Labor Ministers Jenny Aitchison and Jihad Dib flank Premier Chris Minns in this TTT image and headline.
HOW MANY MORE?’: COOKE DEMANDS URGENT ACTION ON WILLIAM BRADFORD BRIDGE AFTER YET ANOTHER SERIOUS CRASH
Member for Cootamundra, Steph Cooke MP, is once again demanding urgent action from the NSW Government to upgrade or replace the dangerous William Bradford Bridge following yet another serious crash.
At around 5:30pm on Thursday 22 May, emergency services responded to a collision between a fuel tanker and a semi-trailer, which forced the closure of Burley Griffin Way between Wallendbeen and Murrumburrah for several hours.
This brought the region’s traffic to a standstill, placing lives at serious risk as NSW Fire and Rescue began the mammoth task of cleaning up the scene.
“This could have been catastrophic,” Ms Cooke said.
“We are lucky we’re not mourning a tragedy today. But how many more close calls, crashes, and injuries do we need before this government acts?”
The William Bradford Bridge is no stranger to danger. The latest incident follows.
September 2024: A multi-vehicle collision involving three vehicles, including one towing a caravan.
September 2019: A bus crash where 28 people were injured, leaving a 65-year-old woman in critical condition and an eight-year-old boy with serious fractures.
Despite these repeated, serious incidents, the NSW Government has failed to commit to essential safety upgrades, instead burying the bridge in a pool of funding competition with other regional projects.
“The Government has had the structural assessments. They’ve had the accident reports. They’ve had the warnings. Yet still, they fail to act,” Ms Cooke said.
“This is a matter of life and death. How many incidents and injuries will it take before they finally prioritise the safety of our community?”
The bridge, built in the early 1930s, is a critical link on Burley Griffin Way and sees hundreds of heavy vehicles and commuter movements every single day.
Narrow, outdated, and unable to safely accommodate modern traffic volumes, it has become a repeat crash site and a deadly bottleneck in the heart of regional NSW.
Ms Cooke said the Government’s inaction is a betrayal of rural road users.
“Last week we recognised National Road Safety Week, yet here we are again, watching another major crash unfold on a stretch of road that’s long been identified as unsafe. The NSW Government cannot continue to ignore their responsibility.”
“They owe it to every driver, every family, and every first responder to stop delaying and start delivering. This bridge needs to be widened or replaced, and it needs to happen now.”
Ms Cooke is demanding immediate action and will raise the issue directly with the Minister this week when Parliament resumes.
EDITORIAL
I love my town and the villages that make it up and I love the area we all live in. It’s just when something isn’t quite right, we need to speak up. I’ve done that at Times, to the benefit of the masses and to my own detriment, including threats of violence and cowardly correspondence aimed at my family.
At times it has been joyous, and an honour writing the local paper and at other times it has been a burden, a weight I have carried with others but a weight I have mostly had to carry myself until more recently.
I heard an old saying, you can only do your best, and it’s true, you can. Sometimes it’s not good enough even when you try really hard. Other times, people don’t do a thing in life and sail through life landing on their feet.
That’s not really me, never been that lucky. When it comes to the paper you are as good as your last one. Sometimes I’ve been somewhat controversial, other Times informative and also downright gone after governments or groups when they attack the little area I’ve come to live in and love for all these years.
It’s now 11:49pm on Tuesday night and after some sleep and time to reflect it’s time to get writing about last Friday night’s double, B-Double truck crash on the William Bradford Bridge.
Stairway to Heaven just finished playing on YouTube and Lynyrd Skynyrd Free Bird is half way through. Maybe a quarter, it’s a long song.
Is there a hidden meaning? Who Knows.
The emergency workers who must get out to accidents like in many small country towns are regular people. They work in Banks, on Farms, as Electricians and even retirees. Hell, Nic Nadycz ran the Harden War Memorial Pool like clockwork for decades, ran most of the bars like clockwork after 5pm and when he had time, he was on the back of the truck as a longstanding member of the local brigade.
The less time our first responders are out in the cold and wet away from family the better. Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome (PTSD) is real and it impacts our local men and women.
The William Bradford Bridge is a bridge that meets at the bottom of the Burley Griffin Way on the western side of Harden. Coming from the east, it’s fairly easy to see what is ahead when the weather is clear and there isn’t a frustrated driver overtaking coming up the hill at you from the west. From the west the road comes up, around and down allowing little time for decision making when vehicles meet on the bridge.
