Inquiry hears of residents’ anger that disaster agencies treated flood response as a ‘nine-to-five job’
The committee chairman, Labor MP Walt Secord, said communities in the state’s north were angry that Resilience NSW had treated the “fourth-worst natural disaster” in modern Australian history as a “nine-to-five job”.“We’re not a 24-hour organisation. We don’t have thousands of personnel,” he said.“We don’t have the scale or resourcing during the response phase of these events.”
Resilience NSW was set up in May 2020 in the aftermath of the black summer bushfires, with Fitzsimmons, a former NSW Rural Fire Service commissioner, appointed to lead the organisation.In her opening statement York said 13 lives were lost from late February until early April across the state, with the town of Lismore in the northern rivers region hit the hardest.
The SES was dispatched to more than 2,200 flood rescues and responded to in excess of 33,400 requests for help.York noted that more than 4,000 properties were deemed uninhabitable after the waters subsided. Victims of the rising waters harshly criticised the state’s response after the first round of flooding, with many residents in northern NSW remaining without electricity for six weeks.
Labor MP Penny Sharpe levelled criticisms at the SES for not communicating with flood-affected communities effectively over which rescue agency would take the lead, describing the response as “confused”.“I don’t think anything has gone wrong in relation to command and control.”