pandemic. Anecdotally, numbers are high. A string of viral videos showing rat incursions into typically human spaces in recent months has instilled terror into the hearts of some Sydneysiders. In December, rodents made headlines when 'giant rats' were filmed 'brazenly' scurrying around the Westfield food court in Parramatta. A month later, at least half a dozen rats were filmed running wild in the kitchen of a late-night kebab shop on Oxford Street, deterring some from the business. But nobody really knows how many rats live in Sydney. There's no rat census and given that a rat's pregnancy lasts just three weeks and can produce a litter of more than a dozen pups, any population count is at risk of becoming quickly outdated. Haeren attributes their visible spread across the city to construction pushing them above ground and changing bin cycles allowing residential waste to sit for longer periods. New research suggests invasive rats are becoming increasingly resistant to poisons, posing challenges for councils and pest controllers. The study's author, Edith Cowan University PhD candidate Alicia Gorbould, says the finding should be a warning sign. 'Australia has been using these poisons for more than 50 years in an unchecked way, with few restrictions,' she says. 'Many countries are putting restrictions on regular pesticides, but if we continue as we are, we can also feed into that cycle of resistance. 'We need a more coordinated approach to rodent management, and that's not happening.' In 2019, the city of Sydney reported an increase in the vermin population that the council said had been encouraged by 'unprecedented' levels of construction. Sydney's first outbreak of leptospirosis, which is spread through rodent urine and killed seven dogs, was linked to the 2019 explosion in the rat population. The disease can also be fatal in humans. Rats have been associated with dozens of human diseases and parasites around the world, including indirectly spreading Lyme disease, plagues and typhus through fleas. Over the past 10 centuries, rat-borne diseases may have taken more lives than all of the wars ever fought. Since the 2019 outbreak, leptospirosis has popped up in urban areas around Sydney, the Australian Small Animal Veterinarians president, Julia Crawford, says. She and the founder of Southern Cross Vet, Sam Kovac, argue more research and surveillance are needed in order to prevent further outbreaks of the disease and deaths of beloved dogs. The harm rats can pose goes beyond our family pets. A city of Sydney spokesperson says the greatest health and safety risks posed by rats are disease transmission, food contamination via their droppings, urine and hair, and structural damage. The spokesperson says recent sightings and complaints also suggest rodents are a 'key concern' for residents in social housing estates, who shared communal bin rooms. The council spends about $240,000 a year on pest control. Alongside rat baits, it operates a 'risk-based rodent control program' on streets and at parks, manned by more than 100 staff and contractors with the assistance of 40 electronic multi-catch units in locations where rodent activity is high. The baits are rotated on a quarterly basis to prevent rats becoming resistant to their active ingredients. During severe infestations, licensed pest control contractors also carry out targeted burrow baiting. Across the state, councils and private operators are responding to concerns about increased rat populations with a mixture of methods. Shaun Bankowski has operated his pest control business, MOA Contract Shooting, throughout New South Wales since 2015. He says he has never been in higher demand to deal with rat outbreaks – from shopping centres to food manufacturing sites, chicken farms and warehouses. 'We've had sites where we've shot over 650 rats in four hours,' he says. 'The whole back of my HiLux was covered in rats – 15cm deep.' Most services use the integrated pest management method, which first eliminates the reasons why rats are drawn to the site, like clutter and food sources, then lays down traps and baits. But Bankowski says that's no longer sufficient. 'Say you've got 100 rats – 80% of them will die from the poison and the traps, but then you'll have that 20% that are immune,' he says. 'They breed up and then you've got a colony that's immune to poisons. 'I come in, get rid of as much as you can with a shoot and then drop poison on them. That usually knocks them out.' If it sounds grisly, he says, the rats die as humanely as possible. 'I can hit a 50c piece at about 120 metres,' he says. 'We always make sure that we got a clean shot, in the head or in the chest.' Urban rat numbers around the world are increasing due to climate change, urbanisation and growing human populations, forcing cities to grapple with whether to continue to fight the war on rats or concede defeat. In New York, the city's first 'rat tsar' was hired by the mayor in 2023, following a competitive application process that called for 'bloodthirsty' applicants who possessed 'killer instincts'. Not all cities have approached the issue with such murderous intent. In Paris, where there are estimated to be more rodents than people, the city authorities have transitioned from battling rats to investigating ways to peacefully coexist with them. 'No one should aim to exterminate Paris's rats and they're useful in maintaining the sewers,' the deputy mayor Anne-Claire Boux said in the lead-up to the 2024 Paris Olympics. 