For months, residents of Lane Cove have borne the brunt of damaged property, dangerous footpaths, constant flooding of ‘stench water’ all at the hands of third-party contractors who are protected under federal law and therefore, answer to nobody. This is after having to live with noisy drilling work undertaken through the night to install cabling for data centres.
The primary culprit is QC Communications, dubbed the cabling cowboys.
As early as December last year, locals were experiencing constant issues with the telecommunications service provider as they installed cabling for a Data Centre located in Lane Cove West Business Estate.
XenithIG subcontracted QC Communications to install cables in the Lane Cove Council area.
The work was described as low-impact and was expected to be completed by mid-July this year. Although construction did not continue past this point, mass damage to public and private property remains with residents fearing the return of these cowboys to finish the job.
So, if this much damage was inflicted, leaving so many outraged, why didn’t local authorities stop it, or better yet, prevent it from happening in the first place? The answer lies within powers embedded in the Telecommunications Act 1994 tied to a construction notice given to Lane Cove Council from Xenith IG.
Why hands were tied and cables laid
On 30 June 2023, Lane Cove Council received a notice of construction from Telecommunications service provider XenithIG, notifying them of the installation of cabling for Data Centres and Dark Fibre – this is essentially fibre optic cables with no service or traffic running on them and not lit by a light signal.
The original notification displayed plans for construction works on Burns Bay Rd, Penrose St, Wood St, and Mars Rd.
Although the construction area was vast and planned to be ongoing for a year, it was described as low-impact. Due to federal legislation embedded under Schedule 3 of the Telecommunications Act 1994, telecommunication carriers, such as XenithIG, do not need to lodge development applications or comply with planning laws if their purpose is to maintain any kind of telecommunications facility.
This is called the carriers’ powers, created to permit the construction and maintenance of telecommunications networks in a nationally consistent way.
Now, legally, these companies are obliged to disclose to the landowners, in this case Lane Cove Council, that they will be carrying out works. The council can object to the construction notice. However, objections must relate to a specific set of matters outlined by the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman (TIO), which will lead to conciliation attempts to amend the concerns. And if no conclusion can be met? The company can engage in the activity anyway.
Admittedly, the nature of the work did seem inconvenient, but it was described as necessary. And without the presence of hindsight, it was impossible to predict the severity of the damage Xenith IG’s third-party contractors would cause, and so, no objections were made.
It was in December when concerns began to manifest among neighbours and the QC Communications impact drilled deep.
Chaos in the suburbs
Construction works were set to begin in the middle of July last year. ITC’s first indication from residents started around December on Garling St with Jennifer Gordon first airing her concerns about constant water flow from a verge outside their house, since last year.
“They drilled away there for what seemed like forever, but maybe two or three weeks, we think, we just can’t quite remember that. And it was just a complete mess. And we didn’t complain, because the job had to be done, apparently,” Mrs Gordon’s husband, Dave explained.
“When my wife spoke to them, apparently they were very grumpy and, you know, they didn’t have any interest in really solving it, it seemed to her.”
The Gordons received a construction notification from QC Comms in early September with works expected to finish later that month. However, due to negligent work, the contractors were forced to return multiple times to fix an installation which would repeatedly fill up with water, causing brown liquid to spill out of the ground, killing the surrounding grass, and constantly running off the verge and down the street
When ITC originally visited the site in July, the only effort to rectify the damage was an orange barrier erected around the mess a few days prior, complimented by an equally fluorescent traffic cone. Three months later, upon another visit, the site remained the same, seemingly untouched.
Unfortunately, this was not an isolated incident. Just a ten-minute drive away, chaos ensued again at St Vincents Rd. Work began there around January, with residents complaining about damaged footpaths, destroyed lawns and property, and foul-smelling water.
“They parked all the trucks in our street. And then they’d go until the next morning or they’d leave about four or five o’clock in the morning. Sleeping tablets and earplugs did not help, but they didn’t care,” one resident shared with ITC. They also said their fence was damaged and only reluctantly fixed by QC Comms once Council was alerted.
A pattern was starting to form with each new location somehow trumping the previous with unsightly damage. One could be forgiven for misidentifying an orange barricade taking up the whole area of a verge right outside a residence on Bridge St as a literal pigsty.A gas main was damaged and erupted causing an extensive gas leak just down the road from Lane Cove West Public School due to mismapping between QC Comms, Jemena and Interconnect.
“The gas was shooting up so high the trees above were rattling. The gas specialist who turned up was a teenager,” one neighbour recollected.
Trouve St resident Pete Evans says he will be 70 – 80 thousand dollars out of pocket after the structure of his garage was compromised by flooding.
“They completely devastated our front lawn, just left mud and dirt and dug up all the grass. They also drilled through the stormwater drain, which is just behind us over here, which caused it to collapse,” Pete said.
“In early April, we had big storms, and we ended up getting massive flooding in our property… completely destroyed everything that was in the garage and destroyed the structure of the garage itself.”
