By BLAKE METCALF-HOLT
LOCAL SES units and fire brigades devoted themselves to the community through a taskforce operation in the wake of the storm on the Latrobe Valley last week.
Around 400 SES volunteers were paged to respond to more than 1100 requests for assistance (RFAs) in the Gippsland region, with more than 700 fallen trees and more than 350 reports of building damage.
The SES Morwell Unit was the second busiest in Victoria (273 RFAs), and the Moe Unit 11th busiest in the state (133 RFAs).
Alongside the Morwell and Moe SES units – Traralgon West, Traralgon, Churchill, Tyers, Yinnar South, Yallourn North, Moe South, Newborough, and Hazelwood North fire brigades provided vehicles to patrol and maintain the havoc imposed on the local towns that left many without power for days.
All of the 22 CFA units in the Latrobe Valley were actively supporting during this period.
The taskforce was created in preparation for the incoming storm, which produced wind gusts north of 100 km/h and affected large portions of Victoria including the Gippsland region.
Due to correspondence with the Bureau of Meteorology in the days leading up to the storm, the SES was able to effectively plan and resource volunteers.
“As a result when the storm eventuated on Sunday night and into Monday morning, all agencies were prepared to respond and support impacted communities,” a VICSES spokesperson said.
Linking with the local emergency services, firefighters were issued where SES needed them due to large space and finite amount of volunteers on hand.
CFA District 27 Commander Doug Broom said that “the CFA and CFA brigades were performing a supportive role in this, so the State Emergency Service (SES) is the lead agency and they are in control of the response to the event.”
“SES was definitely the lead agency in terms of the community and the state’s response to the event,” Commander Broom added.
Communication was done through the SES Incident Control Centre (ICC), which has been established in Warragul, that goes through SES crews before tasks and jobs throughout the area are then delegated to the CFA volunteers.
Traralgon Fire Brigade Captain and Hyland Group Officer, Adam Townsend coordinated his unit when dispatched out into the storm.
“We’ve got other crews that have come in to stand up as a task force that has come in to support everyone, but we’ve got resources all going right across the place,” he said.
“So then they’ll work in with SES either jointly with SES to work together or SES will give them a range of jobs and they go out and just work independently to go out and get these jobs cleared out.”
The Hyland Group and Merton Group are the two CFA assemblies in the Latrobe Valley.
This amount of work also lends itself to a multitude of different CFA vehicles to be utilised, which was detailed by Capt. Townsend.
“The taskforce that came for the storm for here that we used are duel command vehicles, so there’s a four-wheel drive vehicle, and that’s been the combination,” he said.
“So we’ve got our Hyland Group vehicle… we have an MCV (Mobile Communication Vehicle), we have an ultra-light tanker which is with a small slip-on type of firefighting appliance, then we have light tankers and the big heavy tankers that everyone knows for the big grassfires – so there’s a whole different range of vehicles that are appropriate.”
Due to focus being around other places in the Latrobe Valley, the Yallourn North Urban Fire Brigade was dealing with issues in their own area, not before dealing with grassfires that spawned on Moe-Rawson Road in Moondarra.
Captain Hayley King said that their crew was released from the fire and returned to Yallourn North as the storm worsened.
“We got released because the storms started getting really bad and we knew Moe-Rawson Rd (was) pretty bad, so we had to clear a heap of trees on our way back from there and I think it just snowballed from there,” she said.
“That’s when we got a fire call or a notification saying there was a powerline down in Yallourn North, we basically babysat that for hours because there was no SES or Power Company available, so we sat there until 10am I think from 4(am).”
The power pole collapsed on North Rd, the town’s main road, making members watch over the hazard while locals left for work in the morning.
Problems continued to arise through the severe weather in town, and the local crew was right there at all times.
“Throughout the day, it was just dealing with power outages in the town and working out what was needed,” Capt. King said.
“We had one of our members went up and cleaned all of the covers on the playground because it had all ripped off and smashed to pieces.
“So, it was just little stuff to help out where we could.”