'The point is that they should stay in the sewers.' Research published in Urban Ecology in 2022 found rat management may be a 'wicked problem for which there is no overarching solution'. Rather than engaging in a 'war on rats', it said the focus should instead be on 'improving the overall health of the community, instead of on eliminating rats'. The study found in all major rat interventions, populations had either remained at consistent levels, or reduced dramatically and then bounced back. It also noted that they didn't just spread illnesses, but something more existential. The presence of rats, the report said, added 'anxiety and fear into the tapestry of issues that people face daily'. The black rat (Rattus rattus) and the brown or Norway rat (Rattus norvegicus) arrived in Australia with the First Fleet in the late 1700s and their numbers quickly exploded, taking to Australia's shores so naturally that some settlers thought they'd always been here. But while the invasive species would spread disease, damage buildings and agriculture, pillage bird nests and disrupt the environment, more than 60 native species of rat had already lived in Australia for up to 4m years, causing little to no harm at all. The most common native species in cities is the bush rat, a shy rodent that was the unintended victim of a campaign to exterminate black rats during a plague epidemic in the early 1900s that killed about 500 people in Australia, mostly in Sydney. Peter Banks, a conservation biology professor at the University of Sydney, says native rats could now be Australia's secret weapon against invasive species. He's among academics that have been running programs to reintroduce bush rats to areas around the Sydney harbour they once inhabited, to block reinvasion by black rats. Bush rats may look similar to invasive species but they don't cause disease. They don't smell. They live largely separate lives to humans, hidden in burrows during the day and opting for a diet of seeds, fruit and nectar instead of our trash. 'Once we removed [black rats], the bush rats would fill the area, and really dramatically reduce the black rat population,' Banks says. 'They're quite symmetrical competitors – but the black rat really doesn't like a fight. They occupy the empty spaces in the natural world and if there's something there to give them a hard time, they don't thrive. 'They're really used to living off us, so by restoring the bush, we can make it unfriendly for [invasive] rats.' However, he says, 'there's an argument to be had that the urban environment is their natural environment. We think about them as pests, and they can be pests for us, but we don't go trying to wipe out other species in their natural habitats.' For now, at least, the rats are home too – and they're here to stay.
The Guardian
28-06-2025
- Business
- The Guardian
Could the M6 be Sydney's unbuildable motorway due to sinkholes and a reverse fault?
A 245-metre section of a new Sydney motorway tunnel plagued by sinkholes and a 'challenging' geological feature will bring a $3.1bn transport project to a grinding halt unless an eleventh-hour deal is reached. The M6's new twin 4km tunnels, connecting Sydney's south to the wider motorway network, were approved in 2019 and scheduled to open in 2025. That date was pushed back to 2028 after two large sinkholes opened above the tunnel and below an industrial estate in Rockdale in March 2024. But even that extended timeline is now in doubt after the consortium charged with the tunnels' construction between Kogarah and Arncliffe has said it will down tools from 30 June after the discovery of a 'high-angle reverse fault' in the bedrock close to the sinkholes. In an email to staff published by the Sydney Morning Herald in May, David Jackson, the director of the first stage of the M6 project – a joint venture of CPB, Ghella and UGL, known collectively as CGU – said CGU was pulling out. Jackson stated the design and construct contract had become 'frustrated' and was 'terminated by operation of the law'. He wrote that the tunnel 'excavation … has been on hold for almost a year now due to the impact of unique adverse ground conditions caused by a complex faulting zone, including a high-angle reverse fault (never seen before in the Sydney basin)'. 'The presence of such ground conditions could not have been anticipated by anyone,' he said, adding that they were only discovered once tunnel excavation was carried out. 'It is now apparent that a compliant design solution cannot be achieved to overcome these challenging ground conditions.' The government was made aware of CGU's intention to walk away before the email was sent to staff, a Transport for NSW (TfNSW) spokesperson told Guardian Australia. The project is otherwise 90% completed. Above-ground work by CGU in Kogarah may continue and could be completed by the end of the year. The New South Wales premier, Chris Minns, has criticised the unilateral move, claiming that the contractor remains responsible for designing and building the tunnels. 'My best advice to the contractor today is to send the lawyers home and bring back the engineers,' he told reporters in May. 'I'm not going to allow NSW taxpayers to be put over a barrel for these big projects.' Sign up for Guardian Australia's breaking news email A TfNSW spokesperson says the department remains 'optimistic' about reaching an agreement with CGU. They previously said the government was working with the contractor 'to identify a technical solution to the issues encountered' on the project and claimed the consortium had not demonstrated it had exhausted all technical options to move forward with the works. 