Disaster and Emergency Committee - 30 July 2024

Good afternoon, everybody, and welcome to Council's Disaster and Emergency Committee meeting of the 30th of July 2024. Hawkesbury City Council acknowledges the Darug and the Darkinjung people as the traditional custodians of the lands of the Hawkesbury. We pay our respects to Elders past, present and emerging, and acknowledge all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the First Peoples of this country.

I've received apologies

From the Mayor, Councillors, but before we move on to nominating a chair, I've also received a request from Councillor Conolly, has provided a written request to attend today's Disaster and Emergency Committee meeting by audiovisual link, as he is unable to attend the meeting in person. Councillor Conolly has been admitted to the meeting and is not able to participate in the committee until Council decides, or the committee decides by resolution, whether to accept his request. Does someone want to move that Councillor Conolly be permitted to attend the committee meeting by audiovisual link? Moved Councillor Reid and seconded Councillor Lyons-Buckett. Thank you. Do we have Councillor Conolly in the meeting?

Beautiful. Just moving on to that, thank you, Councillor. I've also received apologies from, as I said, the Mayor, Councillor McMahon, Councillor Veigel, Councillor Nathan Zamprogno, Mr Ethan Parker of the Rural Fire Service, and Detective Acting Superintendent Virginia Gorman from New South Wales Police. Are there any further apologies, Councillors? No. Does somebody wish to move that these apologies be accepted? Councillor Reid and Councillor Kotlash.

Now, in the absence of the Mayor, the committee shall elect a committee member to act in the chairperson during this absence. Are there any nominations to act as chairperson? Councillor Calvert, seconded Kotlash. We'll put that to the vote. Thank you. All in favour? So I will now ask Councillor Calvert to chair the meeting. Thank you.

Good afternoon. So, do

I assume that the meeting is already opened, or do I need to open the meeting? You've opened it. Okay. I'll hand over to the General Manager to give us some of the things. You haven't

We're deeply organised. I'd also like to advise that the meetings of the Council Committee are recorded. In the terms of the Privacy and Personal Information Protection Act, this may involve the recording of personal information provided at the time of the meeting. The recordings are made to assist staff in compiling the minutes of the meeting and to enable the podcasting and livestream of Council Committee meetings. The provision of any information that is recorded is voluntary. If any person does not wish to be recorded, they should not address a request to address the meeting. The gallery can be seen in the livestream video, so if you do not wish to be recorded in the livestream, please move into the foyer, and we will turn the foyer speakers on for you.

The recordings may be made available to other persons where such access is in accordance with the relevant regulations. The recordings are stored in Council's record management system and uploaded to Council's website. For the benefit of those persons who may be addressing the committee, it's expected that you'll refrain from making any insult, allegation or personal reflection against any person present or not at this meeting. This request relates to both your address to Council and any answers given in response to questions from councillors. Finally, it's also requested that persons participating in or attending the meeting this afternoon have their mobile phone. Can they please turn it off or turn it to silent?

Thank you, Deputy Mayor.

Thank you. Do we have any declarations of interest, please? No. There are no registered speakers for this meeting. Confirmation of minutes. Would someone like to move the minutes? Councillor Reardon, Councillor Lyons-Buckett. Anybody against that? Otherwise I'll declare it carried. We only have one item to deal with.

Who is today. And before we deal with it, I'd just like to welcome Brendan Hilliard from New South Wales Police. Thanks for being here. We were supposed to have Kevin Jones from SES, but he's not here. Okay, maybe he's on his way.

All right. So we have one item, which is the flood recovery update. And the recommendation is that we receive and note the report. Now, the report starts on page 15. Before we receive and note the report, I'd like to invite Brendan Hilliard. Would you like to comment on that report or in any way, or add to it?

Not at this stage. This is the only stage there'll be. Okay . Councillors, it's up for your discussion.

Councillor Lyons-Buckett. And

Thank you to the staff. It's really good to be released, and as we've seen from these reports, ... always various floods are, and also, I guess, ... getting ... ... in ... I did have a question. But I have another question, and that

Is around

Now that we're in what I guess is between disasters at the moment, and our

But I'm just wondering, with the ... of an assessment being done by New South Wales Government around ensuring

That evacuation centres . . .

General Manager, do we have an answer to that?

