The sudden NSW-Victoria border closure, brought on by the coronavirus spike, has forced some residents to take 100km detours to get to work.
Some bridges have even been padlocked shut with school students, teachers, health staff and farmers, who usually travel across the border multiple times each day, made to travel significantly further just to get to work.
Nyah resident Sue Boulton — who lives in Victoria but works at a citrus farm in Tooleybuc, NSW — said her journey had increased by at least 100km as she had to travel backwards to Swan Hill to cross the border. “If we knew a time frame for how long the bridge would be closed we could deal with it, but at the moment it’s unknown,” she said.
Meanwhile, further upstream, Lachy Monk lives in NSW 300m from the Murrabit bridge but has had his engineering business split in two by its sudden closure, which has seen padlocks put on the crossing’s gates. While it’s understood paramedics have a key to the locked gates, that same journey would now see a 50km detour via Barham or a 52km trip along a dirt track.
NSW police have rapidly deployed more than 650 officers, along with 350 defence force personnel, to guard 55 border crossings with Victoria but residents said they weren’t expecting total bridges closures with large detours between open crossings.
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