Last Friday, just as darkness set in, two trucks collided with an empty tanker hitting a metal recycling truck or vice versa. The petrol tanker supposedly swung out in the wet and collided with the front of the Metal Recycling Truck. It ripped a hole in the tanker a small car would have fit in or a Rugby Forward pack. Thankfully it was empty and there wasn’t an explosion involving 5000 litres of Petrol.
I’m not here to blow my own trumpet on this bridge. Far from it. I want others to blow it louder and more vigorously, so the powers that be in Macquarie Street hear. During the 2017 election, it is widely known that I went up against current incumbent Steph Cooke.
Not much was said by the Nationals at this stage about the bridge and I banged on about it and have continued to while the chance has arisen. Cooke however, has since picked up the mantle and run with it. And good on her. She achieved some bollard work improvements but even she would admit more needs to be done. It’s now time to take that further and it may mean a 10,000 person petition to get it done.
The reason being, politicians in Sydney don’t really care what is going on in the bush. I know because I’ve witnessed it first hand. I’ve been a staffer and see how they interact with each other. Cooke although getting a little tired with the load she has had since 2017, is still the person best suited to represent us, but it’s time to add some oompha behind her.
The Local Council of which I’m a member, hasn’t had traffic data they can provide the State Government who owns both the bridge and the road for some time. They haven’t had any for us the Councillors. They put them on roads wherever they deem fit, so this is an easy one and data we can then own also.
STOP PRESS
The Emergency Services Minister is Jihad Dib. Like many pollies, they are given portfolios they know sweet F A Cup about. It’s no different for Jihad, who is a former School Principal.
Minister for Roads Jenny Aitchison ran a tour business in the hospitality sector, before entering parliament so should understand the need for safe regional roads, so why has this bridge not been taken seriously?
The emergency services members on the ground made the following comments and continue to do so. Does Jihad understand? Should do. The information which made it to our story states, that the bridge has been number 1 on the top 10 Hazards list for this area for years. It is far too narrow and needs to be replaced. Several accidents have taken place here in the last several years. One was a bus crash carrying 38 persons, with several seriously injured. Only a matter of time before we have a disaster here with many near misses with thousands of traffic movements per day.
The bridge is also over a main water course which runs into the Murrumbidgee to add to the risk levels.
Well, the Bus driver at the time who careered off the end of the bridge was hung out to dry. How was he meant to prevent a crash like the one that occurred?
Someone is always to blame, it’s human nature.
This week we have put some footage up of cars travelling the road the next day and then aerial drone footage of semi-trailers going into the middle of the bridge to ensure they are well over. Something we would expect with nothing coming, but not ideal driving.
There’s been plenty of views of the footage when travelling to Coota the morning after the crash. At time of print 157,000. 285 Likes and 30 comments.
More than 90 percent of the comments displayed disgust at the type of bridge, and lack of care by the current government but also the cars travelling too close to each other on the wet on the way to sport. An accident waiting to happen?
Around midday we posted the return video which showed how some of those travelling head towards the middle line on the way back to Harden. 234,000 views 331 Likes and 102 comments.
The comments were markedly different in that there were three times as many and provided some historical insight.
Some of the comments said, “This bridge has been the scene of many accidents over the years, I can remember several accidents happening near or on the bridge, going back over forty years and those in power have only applied bandaid solutions to the problem, that bridge sees a lot of traffic and should have been upgraded, widened years ago.”
“I’ve seen cattle trucks, buses, trucks full of oranges, a horse float and a truck full of breakfast cereals all come to grief over the years, either on the bridge or just before it, I remember your dad and me going out and helping the truck driver that came to grief with load of oranges and he told us we could take home as many orange’s as we wanted, I think I was about 15 or 16 years old at the time.”
“I left work out Strathdoin Rd way a bit after 5pm on the day it happened and I’m glad I didn’t leave a few minutes earlier as the crash had just happened. A Hilux was parked on the side of the road with hazards on and I slowed down but then noticed in the drizzling darkness someone waving a safety vest. It was Amelia from Oxton Park who lives in the nearby property, she did a top job helping to avoid what she feared would be a pile up from traffic coming around that blind approach in terrible conditions as the crash had only just happened.
I remember the local firies ear-marked that bridge as an area of most concern years before the bus crash. Then the works on the bridge following it didn’t really gain all that much extra width and that blind approach is a killer .. literally.
When they designed that 80kmh zone they really should have put it back a km or so, so it included the bridge to help highlight the danger zone.
I think the 80kmh zone should have been extended on the Wombat Rd to just past the stock pile or perhaps just at the start of the Kingsvale turnoff as it seems crazy to start the 100kmh zone at the start of the Wombat Rd just as it comes off Burley Griffin Way.