Thank you through you, Mr Chair. Yes, so as all, I think all local emergency management committees were required to do, we've undertaken an audit of our evacuation facilities and provided the details and the outcome of that audit up to the Regional Emergency Management Committee and subsequently up to the State Emergency Management Committee. Excuse me,

Councillor, I can't hear

You very

Well , is

It

It could be, could be, but I think there's something wrong with the system somewhere.

I'll speak louder. No,

I don't think it's you. I think there's something...

No.

Thank you for that. No, that would be

Wonderful. I just hope that in this time, before we move into another fire season and before, you know, potentially more floods, that we continue to look at the gaps that make up... and I know that they're

Filling those gaps by working through where they're ... and we're going into some sort of remediation stage . We

Have all this knowledge

Now about what happened and the ... circumstances, and I hope that can translate

Into making us just that bit stronger for the next round, guys.

Thank you. Councillor Cutless.

Thank you, Mr Deputy. I'm just following on from that. I guess something that I have been mindful in almost all about the disasters that we've had is that there seems to be not a very good understanding in the community about who actually declares, you know, we're our disaster, we're our recovery centres, and we're evacuations . And it's always been— Am I yelling now?

No, I think it's just right

So I guess what I'm sort of asking is, can we try and increase the community's awareness that it's not council that directs this? I mean, we do our bit by having our facilities, and that's my understanding of that your answer, that council— we're ready to go. It just depends on what the disaster is doing, the type of disaster, where it is, and what we think we're going to be up to. So I think instead of the community thinking, Oh, you know, nobody's— they've forgotten us, you know, and we get that, and that's important that people don't feel that, especially in a disaster. And so I suppose maybe that's kind of not our role, but some role that we can keep saying to the community, all our facilities are ready.

We've done our, we've done other preparation work, we've done our, you know, we're ready to go. And I think that would be a good message instead of sort of saying, Oh, it's all going to be terrible. So not really a question, just a comment. I'd like to see, I don't know how we can do that, but if we could do that, I think it would ensure way to comfort the community because it's always a holiday.

So that's just a comment. Councillor Reardon

Through you, Mr Chair, yes. So the Transport for New South Wales are the responsible road authority. Their last advice to us was that it would be cleared. Now they've given us a window to allow for weather and river levels and so forth, between mid-August and the end of September.

Councillor Lyons-Buckett.

I think my question is, I think we , at this stage, yeah, we need to

Just break down old Wagga Emergency Plan, because there's parts of the plan that are public, but there's also information that has to do about disclosing the main reason to be confidential. But just in terms, so people have an understanding of what the confidential portion, particular event, and just some basic numbers of who to contact, where to get the information, and what to do. Just the real basics, but in a very plain and very just straightforward way so people have it as a single

Source of page of information.

Director of Infrastructure, do you want to comment on that?

Yeah, we'll certainly take that on board and look at what we can push out with our comms to help with that, perhaps utilise our emergency dashboard .

I was going to say the dashboard would do a lot of that for us, but you're looking for a separate piece of paper or something, right?

Possibly something that even went out, the debates all went out. It's just like a, we've done it for other things before, but it's just basically, you know, we've got a plan of what happens. It's in a very overarching way. Obviously people will need more information, look for more information, but in terms of just saying who's in charge and what you've got, and just that huge... I think the confusion that arises around evacuation centres are there aren't set places and obvious reasons, but the fact that if there is the need for an evacuation centre, the location of that will be advised, will be notified at the time, but also that we do really have at least

The important message to get out there. Thank you. Councillor Wheeler.

So stressed and so stretched are why would be disasters, and making, knowing that it is in place before they need it, and even if they don't need it, I think it's good to making it easier for people to cope with a certain test they might not. And along those lines, our consistent with the population guidelines, but the comments could we include a disaster and recovery info in the induction package for incoming sort of just because this is really important

General Manager, that's a possibility.

Yeah, absolutely. We'll prepare something along those lines.

In terms of evacuation centres, during the bushfires of 2019, I was going to say admonished, but I was spoken to quite directly by the district police superintendent and basically told to get out of the way. The police were going to determine where the evacuation centres would be, and he told me our job was just to have evacuation centres available, and the police would then say, Open this one, open that one, or We will open that one. It wasn't our job to actually open them or tell people beforehand where they were, because people might end up going to one that they don't want people to go to. So the police had to be the people who said, Go to evacuation centre A. And so we really need to be clear on that, that our role is to have the evacuation centres if they need it.

