DANIEL PEDERSEN
LIFELINE Morwell was in ordered disarray on Monday morning after a fire wrecked parts of its Fleming St building at the weekend.
Neighbours alerted fire authorities at about 1am Saturday that having heard two loud crashes, flames were leaping from the front of the building.
Lifeline Gippsland chief executive Michelle Possingham was busy directing tradespeople and helping assessors as she spoke with The Express.
“At this stage we know it wasn’t malicious, it appears to have been an electrical fault,” she said.
“But we are shut down for the forseeable future,” she said.
That means one of 41 crisis hotline centres across Australia is out of service and Ms Possingham was on Monday morning attempting to work out to get the organisation’s volunteers back on line.
“There’s some work that just can’t be done from home and there will be some impact on revenue because people who lease office space can’t inhabit the building,”she said.
“We’ve been dealing with it for just two-and-a-half hours,” she said.
There are two other ‘phone rooms’ in Gippsland, in Drouin and Maffra, but volunteers’ travel time would be impacted if they chose to work from an alternate office, said Ms Possingham.
“But no-one should face their darkest hour alone so, like all Gippslanders, we’ve faced tough times before and we’ll just get on with it,” she said, while negotiating with a tradesman where to park a large generator.