'It is unfortunate CGU now appears to have determined it is in their commercial interest to down tools instead. We're considering Transport's position in relation to the contract given the unilateral steps taken by CGU,' TfNSW said. As part of the tender process for the major project, potential contractors were given geotechnical reports of the ground where the works would be carried out, TfNSW says. It was unable to provide geotechnical reports from any stage of the project to Guardian Australia. CPB, as lead contractor for CGU, says it cannot comment further. Grahame Campbell, an engineer who project managed the M4 – which was finished in half the forecast time and budget – has written a paper for the Centre for Independent Studies about 'bungles' that lead to cost and time blowouts on major infrastructure projects in Australia. He is confident the M6 will be completed eventually, but believes it will be over budget – like other major projects including Sydney's metro and light rail builds and Melbourne's North East Link. 'Of course it can be finished and it's a matter of doing it correctly and doing it with the right team,' he says. Speaking generally, Campbell says blowouts have not always been so common. They can be caused by various factors, including contractors starting construction before finishing designs, changes to designs, governments handing responsibility for risks to contractors, and a lack of expertise within government or at the contractor level. 'A contractor is pretty good at throwing concrete in the ground and putting pitching on the soil,' he says. Sign up to Breaking News Australia Get the most important news as it breaks after newsletter promotion 'But they're [sometimes] not particularly good at project management. Keep your mind open and understand the broadest issues and deal with them. Unfortunately, those concepts aren't very big in government … at the moment and they get into these messes. 'You would think that having lost billions of dollars over decades, [governments] would have learned by now – but unfortunately it doesn't seem like they have.' Setting up and decommissioning work sites is expensive but it's not unusual for contractors to change midway through builds, Campbell says. Stakeholders should learn from previous large projects, he argues. 'Thousands of projects have been built in the Sydney basin. You know, you could go back and see how they were managed.' Soil or geological abnormalities should ideally be discovered before works begin. Water management – which can lead to sinkholes – is 'always the biggest problem' in major projects, Campbell says. Prof Behzad Fatahi, a professor of civil engineering at the University of Technology Sydney, says the city is home to fault zones, most of which are classified as 'normal'. 'Reverse faults', where a layer of rock is forced upwards and over another layer, are less common and hard to detect because the fault angle is often very steep. Boreholes drilled into the ground five to 10 metres apart may miss a reverse fault, the professor says. Fatahi says survey techniques, including seismic surveys, are not 'bulletproof … There is always a chance of missing things.' The danger of building a tunnel at the site of a rock fault stems from potential movement at the fault zone. While Sydney is not a highly seismic area, even a tiny amount of rock movement could compromise a tunnel, he says. A novel way to protect underground pipelines from land movements involves cushioning pipes with foam, his research has shown. Solutions to prevent sinkholes include grouting, tunnel lining and freezing the ground before excavating. All civil geotech designs come with some unknowns, he says. 'There is no zero-risk … but this doesn't mean that there will be big surprises'. The two sinkholes that opened up above the M6 tunnel were not a normal risk associated with digging, Dr Francois Guillard says. The senior lecturer in the school of civil engineering at the University of Sydney says sinkholes can happen anywhere water penetrates the ground, although karstic regions – often made of soluble limestone – are typically more prone to sinkholes. Sydney is not especially prone to the phenomenon, given its mainly sandstone geology, Guillard says. For a sinkhole to develop, material under the ground's surface needs to be removed, usually by water erosion or chemical decomposition. In urban areas, disturbance of usual water drainage patterns can lead to sinkhole formation under the surface of tarmac. He agrees that investigations of soil and geology from the surface are 'not perfect'. Guillard says human-made sinkholes, triggered by engineering or building works, are 'rare' – as are urban sinkholes generally. 'I would not recommend people be worried, it's low risk,' he says.
Yahoo
22-06-2025
- Automotive
- Yahoo
I-80 fully reopens through New Jersey after sinkhole repairs
Interstate 80 has fully reopened through New Jersey after months of repairs and delays due to sinkholes. The sinkhole problem began in December 2024, at first leading to a brief fix before more holes opened and authorities shut down I-80 eastbound entirely in February. 'I am thrilled to see all lanes of I-80 open safely this weekend so we can ensure that New Jerseyans can get to where they need to go efficiently and safely,' Gov. Phil Murphy said Thursday in a statement. I-80 eastbound reopened in full on Saturday. The westbound lanes reopened June 14. The extensive delays, beginning in February, created a nightmare route for anyone traveling through Wharton and for residents of the town about 30 miles west of Central Park. When the project began, officials said the delays would continue indefinitely. But in April, a timeline was set to complete the construction by mid-June. 'I want to thank the thousands of New Jerseyans who have been impacted by these sinkholes for their patience as we worked to secure this roadway,' Murphy said in his statement. The sinkholes were caused by an abandoned mine under the road — one of 600 such mines throughout New Jersey. When the first sinkhole opened in December, crews tried to patch up the single gap and reopen the highway, only to find more and larger holes opening two months later, forcing the larger operation.
