A Lithgow City Council tipper truck recently fell into a hole on Gay Street revealing a timely issue before it was too late.
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The eight tonne vehicle cracked a concrete slab, which was in poor condition, situated over a canal during a process to remove a grass median strip on the road.
Council operations director Iain Stewart said it was fortunate the incident occurred before Gay Street and the two neighbouring laneways were scheduled to be resealed.
“When we did further excavation works we discovered that the slab was in fairly poor condition and we’ve had to replace about forty metres of it,” he said.
“There’s a lot of heavy vehicles using that particular section of road, the median strip really wasn’t really providing any advantages so prior to resealing it we decided to remove the median strip.”
“[The concrete slab has] been there for years and years and we’ve never had any problems with it until this latest episode.”
The back wheels of the truck were dangling in the void for a period of time but the vehicle was easily retrieved with the help of a backhoe on site.
The concrete slab was being replaced on Thursday with an additional cost of around $8000, following which council workers will be able to resume the original resealing process.