The NSW State Emergency Service was so overwhelmed by calls for help during record floods this year that it turned off its jobs deployment system, a key report has found.
But despite multiple failures by the agency identified in the report, NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet says SES boss Carlene York still has his support.
“Carlene is a great commissioner of the State Emergency Service,” Perrottet said. “She’s a strong leader of that organisation. She coordinates and shows incredible leadership in relation to our front-line volunteer service.”
NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet released the report into the flood on Wednesday. Credit:Elise Derwin
The Independent Flood Inquiry report, published on Wednesday, was scathing of the SES and said it failed to use many of the resources that were available to it.
It also found that the agency failed to adhere to current emergency management arrangements, that flood rescues were not conducted in line with policy, and that the SES was unable to coordinate multiple flood rescues.
In Lismore on Wednesday, report co-author and former police commissioner Mick Fuller said the fact the SES had turned off their system for logging calls from the public who needed help was “just not good enough for the community”.
“I heard evidence directly from unit leaders where they had turned off BEACON, the main system for calls for service, because they were overwhelmed,” he said. “We heard evidence that Up to 3000 calls for service were lost in Lismore alone, in terms of people requiring flood rescue.”
Local Labor state member Janelle Saffin said the emergency response to the February-March floods was “a systemic public administration failure, just failure. There’s no sugar-coating it.
“The findings and recommendations are consistent with our experience,” she said. “What the findings showed was an absence of preparedness, an absence of appropriate response, at every level. There was no preparedness or planning for “what if”.
Fuller said that, during the February-March floods in the Northern Rivers, police had not considered taking over management of the emergency because the SES and other agencies felt “the matter was in hand”.
Flooding in Lismore in March.Credit:Getty
Under the State Emergency and Rescue Management Act, the state emergency operations controller – normally a deputy police commissioner- can request to take over control of an emergency response. Fuller said it was very rare for that to occur, although it had happened once before during a 2012 flood.
An NSW SES spokesperson said York “remained committed as NSW SES commissioner” and that the agency had responded to the Northern Rivers flood with all available assets and personnel. It had also moved additional resources, including from other agencies, into the area.
“This was at a time when the NSW SES was also operational on the Central Coast, Mid North Coast and in metropolitan areas. Hundreds of NSW SES personnel were involved in the floods and worked alongside other agencies in support of the response,” the spokesperson said.
“During the flood emergency, NSW SES responded in accordance with existing emergency management arrangements.”
The spokesperson said many of the recommendations and findings in the report were in line with an inquiry conducted into the 2021 flooding event by the Australasian Fire and Emergency Service Authorities Council. The SES said on the back of that report it had asked the state government for increased resourcing, capability, capacity, facilities and local community support and services.
“The NSW SES is already proactively positioned to address both the AFAC review and a number of the findings of the parliamentary and independent inquiries.” the spokesperson said.
The report also recommended the Bureau of Meteorology take over the running and maintenance of as many river and rain gauges in NSW as possible, which are currently owned and managed by a number of different agencies.
“We do need to have a bigger gauge network,” report co-author Mary O’Kane said, adding the information from more gauges would help flood models better predict the extent of a flood. “At the moment that needs to be better in these really big catchments, like we have here.
Saffin welcomed that recommendation.
“The gauges are a disaster, but we’ve got to know what the BOM are doing,” she said. “We’ve got to see in real-time how they look after the gauges. We didn’t have gauges in some places, and in others, they didn’t work … there was a lack of preparedness, almost bordering on indifference. Someone has got to be responsible for them.”
The report recommended that a new deputy police commissioner be appointed full-time to emergency and disaster management under the recommendations.
It also found an independent audit of NSW rescue capability was needed to assess which agency should respond to individual flood rescue requests.
The report also said that there should be a partial merger of the SES and NSW Rural Fire Service back-of-house operations.
The government has indicated it will accept all 28 of the recommendations in the report.
The report also notes that Resilience NSW was unable to perform as intended due to the size and scope of its remit. The primary criticism levied at the agency included its slowness and unresponsiveness in relation to evacuation and recovery centres, clean-up, restoring essential services and issuing grant funding. The recommendations said the agency should be scaled back and its functions reallocated to other departments.
Loss of essential services, including power and telecommunications, also needed to be addressed, with community and emergency service personnel struggling during the 2022 flooding events. The report has recommended greater work be done across governments and industries to ensure there are adequate backup and temporary options available.
The report has recommended a one-size-fits-all disaster app be developed that would allow emergency services to consolidate individual warnings into one location that provides real-time flood warnings.
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