A nice soaking rain for the garden is a disaster when combined with plugged drains, one local couple has learned the hard way.
Anthony and Melissa Nero bought their dream home in the Orchard Grove development several months ago and immediately began landscaping and planting out their back garden with box hedges and other beautiful plants.
Anthony, who has lived and worked in Warwick for the last three decades, loves the house, his garden and the couple’s two fur baby dogs that spend their time in the garden.
“It’s our first brand new house, I did all the work in the garden myself. I put all the plants in, this was three months after three stents were put in my heart,” he told the Town & Country Journal.
But flooding rains, clogged drains have wreaked havoc on their lives and caused the couple to butt heads with the developer over infrastructure in the newest part of the development.
Gold Coast developers MKM Group, under the management of “controversial real estate developer Michael Kljaic”, according to a Courier-Mail story, has been developing the estate in Warwick since 2019.
When a new section of Orchard Grove underwent development earlier this year up the slope from the Nero’s home a disaster was in the making. Despite a retaining wall on their property, and another one above them, all it took was one good rain to wash away their hard-won garden.
“On 12 November we had 25 mm rain, we had water coming down, we had landscaped with topsoil, bark plants…it’s washed the bark away, water was coming through every single gap in the retaining wall. The next day we had more heavy rain, our drains couldn’t take it, water was all around the pool. On the 18th we had more rain and it was even worse.”
The back garden was heavily damaged and “full of debris”.
“Every time I’ve gone to Council I’ve just asked that they fix their side of things,” Mr Nero said. Happily, eventual pressure from council compliance officers on the developer led to a much-delayed clearing last weekend of the clogged drains that caused the flooding.
Whether the cleared drains and retaining walls are adequate to prevent future flooding remains to be seen.
“Crossed fingers,” says Anthony.
