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House of Assembly - Fifty-Fifth Parliament, First Session (55-1)
2022-11-17 Daily Xml
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Extreme Weather Response

Ms HUTCHESSON (Waite) (14:52): My question is to the Minister for Emergency Services. Can the minister inform the house about the emergency services response to the storm event last weekend?

The Hon. J.K. SZAKACS (Cheltenham—Minister for Police, Emergency Services and Correctional Services) (14:52): I thank the member for Waite for her question. I do want to note particularly that, amongst the significant response of our emergency services to storm events on the weekend and leading into the early days of this week, the member for Waite herself was on one of those CFS appliances contributing to her community and doing an outstanding job.

There were 423,000 lightning strikes that hit the state. There were severe troughs and thunderstorms on Saturday, and anyone in this place would absolutely share my view, I am sure, and we would share a collective view that some of the scenes we saw with those downed trees, downed powerlines and Stobie poles bent over due to the force of these winds were quite extraordinary events and winds and weather systems that our state does rarely see.

Whilst the climate is changing, and whilst we know that because of that climate change these events are becoming more severe and those events are becoming more frequent—not just in South Australia but right across the globe—the effect of these weather events does have a profound impact on our communities. Whilst they have a profound impact on our communities and on those people who are living through that and on those people who have had significant damage to their homes or have been without power or without water, it always is important to remind ourselves that there is an equal if not more of a profound impact on those volunteers and staff from our emergency services who are responding during this crisis and during these emergencies.

Whilst the wind was blowing, whilst powerlines were down, whilst trees were blocking roads, our volunteers from the SES and CFS and our career staff from the MFS were on the road. They were in our communication centres, taking phone calls. They were in the emergency services headquarters, embedded in the SES hotline, taking those phone calls from concerned members of the public—members of the public who were, in my view, being extraordinarily resilient in the face of these events coming through.

As has been put to me in the days after the event, there were a number of members of the public—quite a large volume of members of the public—who decided themselves not to contact authorities, not to call 000, not to call hotline services at the time, despite there being trees over their roofs and in their homes, powerlines down, and facing quite a degree of danger themselves, because they were thinking about others who may have been in worse situations. That does speak a lot about the strength of the community not only in the areas impacted but across all parts of our state where in times of need, in times of emergency or crisis, the community does come together. They do come together.

That was demonstrated to me firsthand when I spent some time in the electorate of Waite with the member and her local CFS brigade. We spent some time on the ground, where I also visited a number of volunteers across the southern regions to thank them personally for their service, to thank them personally for the work that they were doing and to also assess firsthand the type of risks they were responding to. In a cliche that can often be used, but I don't think is inappropriate whatsoever in this case—the bravery in which our volunteers and staff stood up on that day and have been serving us all week.

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