When Morwell residents vacated a town showered in ash during the Hazelwood mine fire, emergency protocols came into play.
Evaluation exercises like the one staged on Tuesday at the Latrobe City service centre in Traralgon aim to strengthen emergency services responses.
Latrobe City and Baw Baw Shire councils participated in legislated annual drills to evaluate school evacuation plans, which included the removal of children to an emergency relief centre, and assess the quality of the emergency service response.
Three schools, Victoria Police, Ambulance Victoria, State Emergency Service and council collaborated in the mock emergency to make sure the process was sound.
“It’s really important especially in times of emergency so that we’re trained. Staff turnover is a big thing across the board for Victoria Police, SES and councils and Red Cross, so we all need to know how we work together in these areas,” Latrobe City’s coordinator emergency management Lance King said.
“Communication somewhere generally doesn’t marry up at times so that’s an area we’ve identified where we need to improve our communication with the schools.
“What we (also) need to look at is redundancies in the planning for evacuation (for example) if an evacuation point is unavailable, where do we go next?”
It was a question that had to be answered during the mine fire.
“In the Hazelwood mine fire if we’d used Kernot Hall or a location in Morwell… they were in the impact area of the smoke, so we had to use Traralgon and Moe,” Mr King said.
“We learnt that emergency relief locations need to be flexible, you can’t just designate one point.”
Victoria Police Acting Inspector Cameron Blair said Gippsland was in a strong position to respond to emergencies with all agencies on the same page.
“This exercise is an example of that collaboration at work and provides ongoing assurance to the broader community that we’re working as one in response to emergencies in Gippsland,” he said.
“The outcome we’re looking for is to cement those relationships, identify anything that needs improving, so it’s a great foundation to build on what is already a very strong and robust framework.”
