Part of the Great Western Highway will be closed for at least three months <\/a>Part of the Great Western Highway will be closed for at least three months<\/p>\nColeman says the government has committed to updating signage in Lithgow, which initially advised Little Hartley was accessible to \u201cresidents only\u201d.<\/p>\n
Nationals state MP for Bathurst and former deputy premier, Paul Toole, whose electorate includes Victoria Pass, warns just one day more than the three-month timeline would \u201ccause more red-hot anger in the community\u201d.<\/p>\n
Since the closure, children in Hartley and Little Hartley have spent two hours travelling home from school in Mount Victoria, on the other side of Victoria Pass, resident Celine Watz says.<\/p>\n
Before last Sunday, \u201ca normal journey by car down the Victoria Pass [was] 10 minutes at most\u201d.<\/p>\n
Lithgow local Kylie Mackey says the closure will limit her ability to see her children in Sydney. She anticipates more than a three-month wait: \u201cIt\u2019ll be a hell of a lot longer than that.\u201d<\/p>\n
The detour sees traffic diverted on to Lithgow\u2019s main street. \u201cIt\u2019s only been a week, and we\u2019re already starting to see damage on our local roads from the heavy vehicles coming through town,\u201d Mackey says.<\/p>\n
Aitchison says additional resources would go towards strengthening roads taking the additional strain. The diversion will add 25 minutes to a journey, but longer during peak times and weekends, she says.<\/p>\n
Engineers drilled holes into the bridge this week to investigate the cause of the cracks. Photograph: Transport for NSW<\/p>\n
A spokesperson for the local health district acknowledged the impact of the closure on staff, patients and visitors, advising them to \u201cplan their journey, follow diversion signs, and allow extra time\u201d. <\/p>\n
But they say there are no disruptions to the delivery of services at hospitals in Lithgow or the Blue Mountains. \u201cThe highway remains accessible to NSW Ambulance and other emergency vehicles between Lithgow and Little Hartley, up to the closure point.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cAn alternate route is available for emergency services needing to drive through the impacted area.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u2018I\u2019m amazed it\u2019s lasted\u2019<\/p>\n
The state or federal governments have not yet committed to providing financial relief for affected businesses or residents, with the effects potentially reaching far into NSW. Aitchison said on Friday she was working towards a \u201cwhole of government response\u201d.<\/p>\n
She did not directly respond to a question from Guardian Australia about whether the government would reconsider shelving the plan for the tunnel. Aitchison told reporters on Friday that \u201cnothing was off the table\u201d, rejecting the suggestion that the Minns government had underfunded regional roads at the expense of metropolitan transport projects, pointing to hundreds of millions spent on maintenance.<\/p>\n
Toole says the government had committed to \u201cfixing a fragile piece of the road, but there\u2019s still no long-term vision\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou\u2019ve got their federal Labor counterparts talking about a $90bn fast rail from Sydney to Newcastle.\u201d<\/p>\n
There was a scare about the bridge collapsing in the late 1970s. Photograph: Transport for NSW<\/p>\n
\u201cIf it was in Sydney, Newcastle or Wollongong the project would go ahead but it seems that regional communities are forgotten.\u201d<\/p>\n
Coleman says the Coalition\u2019s original plans were \u201cpossible and feasible\u201d.<\/p>\n
While the closure has created local uproar, it isn\u2019t a surprise. David Wilpour, from Lithgow, says there was a scare about the bridge collapsing in the late 1970s. \u201cI\u2019m quite amazed it\u2019s lasted another 47-odd years,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Behzad Fatahi, a professor of civil engineering at the University of Technology Sydney, who uses the bridge often, says it\u2019s \u201cphenomenal\u201d it has lasted without the deck, piles or piers of modern bridges.<\/p>\n
Engineers drilled holes into the bridge this week to investigate the cause of the cracks. Fatahi says they could be due to the movement of the larger, northern retaining wall, or the deterioration of the interior crushed stone originally laid by the convicts.<\/p>\n
\u201cPieces of this, over 200 years, can crush into smaller pieces, water will get in there and wash this material out,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
Fatahi says a medium-term solution would be to inject cement mixed with water into the empty space, shoring up the original structure.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe alternative solution in the longer term will be designing and constructing tunnels to bypass these challenging areas.\u201d<\/p>\n
Until then, residents are adjusting to the longer, diverted route, which coincides with fears of fuel shortages caused by the conflict in the Middle East. Toole says there are already reports of lines of trucks, \u201cburning additional diesel while fuel prices skyrocketing\u201d.<\/p>\n
One resident, who asks to remain anonymous, says the diversion on to her Lithgow street has left her \u201cextremely sleep deprived\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe neighbours have called our street the \u2018New Great Western Highway\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Almost two centuries ago, hundreds of convicts carried out a Sisyphean task in New South Wales\u2019 Blue Mountains.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":538627,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[64,63,44],"class_list":["post-538626","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-australia","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/538626","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=538626"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/538626\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/538627"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=538626"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=538626"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=538626"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"Mitchells](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/Mitchells_Causeway__Mt_Victoria_pass--83c4ae77-75ea-4b9e-9f14-f69645bd383b-1.0.0000000.jpg\")
Mitchells Causeway, Mt Victoria pass<\/p>\n