July 13, 2012
Australia

Silverton residents want bypass road for wind farm

Margaret Paul | ABC News | www.abc.net.au 13 July 2012

Energy company AGL says it will consider building a bypass road to ease traffic concerns about its proposed wind farm at Silverton, in far west NSW.

The project’s community consultative committee met for the first time last night, and traffic management was high on the list of concerns.

AGL’s general manager of power development, Scott Thomas, said the company will look at building a road connecting the wind farm with the Barrier Highway to Adelaide.

“To get the feedback from the community that there is that potential to look at sort of bypassing some of those key roads, is certainly something that we’ll go out there and do some further work to better understand if that is a viable option,” he said.

He said the wind farm’s project manager will be out having a look at a site for the road today.

“We need to understand who owns the land, and we’ll continue to work it out from there,” he said.

Silverton resident, John Taplin, said a bypass road would ease his concerns about trucks blocking Silverton’s only access road to Broken Hill.

“Hopefully that’d get all the heavy loads off the Silverton road, straight in and just cross over the Silverton Road, so therefore you wouldn’t get much congestion at all,” he said.

Peter Price lives in Silverton and owns the Silverton Hotel.

He said he’s concerned about traffic congestion, and hopes the company goes ahead with a bypass road.

“It does open up another route into Silverton or the Silverton road, it gets all the traffic off the Silverton road,” he said.

“At the moment there would only be that one crossover at the grid onto the daydream mine.

URL to article:  https://www.wind-watch.org/news/2012/07/13/silverton-residents-want-bypass-road-for-wind-farm/