Firefighters have again taken aim at the contentious wire rope barriers on the Calder Highway, with a Country Fire Authority captain suggesting it was “only a matter of time before someone gets hurt or killed”.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
A spot fire on the Calder Highway near Castlemaine on Sunday escalated from a one square metre patch to a two-hectare grass fire because CFA crews could not access the area quickly enough, incident controller Andy Chapman said.
“Today was a benign day. Had it been a bad day that fire would have absolutely ripped through,” the Elphinstone fire brigade captain said.
“It’s just a mess.”
The lack of gaps in the flexible wire rope barriers, which are being installed on 20 high-risk roads in Victoria, was a concern for Mr Chapman.
“It allowed the fire to get away,” he said.
The restrictive nature of the barriers left CFA trucks and members precariously placed on the highway, often blanketed in thick smoke.
“One of our members was nearly smashed by a semi-trailer today,” Mr Chapman said.
“We’re trying to fight a fire in very dense smoke with traffic going through. It’s only a matter of time before someone gets hurt or killed.”
It’s not the first issue Mr Chapman’s brigade has encountered with the barriers during the fire season.
“Nearly every job we have a traffic issue,” he said, adding the highway had to be closed in both directions between Harcourt and Elphinstone.
The wire rope barriers, supported by steel posts, are designed to avoid head-on and run-off crashes.
Mr Chapman suggested VicRoads remove the inside wire barriers and place just one barrier down the centre median strip.
The new barriers have also been criticised by motorcyclists, who fear the rope acts as a “cheese shredder”.
But Victorian roads and road safety minister Luke Donnellan, when visiting an installation site on the Calder Highway at Ravenswood South last month, dismissed safety concerns as “conspiracy theories”.