CBS News
20-06-2025
- Automotive
- CBS News
I-80 in Wharton, N.J. set to fully reopen Saturday after one more night of closures
I-80 in Wharton, New Jersey is set to fully reopen Saturday, but it can only happen after one more night of closures. All three eastbound lanes are expected to reopen in Wharton Saturday morning. It's four days ahead of schedule. But in order to restore all the eastbound lanes, there will be a full closure Friday night so the road can be paved, and traffic stripes added. The eastbound lanes will be entirely closed at Exit 34/Wharton/Dover/Sparta from 9 p.m. Friday until 9 a.m. Saturday. The following detour will be in effect. Motorists on I-80 eastbound are being directed to take Exit 34 to Route 15/Wharton/Dover/Sparta At the end of the ramp, stay right following signs for Route 15/Jefferson/Dover/Sparta/Picatinny Arsenal Stay in the right lane on North Main Street following signs for Route 15 North/Jefferson/Sparta Bear right toward Route 15 northbound/Picatinny Arsenal At the traffic signal, merge onto Route 15 northbound Stay left, following signs for Pondview Drive/U and Left Turns Using both lanes, make a U-turn at the Pondview Drive traffic signal and merge onto Route 15 southbound Stay left to take the exit to I-80 eastbound All westbound lanes reopened last week. The major highway has been partially shut down to repair a series of sinkholes that started appearing last December and kept developing. "I am thrilled to see all lanes of I-80 open safely this weekend so we can ensure that New Jerseyans can get to where they need to go efficiently and safely" Gov. Phil Murphy said. "Importantly, I want to thank the thousands of New Jerseyans who have been impacted by these sinkholes for their patience as we worked to secure this roadway. I also want to thank NJDOT Commissioner Fran O'Connor, the NJDOT crews, and the New Jersey State Police who have worked around the clock to open this highway safely." "With the reopening of all lanes on I-80 eastbound this Saturday, full mobility will be restored on I-80 in both directions ahead of schedule," O'Connor said. O'Connor said the repairs "are permanent," and that he believes I-80 is now "stronger and safer than it was before the first sinkhole developed. The engineering and magnitude of work that went into stabilizing and strengthening this road for decades to come is truly remarkable."
BBC News
05-06-2025
- Business
- BBC News
Business 'left in the dark' over sinkhole repairs
Council officials are to be questioned about plans to fix sinkholes that swallowed a large part of a Surrey road, as a local business claimed people were not being given timely public meeting organised by Tandridge District Council and Surrey County Council Highways aims to detail when Godstone High Street will be repaired after sinkholes – one 20 metres in length – appeared in February. It comes as one affected business owner told the BBC he feels "left in the dark" about what is being done to fix the partially collapsed road. "This continues to be a highly complex incident," said Matt Furniss, cabinet member for highways, transport and economic growth at Surrey County Council. He added that "thorough investigations" were needed to understand what caused the collapse and repair it fully and effectively. "We hope to have the road re-opened during December this year, but our focus will be on ensuring the road is safe to use so the exact date will be confirmed once we are fully assured of this," Mr Furniss added. 'Minimise the impact' Shane Fry, who runs the DD Services garage on the high street, told the BBC ahead of the meeting that his business had had to adapt to "stay afloat". He urged authorities to offer a clear timetable about when road repairs will be finished at the meeting."They said they would keep us up to date, but this hasn't happened," Mr Fry said, adding that he felt "left in the dark". "We need to know. It will benefit everyone in the area," he County Council said it was continuing to update local residents and businesses as it progressed through each stage of the process. "We're also looking at how we can minimise the impact on local businesses while the necessary road closures are in place," said Mr Furniss. Councillor Catherine Sayer, leader of Tandridge District Council, said local authorities wanted to get "all the information out there as soon as it is available". She told the BBC: "We obviously know it has been an awful time for people. But, as far as I can see, things are moving as fast as they can."She said she believes the meeting will tell the public what they want to know about how road repairs are progressing and offer a timeline."The key thing is to get everything back to normal as quickly as possible," she said. "Businesses need business as usual."
