Combating rising waters - Waratah Flood posts

The problem

Chris Bullmore has been a fencing contactor for 25 years located around the Queanbeyan area in Southern NSW. Chris has been an integral part of the Wandiyali-Environa wildlife sanctuary, helping to erect the 10km fox and cat proof fence enclosing the 1000-acre property. However, the fence line ran through two creek gaps, one that was 30m across and another that was 25m across. Due to the sensitive nature of the enclosure, these needed to be fenced securely.

With the recent rain events, these creek systems were prone to flooding and within the last two (2) years there has been at least 6 of these major weather events that would have caused significant damage to the fence line.

Chris decided that the project needed something to would be permanent whilst also allowing the fence to remain intact even after floodwaters have come through.

The solution

Chris had seen Waratah flood posts in the market and considers himself a true Waratah products supporter. He discussed the creek crossing with his local store and his local Waratah Representative, who further discussed the Waratah flood post and how they could help prevent these fences from being destroyed during these flood events.

Over the creek crossings Chris installed an Ezypipe^® strainer on each side of the creek, he then ran a wire cable from one Ezypipe strainer to the other. Once he had rolled out netting across the creek run, he put several Waratah floods posts along these creek systems.

This design meant that as flood waters rose, the posts pushed the entirety of the netting up, allowing logs and other debris to pass under the netting, therefore there was less impact by a flood event.

After such weather events the flood posts are easily put back into the ground by simply securing the bottom spigot into the creek bed and then the fence is back up and running.

Chris explained that this has saved the project a massive amount of money, “Without the flood posts the netting would have been destroyed. To replace that portion of the fence would be roughly about $2,000 per creek crossing. With the number of events, we have had over the last couple of years, the costs would have added up to about $24,000 in the last two years alone. And this doesn’t account for the time it takes to go back and mend these crossings.”

Chris also recommends anyone thinking about using something like this should seriously consider using Waratah fencing products, “When fencing the right product can be the difference between wasting money and time, if you choose Waratah, you can save yourself a lot of trouble & time in the long run.”