A sinkhole roughly 8–10 m wide and several metres deep has opened on the AJ Burkitt Reserve sporting oval in Heidelberg, directly adjacent to the North East Link tunnel alignment in Melbourne’s northeast. Victorian Infrastructure Delivery Authority has confirmed the “surface hole” is in the vicinity of active tunnelling operations, leading to a work pause while engineers and emergency crews carry out geotechnical investigations and monitoring. No injuries or structural damage have been reported, but the area remains fully cordoned off pending cause determination and stability assessment.

Welsh Government has set a record £85M budget for flood and coastal erosion risk management in 2026/27, its largest single-year allocation for defences. Funding will support schemes under the National Strategy for Flood and Coastal Erosion Risk Management, targeting high-risk communities along major estuaries and exposed coastlines. Designers can expect increased demand for reinforced concrete and rock armour sea walls, upgraded earth embankments, and higher-capacity culverts and outfalls to cope with more intense rainfall and storm surges.

Assessing dam failure risk with WTW takes centre stage in the latest Engineers Collective podcast, focusing on how insurers and engineers jointly quantify breach probabilities and downstream consequences for large embankment and concrete gravity dams. Discussion covers use of probabilistic risk assessment, portfolio-level screening tools and event trees to evaluate failure modes such as overtopping, internal erosion and spillway degradation under extreme rainfall. The episode also examines how updated risk metrics influence capital maintenance planning, emergency drawdown provisions and prioritisation of dam safety upgrades.