Back Demondrille Rd is 80kmh and having both the railway bridges in that area included in the 80kmh zone would make a lot of sense.”
“I was driving a truck many years ago across the bridge heading towards Wallenbeen. A 4wd coming from the opposite direction didn’t care that I was on the bridge. Next, I heard a noise. I looked in mirror on driver’s side and saw the 4wd mirror on his side hanging. I was glad it wasn’t worse. Too many don’t care if you are on the bridge or not.”
“This bridge has been dangerous for many years, way too narrow. The repairs that were carried out in recent years were purely cosmetic. With the amount of heavy vehicle traffic now travelling on the Burley Griffin Way being B triples and Road train combinations the bridge needs to be widened or replaced.”
“Too many bridges were designed for horse and cart days, not for Modern Traffic Railway bridges around Cootamundra for example.”
We will pick up the crash and how it unfolded on Friday night.
Station Commander Wal Leonow said, “About 5:30pm Marty Lang rang me. Phone coverage on the day was really poor. We didn’t have hardly any phone service. We had phone service, but no signals. So the message that I got from Marty was very scattered.
I couldn’t really understand him. All I heard was trucks and the bridge, so straightaway I knew. Trucks and that bridge.
I sent a group message out to my team to say you get to the station. I called Comms, and called the job in. I took my ute down to the job, down at the scene, and the local police were there and told me that everybody was out and okay.
And then I walked towards the first truck and realised it was a B double fuel tanker with a huge hole in the side of the tank. The driver told me that everything was empty. If it wasn’t empty, he probably would have been dead and we could have had fire and it could have potentially caught alight. Or we had that other element which we’ve always been talking about, what happens if or what happens when that fuel would have leaked into the Creek and alternately, that waterway runs into our Murrrumbidgee River drinking service.
So, that could have been catastrophic, even if no one was killed it could have been an environmental disaster. The amount of livestock that are on that waterway, you know, sheep and cattle and whatever else we’ve got all the way down to there, would have been affected.
So I realised very early that the tanker was empty, and there were no leaks from the first truck. I went to the second truck, which was a recycling B double. The fuel tanks were damaged, but they weren’t leaking. So I called HAZMAT from Wagga. They came over and sucked the tanks out before tow recovery moved the trucks.
We had just enough room to squeeze some traffic through. I had the highway blocked at Wallendbeen and Wombat Road and any traffic that was in between and caught up with it, I dealt with later on.
I had a road sweeper come out, just in case there were any metal fragments or anything on the road. Traffic control just allowed one lane and a time through to clear all that and then as the night progressed and the rain progressed and everybody was wet and cold and tired, we cleaned everything up.”
What Wal describes here could have been so much worse. With 30 years of experience, he knows it and his crew knows it, the Police, Ambos, RFS and HAZMAT crews.
The Harden crew were sent to a Hume Highway incident recently. Wal said, “The bridge is actually starting to get a little bit frustrating. I would like some more statistics on it, like traffic movements. If we could get the Council to at least run a traffic monitoring device or whatever they’re called across it so we do have a bit of evidence to say, “Hey, look, push a little bit harder and say there are X amount of traffic movements on this highway. So many B doubles, so many trucks. The bridge is just not wide enough.”
Fatalities are something that comes with the territory. “We also experienced them, sadly, a while ago here the four B doubles that crashed south of Jugiong, there was a fatality involved, people were trapped. It was probably one of the biggest jobs that I’ve done in my time, and again, and I have stipulated this before, when you have a north or southbound lane of the Hume Highway blocked, everything gets diverted to the Burley Griffin Way. So most of these people don’t know where Harden is, let alone that bridge, and if you’ve got the movements of one lane of the Hume, which is probably 50 times more than the Burley Griffin Way, the risk factor of that multiplies massively.”
There was a three car pile up on the William Bradford recently. Wal said, “We had a three car pile up not long ago, fortunately, no lives were lost. That instance highlights the monetary cost compared to the human cost, which brings us back to the bus driver who in all likelihood saved lives. How the bus from Griffith did not roll over is a miracle.
With the Premier apologising to those using public transport in Sydney for the glitches and the slow roll-out, maybe it’s time to head west, take the Akubra out of its plastic for the trip and get fair dinkum.
Jump in a ute and meet a prime mover on the bridge. Maybe see how you feel if you make it to the other side. If something isn’t done soon enough someone will make it to the other side against their wishes.
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