But not for us to open them, and I would hesitate to even advertise where they are, in case people read that and then it turns out that's flooded or on fire or something. So I just would like to exercise some caution with that, if we could. Councillor Cottrell, you had your light .

I'm putting on my aquatic ecology hat on now, because people have said to me there's been a lot of snags in the river and how terrible it is. From an aquatic ecology point of view, it's fabulous, and fish species in the river really, really, really love the big snags. Early days of the river restoration, they cleared all the snags and then they have a program for re-snagging. So snags are a part of the river. That's what they do. Possibly not that big, but there's a good story there for fish. So I just wanted to share that with you. It's not so bad every time we clear it up. And every time I drive over the bridge, I feel I should go and ask the fishers that are down on the jetty, are they catching any fish? Because snags really do harbour the area, because resident feeding sites

Thanks. Councillor Conolly seems to have disappeared from the screen. Is he still with us or is he?

He couldn't hear us.

Okay. Well, we'll have to keep going anyway. I wanted to point out that it was interesting on page 16 about the direction the flood came and the fact that— The Grace, Colo and McDonald Rivers didn't actually have a lot of inflow into that flood, and it points out that there's no quick fix to floods. You can't say if you do X, then you'll solve all the floods, because this shows you that's not the case. Every flood is different, comes from a different place, and I would urge that those figures for this flood, even though it wasn't one of the biggest we've had, I kept in mind in future by future councils that, you know, there's no one solution to this problem. Any other? Councillor Lyons-Buckett.

Yes. Any further discussion? Councillor Conolly is not coming back. Well, there's a recommendation on page 15 that the committee receive and note the report regarding the June 2024 flood events. Someone like to move that? Councillor Djuric had his hand up first, seconded by Councillor Reardon. No one wishes to speak against that?

No. You see, you don't need right of reply, Councillor Djuric. I'll put the motion. All those in favour, please raise their hands. In favour is Councillor Reardon, Councillor Kotlash, Councillor Djuric, Councillor Lyons-Bucket, Councillor Wheeler and Councillor Calvert.

Absent

Are Councillor Samprogno, Councillor Dogramaci, Councillor Conolly, Councillor Sheeda , Councillor Veigel and the Mayor, Councillor McMahon. Did I miss anybody? No. Declare it carried.

You don't think we've got a quorum? Six.

We had enough to start

I don't think you can, actually. General Manager?

I'm inclined, Council, for us to proceed, make your resolutions. When we put the minutes up to Council at that particular point, we may at that point note that we went in quorum at the point of decision making, but I think we just push on with how we're proceeding. Yep .

So it's been passed . Is there any other business? Councillor Wheeler

Generous with their openness around their own ... and their families, I guess

Experiences with the ... and how they have continued to ... I think, for example, as we look at what we do with our limited money, ..

Thanks .

So I couldn't hear a lot of that, but I got the gist. Do you want the general manager to just include a note in the minutes? All I'm asking you, a note in the minutes or a motion?

For the next council. Yeah.

Trouble with a motion is that we don't have the quorum. No, but

The next council will receive a

Report. Yep. Okay. So we'll put a note in the minutes to that effect. Okay. Any other business, Councillor Cotter?

Thank you. I'd like to add too, Councillor Wheeler's suggestion, and I'm going to ask Councillor Wheeler to help me out with remembering what course we were going to do, and you and I were going to put our hands up for how to respond to people in crisis, and it was all, I think it was a . .. report. Yeah, and

It was— I think it was

The accidental counsellor training through Lifeline. Yep

Accidental counsellor, and really when I thought about that, I thought really, are we able to expand that to our staff? I mean, a lot of our staff are ... residents, and a lot of our, you know, I know our funds are tight, but that kind of thing, this isn't going away. This is, we need to get really good at supporting our community, and that comes from us and our staff. So, yes, could I just suggest in that, we really have to work in this space a lot more.

Yep. A significant cohort of our staff did that course in 2022, so that's probably timely for a refresher. I'm also taking my mind back to probably last year where there was actually some academic research done on the impacts of mental health after disasters. And, yeah , I think we'd be happy to talk councillors through that and gather what information we can and brief the new council, you know, either later this year or early next.

So you put that down as a note in the minutes? Yes. Yep. Councillor Lyons-Buckett.

Any further business?

If not, can I thank Mr Hilliard from New South Wales Police for being here. Thank you, Councillors. I'll close the meeting at 4 .32. Thank you.