Lending a hand: Emergency services from NSW and Victoria came together in Queensland to offer assistance after severe weather. Photo: VICSES Seymour
Since Christmas Day, members of the Seymour SES have been sent to Queensland due to severe storms, high winds and an extraordinary amount of rain.
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The Gold Coast, Scenic Rim and Logan areas of south-east Queensland were heavily impacted, which resulted in 4200 requests for assistance.
The requests related mainly to trees over roads, trees falling on houses and roofs blown off or damaged by debris.
Two teams from Seymour, Team Alpha and Bravo, were deployed during the holidays.
Team Bravo’s Christine Welsh said the Queensland Fire and Emergency Service requested assistance from both NSW and Victoria to help with the jobs.
“Local crews were beginning to fatigue due to the large amount of RFAs over many consecutive days,” she said.
“Units across the state initially received an operational request via pager and were asked to provide names of those who were able to deploy and who had the qualifications requested by QFES.”
“A second request was then paged asking for members who held a medium truck licence who could deploy at very short notice.”
Organised: A convoy of 10 medium rescue trucks was driven from Seymour to Queensland. Photo: VICSES Seymour
Ms Welsh said Team Bravo had two hours to pack and get on the road to meet the convoy at Wodonga.
Team Bravo was tasked to drive a convoy of 10 medium rescue trucks and a support four-wheel drive to Brisbane.
Ms Welsh said their biggest challenge was traffic and trying to maintain a convoy of 10 trucks within that traffic.
“It was not an easy task in some places,” she said.
“The second challenge was trying to balance rest and food stops with maintaining our pace.
“We had a timeframe on when we needed to be in Brisbane, but we also had to manage fatigue of our drivers.”
There was also pre-New Year’s Eve traffic around Sydney to contend with.
Ms Welsh said being a volunteer meant sometimes being needed during celebrations of holidays or special occasions.
“Each individual volunteer has the opportunity to put their hand up to help, but we are never forced to do anything we aren’t comfortable with or don’t want to do,” she said.
“The majority of members know and understand that the time they give is going such a long way to helping others who are at a less than ideal time in their life and need help from those who are able to give it.”
Despite that, Ms Welsh said her personal experience was great.
“I was riding in Corryong’s rescue truck with a lovely fellow from Myrtleford unit for near on two days,” she said.
“We had some awesome music playing and sang along as we drove. There were rest, food and sleep breaks along the way.
“If it wasn’t for the pre-New Year’s Eve traffic around Sydney, it would have been a perfect drive.”
On Tuesday, January 2, Seymour and the surrounding areas experienced torrential rain after a sunny, 30-degree day.
“Seymour is a very resilient community; our locals call for assistance when they need to, but also just try to get on with things and do what they can themselves,” Ms Welsh said.
“The biggest message for us would be to never drive through flood water.
“It’s just not a safe thing to do. You don’t know what’s under the water or if the road is even still there.”
During the October 2022 floods, Seymour SES received 39 requests for assistance from people stuck in floodwater.
A large majority of those had driven into the water.
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