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House of Assembly - Fifty-Fifth Parliament, First Session (55-1)
2022-11-15 Daily Xml
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Davenport Electorate

Ms THOMPSON (Davenport) (15:22): I rise to thank and acknowledge our incredible SES and CFS volunteers and also MFS and council staff who have been working incredibly hard day and night over the last few days with the power outage and storm damage.

I would like to particularly thank some of the crews in my electorate of Davenport, including the CFS for Happy Valley and also Cherry Gardens, and also the O'Halloran Hill MFS who have been working extremely hard and sometimes working 14, 15 or 16-hour shifts over the weekend to make sure that people can get to and from their homes, get out and about and get what they need, get to work, get to school and look after their loved ones.

When we have challenges like this in our communities there is often a silver lining. This time it has certainly been that the community has come out and banded together to support each other. We have seen our local businesses, restaurants and cafes offering their coolrooms, offering their charging points in their stores to the community. The community centres have offered hot showers and, again, places to charge their phones and their laptops. It has been wonderful to see how supportive people have been of each other.

I would like to particularly have a little shout-out to the residents of Black Road at Flagstaff Hill. They get absolutely hammered every time there is a storm in our state. It was not that long ago that they were cleaning up along Black Road and now they have had to do it again. It felt like almost every second tree on Black Road came down on Saturday afternoon, and immediately the residents were out there with their chain saws clearing the road and making it safe for people to get through.

We had a couple of homes completely lost in the storms on Saturday. I mention the home of one family of five on Black Road at Flagstaff Hill where a huge tree fell down and absolutely obliterated the home. There is not much left of it, and this happened just after a recent renovation too. My heart breaks for that family who are now living in a one-bedroom unit with their elderly mother and their dog until they are able to work out a plan going forward.

What was most incredible was how positive the family stayed throughout the situation. We were on the phone to them trying to get them information as best we could, but as we knew with the hundreds of call-outs across the state that information was hard to come by, and it took them a couple of days to learn when they were going to get some support.

However, they stayed positive. They understood that they were not the only ones and never got down and out despite their challenging situation. I am sure that it also had a lot to do with the support they received from their neighbours and from the local businesses that were offering all sorts of assistance.

In a street in Aberfoyle Park a Stobie pole came down and completely blocked off a road. We had residents doing traffic control for two or three days. It was only this morning that we had assistance to remove that tree and the Stobie pole off the road. The residents have been managing that community for the past few days, and it became quite the community event. I think that the neighbours all got to know each other, which again is a silver lining. People were bringing out food, wine and really enjoying the social activity that this challenge brought to our community.

There is still a long way to go. There is still a huge clean-up to do in my electorate of Davenport. I think it will be a few weeks before the streets look the way they did before the storm, so I would just call on the community to continue to be positive and continue to be patient.

Council staff are getting out there this week particularly, and hopefully with some shift changes the SES and CFS staff will have some new energy to get out there and clean up the mess that has been left behind. I am calling on our community and our neighbours to continue to be positive, to get out there and to offer some help wherever they can and to stay safe on our roads.

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