SES and Rural Fire Service (RFS) members from the MidCoast region are helping with the clean-up in Lismore after the area was devastated by flooding on the weekend.
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SES Mid North Coast acting deputy controller, Maria Frazer said that members from across the region are currently at Lismore and are mostly assisting with incident management and community engagement.
“Generally with out of area we don’t send whole units because we need to maintain a certain amount of capability in the area they come from as well in case something happens in our area,” Maria Frazer said.
The RFS Mid North Coast region has provided 42 people, 10 tankers, a bulk water tanker and two command vehicles to assist in the clean-up efforts.
RFS members and vehicles from Pindimar, Pacific Palms, Limeburner Creek, Tuncurry, Booral, North Shore 7 (Port Macquarie), Marlee, Mitchells Island, Lake Cathie, King Creek and Lake Innes are currently providing assistance in what has been described as looking like a ‘war zone’.
“We’ve got composite crews - there are members from other brigades on some of these trucks. It really has been a District-wide effort. A lot of the brigades are represented,” a RFS spokesperson said.
“Crews will concentrate on critical infrastructure cleanup initially, then move on to other assets.”
Due to the massive scale of the disaster neither the SES or RFS are sure as to when they will no longer need to provide assistance in Lismore.
“Clean up can take a while. Generally it’s a matter of transitioning into that recovery phase and obviously the teams up there have been working quite long hours, so it may well be that we may need to provide some further people up there so they can have some stand down time and have a bit of a break, but at this stage I couldn’t tell you how long that would be for,” Maria Frazer said.
At this stage the RFS are looking at bringing their crews home on Thursday, but they are unsure at this time whether they will be doing a change over and sending relief crews up.
“That’s still to be determined,” the RFS spokesperson said.