The Saint: ABC news report did us no favours

Sewer surcharges into both private and business premises has been a well known and very distressing problem in Lithgow for decades and somewhere recently the ABC must have got a whiff of the issue and decided to do an expose for national news programs at the weekend.

That's fair enough; there's no denying the issue exists.

But, and it's a big but, the manner in which the ABC presented the story gave the impression that all of the valley was a cess pit and that's far from the case.

Worst affected, as it has been for decades with no real attempt at rectification, is the low lying Extension Estate area west of Hassans Walls Road..

Virtually every time there are periods of heavy rain, as we are experiencing again this Summer, the surcharges return through gully traps and toilet bowls.

That's really Third World stuff but Council has always argued the cost of rectification, estimated this week at around $60 million according to the ABC, was beyond it's financial capability.

The Extension Estate was subdivided and developed pre World War I around the time the SAF was being created and obviously infrastructure design was far from an exact science..

Apart from Extension Estate there are other isolated but just as distressing incidents of surcharges in various parts of town but not to the extent indicated by ABC News.

The news story, formulated after ABC Regional called for affected residents to come forward, again painted our city in a bad light.

But there could be a silver lining if the unwanted publicity finally jolts someone in authority into positive action after more than 100 years of long suffering householders.

A milestone for the Catholic parishes of Lithgow, Wang and Portland this weekend when popular Parish Priest Father Gary McKeown conducts his final Mass prior to retirement. Fr Gary has been in the Priesthood for 51 years and has built up quite a following during the last several years at St Patrick's. He is retiring to Mudgee where he has family connections.

THE mid Summer season of Friday night jazz in the park (that's QE park in case you didn't know) resumes tonight (Friday) from six o''clock,.weather permitting. It's hard to imagine a more pleasant way of easing into the weekend so grab a picnic, some bubbly and a rug and chill out. And it's all free thanks to the enthusiasm of local musicians.

AS we continue to rush headlong into a green future there's been setbacks for a key player, the electric vehicle. Sales are still strong but manufacturers are already scaling back their plans and, in a major development, the world's biggest car rental company, Hertz, is to cull a third of its fleet of EVs. That's about 20,000 in the USA alone. They'll go back to the future, being replaced by conventional vehicles. Media reports this week said manufacturers had '..largely exhausted the pool of early adopters keen to take on new technology' and those, no doubt, genuinely wanting to save the planet.. In a further twist a report this week comparing a conventional and electric BMW on a test run to Melbourne found the EV took two hours longer and cost more than the petrol version. Re-charging and re-charging tariffs were the killers. EV owners love ém but, it seems, not on the long haul.

ON a related subject the clean air police would earn credits with a crackdown on diesel fumes, surely the most obnoxious odour in our urban and open road atmosphere. Poorly tuned tradie type utes seem to be the worst offenders. (That's because semi trailers have loft exhaust stacks that boost the pollution to a higher plane). Probably difficult to implement or police but the EPA has had an occasional crackdown in the past, focussing on Old Smokey.