Torrential rain and high winds battered the Tweed Coast this week, causing damage across the region but, for a group of volunteers in Pottsville, it was a true “baptism of fire”.
Ex-tropical cyclone Oswald stormed across the Tweed, taking down trees, damaging the roof of the Tweed Hospital and damaging houses, as well as bringing heavy rain and moderate flooding to Murwillumbah and Chinderah. And late on Tuesday, Prime Minister Julia Gillard and NSW Premier Barry O’Farrell announced Tweed would be one of 10 local government areas to have access to jointly-funded national disaster assistance following extensive flooding.
But it also gave the volunteers of the newly established Tweed Coast SES a chance to show what they were made of.
“This is the first big event we’ve had since we were officially opened in October of last year,” commented Tweed Coast Unit Controller Kristine McDonald.
“The group members are enjoying the challenge. We had 11 of our crew active, as well as Fast Water experts and their boat from Cooma.”
She said they had 30 calls in the first three days of the storm event, including roof jobs and a lot of tree damage.
“We have taken the pressure off other units that used to cover this area,” Unit Controller McDonald said.
Tweed District Controller Brian Sheehan said the SES attended more than 400-plus jobs across Tweed, with more than 150 people, including volunteers, brought in from around the State.
“We’ve had significant call-outs for trees being down, because we had winds of over 100km per hour at some stages,” Controller Sheehan said.
“And as a consequence of the trees down, we have a lot of tree damage to houses and units.
“The other major callout was to people driving through floodways, who had to be pulled out of cars.
“We had 10-12, which is too many by far.
“The hospital lost the roof off the second storey of the children’s oncology unit. They moved the kids, quite obviously, but I think as of Monday, we had the roof back on. We effected a repair but I’m not sure if the power had been restored. We got the roof back on in just a couple of hours but we had a lot of assistance.
“Generally across the Tweed we have a significant number of people who have suffered inundations in their homes and yards; we’ve got a lot of our region that’s still not reachable. We did an evacuation of a caravan park at Chinderah – 200 plus people.”
