MORE workers have joined clean up efforts in Belconnen following last month’s freak storm.
Twenty ACT Parks and Conservation service workers are on the ground helping Transport Canberra and City Services’ tree crews clean up debris and speed up the removal of fallen trees.
Belconnen was the hardest hit suburb in the storm on January 3, with strong winds and hail stones damaging homes and crushing cars.
Minister for Transport and City Services Chris Steel expects the clean up to take some time.
“Even with these extra resources, the large number of damaged trees and branches on public land means that the storm clean-up is going to take several months,” Mr Steel said.
Mr Steel said there has been more than 2000 requests for help logged through the ‘Fix My Street’ portal.
Clean-up crews have been working to remove fallen trees and debris from roads, driveways and pathways.
Clean-up efforts will then move to playgrounds, sportsgrounds and parks affected by the storm.
Who can be trusted?
In a world of spin and confusion, there’s never been a more important time to support independent journalism in Canberra.
If you trust our work online and want to enforce the power of independent voices, I invite you to make a small contribution.
Every dollar of support is invested back into our journalism to help keep citynews.com.au strong and free.
Thank you,
Ian Meikle, editor
![Teacher Vanessa Jones has been living in Higgins since 2001, and while she loves the area, she says she is “fed up” with the neglectful ACT government.
The Higgins shops have been completely abandoned, says Vanessa, preventing the opportunity for residents to have a community-centred space to socialise.
They only received bins nine months ago, she says, and requests for a water station and repairs to the bus station have gone unanswered.
“It’s very, very slow,” says Vanessa.
“I asked for the zebra crossing on Fullagar [Crescent] to be repainted, and we had to wait about six or nine months.
“That’s just such a long time… we pay a lot of rates.”
Vanessa says assistance from the government only seems to go to communities with time-rich and assertive communities, leaving places such as Higgins, where the majority of households have both adults working full-time and English may not be the first language of the family, at an automatic disadvantage.
“If you’ve got two people working, paying a mortgage, raising two or three kids, they don’t have the time,” says Vanessa.
Vanessa says the lack of attention quieter places such as Higgins is receiving is starting to look a lot like favouritism.
Read the full article on our website citynews.com.au
#canberra #canberranews](https://citynews.com.au/wp-content/plugins/instagram-feed/img/placeholder.png)
Leave a Reply