The blocked water drain, caused by QC Comms, diverted the water from the heavy rain into Pete’s residence, destroying his garage and backyard. When asked if this was simply the result of the high rainfall in April experienced all around Sydney, he reassured ITC, that this was unprecedented.
“This house was built in 1925, we’ve been here since the 70s. This house has been here for 100 years. We’ve had plenty of storms. We’ve never had any flooding like that.”
But perhaps the most consistently damaged area is on Burns Bay Rd, spanning about a kilometre from Fig Tree Bridge up to the intersection at Waterview Rd.
Orange barricades, traffic cones, dirt mounds and cracked and uneven sidewalks can be found in different parts of this strip. Kevin Phillips, who owns a property along the road has been extremely vocal about not only the safety concerns involved with the damaged footpath right next to a busy road but also the destruction of his private property.
“This is my private land here, which was nicely grassed. I told them it was private property, explained where the boundary was. They just ignored it,” Kevin told ITC, as he pointed to his once neatly kept lawn, now transformed into a mud pit.
“I’ve been trying for five months now to get the council to come and fix this, so I can drive over the driveway, and people can walk through here without falling over.”
Further to this, the NBN in the area was out for six weeks after a worker cut through a broadband cable. Similarly, Optus confirmed with ITC that their underground network was damaged and subsequently caused mobile service disruptions on 4 June, before being restored a day later. However, they refused to reveal what contractor was at fault.
A few doors down, neighbour Peter Ryan also shared his dismay with the cowboy contractors, describing loud rock breakers active till the very early hours matched with some aggressive encounters with workers.
“One night I came out here at one in the morning,” Peter said standing on the torn-up verge outside his house, “Then I came out here and confronted a guy cutting out my driveway with an electric cement saw. Anyhow, the guy he was with went off his rocker, threatened to throw me back inside my property.”
During this saga, estimated to have lasted around half a year, residents attempted to contact QC Communications management to rectify the damages caused by them. The obligation to do so is a requirement stated in the Telecommunications Act. Ironically communication between the communications-specialist company was often fruitless, with their project manager reportedly ducking calls and the company eventually removing the customer service line from their website.
Council was able to sway the contractor to rectify damages that were made early on. However, this work was often poorly executed and needed to be fixed again later, which in most cases was never done.
Who you gonna call?
When initially interviewing residents months ago in July, many were still seeking answers through a variety of avenues. Council’s phone was certainly getting put to work with other organisations such as Sydney Water and the TIO unable to provide a fix or immediate compensation to rectify damages.
Now, in December, many of those residents have given up pursuing any authority and are instead living with the damage – bad water seeping from verges, mud turning rock hard – all while the finger-pointing about who is responsible doesn’t let up.At the top of the list to blame by many accounts is QC Communications and many have discovered this to be an pointless endeavour, as the company has since been placed into liquidation.
The next rational thought would be the original contractor Xenith IG, but since they can’t reveal their client due to a non-disclosure agreement, Xenith IG is discussing the works with Lane Cove Council.
As mentioned previously, according to the TIO and the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA), under the Telecommunications Act 1994 , any damage made in relation to land needs to be restored “to a similar condition as it was before the activity began.”
ITC reached out to federal authorities and asked what residents could do to receive compensation for any damage inflicted on private property by third-party contractors. Minister for Communications Michelle Rowland advised contacting the ACMA to investigate any breaches of obligations under the Code.
While the ACMA advises landowners to contact their relevant carrier and if not satisfied with its response, recommends complaints be made to the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman.
ITC also inquired to Sydney Water following complaints from residents of ‘foul-smelling’ water, suspected to be sewage. However, the company stated water technicians visited these sites and said the water was not part of their systems, wastewater or otherwise.
And of course, there were some who said the buck stops with Lane Cove Council, who allowed the work to go ahead initially and continued to do so.
In short, ITC approached Council and asked if they had any regulatory powers to force the companies responsible to rectify the damage or if they had communicated with the TIO to assist with enforcing the regulations under the Telecommunications Act.
“Contractors are operating under Federal legislation which means their authority generally trumps local measures. This is why we are trying to work with the contractors and the companies who have engaged them to make improvements to our level of satisfaction, as while they have an obligation to fix any damage they incur, we have limited regulatory powers to enforce our level of satisfaction with their work,” a Council representative stated.
“Our next course of action is the Ombudsman if we don’t get a satisfactory conclusion to this process.”
What’s next?
For now, a practical conclusion is still out of sight. At least the cabling cowboys have been rounded up and are unable to cause further damage, with some residents even informing ITC that Council has promised they will be back to clear waste soil and remediate properties.
But with some of the cabling work still incomplete and sites left with damage more severe than bad soil, many questions remain.
Who is responsible, and who will pay for it?
What’s the word from Xenith IG and QC Comms?
Will the cabling cowboys return to finish the job?
Who has the power to stop a cabling company when they are identified as causing systemic damage?
Who oversees their work and has the power to stop a particular company from undertaking ‘low impact’ works?
Check in with us over the next few weeks as we continue to share our investigation and explore some of these questions coming out of the wild west of Lane Cove.
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