Dereel

The VCAT hearing regarding our NBN tower went ahead on April the 24th at the Ballarat Magistrates' Court. It was scheduled to only go for the morning but due to Wendy taking far longer to present her case (and starting the day with some theatrics about there being too many mobile phones in the room) it ended up running the entire day finishing up at around 16:30 in the afternoon. The good news however is that the entire case was heard and all that remains now is for the chairman to visit the site of our tower and then to deliberate on what was said at the hearing.

Of course Wendy did herself no favours constantly harping on about electromagnetic radiation when the chairman made it 100% clear to her at the beginning of the day that that topic is completely irrelevant to his decision making. The expert witnesses put forward their points very well with one of them stating that the location of the Dereel tower is "one of the best locations for a telecommunications tower" he has ever seen and would consider it to be the perfect example for NBN and other councils to use when looking for further locations in the future.

The chairman said that he should publish his decision within 6 weeks stating that he does have a heavy workload at the moment (not made any lesser with 5 of these telecommunication tower planning applications just in this week) so there is a small possibility it could take a little longer than 6 weeks but he felt that unlikely.

In my opinion based on all the evidence that I heard I see absolutely no reason for the chairman to override the councils approval and instead he will reaffirm the planning application approval.

After almost 3 years it's time for a change. Wordpress has been an okay framework for this site but in recent times it has been attracting larger and larger numbers of comment spammers and hack attempts. Most recently websites running Wordpress have been put under enormous strain as hackers attempt to brute force login details. It has simply become too much work to maintain a Wordpress site with these constant attacks. So now we're moving to something more modern.

All the content for the Dereel community website is now hosted on Github and is compiled and deployed by a program called {:awestruct}. You can find out more details on the source code page.

I have migrated all the old posts, images and other content over to this new system. I have not yet migrated over the comments (I am still deciding how best to do it). I have done my best to ensure that URLs remain consistent between the old Wordpress and new layout but if you find any 404's please let me know (comment on this news post).

If you find a bug in the website please lodge it as an issue against the Github project.

Here is the latest edition of the Dereel Fire Community Newsletter:

DereelFireCommunityNewsletter_Edition 5

I'm sure everyone is getting tired of this topic but just a reminder to people that the VCAT hearing in regard to our NBN tower is scheduled for the 24th of April at 10am in Ballarat, that's less than 10 days away. I have heard some rumours being spread that the complaint had been withdrawn but I just rang VCAT and they have assured me that no such withdrawal is showing on their system and that the hearing is still going ahead as planned. I will definitely be attending the hearing.

All residents seeking information about the fire yesterday should make their way to the Dereel Community Hall at 11am today, Thursday 28th of March.