WORK has begun to boost drainage at Albury’s Waugh Road cemetery after rain submerged lawn burial plots last year.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
The city council is spending $50,000 to help stop water pooling and masking plaques of the deceased in the graveyard’s lawn area which borders James Fallon High School.
The council’s engineering and works committee chairman Henk van de Ven anticipates the measures will put families of those buried at the cemetery more at ease about the state of the grounds.
“The works currently under way at the Waugh Road cemetery include the installation of surface collection pits and underground drainage as well as some minor surface level adjustments,” Cr van de Ven said.
“The works are included in the current works program to assist in the long-term maintenance of the area and will hopefully address any customer concerns.
“We’re undertaking the works now to ensure minimal disruption to the site and to ensure the new infrastructure is in place before the wet weather arrives
“The budgeted amount for the installation of the drainage is approximately $50,000 and we plan to have the works completed by Easter.”
The council will also install raised concrete blocks to elevate sunken grave plaques in the lawn area.
The work follow families being upset last year to find their relatives’ graves marked by a pool of water instead of a plaque due to rain which failed to drain for weeks.
Wodonga resident Denise Stewart, whose uncle Allan Harold Wilson was buried at the cemetery in 1968, was horrified.
“The whole area is a quagmire and it’s a disgrace,” Mrs Stewart told The Border Mail in September.
“We all accept you die and are buried but to go to a memorial and put flowers there and sink is awful.”
Lavington retiree Jan Mroz, whose Polish immigrant father is buried in the lawn area, this week welcomed the council’s work, recalling his reaction to last year’s inundation.
“I go there and see him every Father’s Day and went to go there and I had runners on and it was coming over my runners,” Mr Mroz said.
“I couldn’t go in there for six to eight weeks, it was that wet, but we had an extremely wet winter.
“Even the bigger graves with headstones, some of them were leaning a bit and had sunk.”
The lawn area includes graves of children who lived for just a few hours and the resting place of Thurgoona’s Private Ernest Grant, who died in the Battle of Long Tan in the Vietnam War in 1966.
