Cade Lucas
Late night maintenance works along a Werribee street have left local residents up in arms and lacking sleep.
Since early October, workers contracted by Vic Roads have been performing tree maintenance on sugar gums along Geelong Road at any time from 8pm through to 1am.
Long time resident Lisa Markovic said the evening work was unprecedented and came without warning.
“I lived in this house for 13 years and I’ve never ever seen tree maintenance work at night time,” said Ms Markovic, who first found out about the works while watching television.
“I was watching TV in the backroom and I heard what sounded like a chainsaw firing up. I ignored for a few minutes, but eventually went out to explore and saw the trucks and workers and a cherry picker.”
For the next month maintenance crews from infrastructure services provider Ventia would arrive of an evening to prune the trees, cut off branches and then feed them into a woodchipper, with residents unaware of when they would arrive or leave.
After a series of complaints, Vic Roads placed a notification of the works on its website, but Ms Markovic said this was an inadequate way of informing local residents and didn’t lessen the impact it had on their lives.
“It could be 5 minutes for all I care, once you’re woken up by that kind of noise it’s really hard to get back to sleep,“ she said.
“Honestly, for three weeks I slept in my back lounge room on the couch to try and get away from the noise at least a little bit.”
While Ms Markovic lives alone, her neighbour Anna Rebesco has two young children, making the disruption even worse.
“I had a toddler who was woken up each night and my son he missed a couple of days at school because of being kept awake by the noise.”
Ms Rebesco said previous maintenance works had always occurred during the day, but that she’d noticed a difference since responsibility for the trees shifted from council to Vic Roads.
“When council did it they did it during the day and with traffic management,” she said. “These guys didn’t have traffic management that I could see. They had big logs crashing onto the ground and traffic wasn’t stopped that I could see.”
A spokesperson for Ventia said residents were notified of the maintenance works via letterbox drops on September 25 and November 15 and that conducting the work at night was safer and caused less disruption to traffic and residents.
“We appreciate that conducting this essential work may impact some residents and do our best to minimise this, such as restricting the heaviest work to early in the evening and notifying residents ahead of work in their area.”
