SEO for plumbers in Geelong

Geelong was surveyed three weeks after Melbourne, in 1838. It has a century of housing that Melbourne’s outer suburbs simply do not have, and then it has everything built since.

Its water authority puts the position better than we could. Announcing a fifty million dollar sewer programme in 2023, Barwon Water wrote that “many sewer mains in the region are several decades old, with some over 100 years old”, and named tree roots as one of the things breaking them.

Their fix is the one a plumber sells: camera the line, clean it, and install a structural liner. They are doing it across hundreds of pipes.

Geelong was sewered in 1916, the first house connecting a year after the Barwon Sewer Aqueduct was finished. That is nineteen years after Melbourne — and forty-eight years before Ringwood.

Then came the factories. Ford arrived in 1925 and had over five thousand people by 1953. To house them the Housing Commission built Norlane from 1947 and Corio from the late 1950s: roughly five thousand Commission houses between them, finished by 1976. More than twelve hundred of the Norlane houses were prefabricated units shipped in from Holland and France.

The ground is not one thing here, which is unusual. Council’s own reports describe the northern growth area as “highly reactive and expansive soils” on Newer Volcanics basalt — the same rock that sits under Brunswick.

But go east and south and it turns to marine sand, marl and limestone, with river alluvium along the Barwon and the Moorabool. Basalt boulders float in the clay in the west. One city, four or five different sets of ground conditions.

And it floods. There have been about fourteen large floods since 1852, roughly one every ten to twelve years, with Newtown, Belmont, Highton, Breakwater and South Geelong named as at risk from the river — and flash flooding in the CBD itself.