Orange SES volunteers to the rescue at Central Coast

Peter Hodgins, Liann Deyssing and Grant Hill left Orange early on Thursday morning to help at Wyong and returned on Sunday afternoon.

Mr Hodgins left his day job as a postman to go on the deployment to the low-lying area where there had been 1800 calls for assistance after heavy rain caused flooding last Tuesday.

A heavy storm that hit Sydney and the Central Coast on Saturday resulted in a further 86 calls for help but overall Mr Hodgins said the volunteers were starting to get on top of the situation by Sunday afternoon.

“We found a lot of tree damage and flooding,” Mr Hodgins said.

“The flooding side is definitively worse that what we’ve seen before because it was still up in the dams and lakes and the river system there is all tidal, it was fairly well up when we got there and a great number of roads were still flooded while we were there.”

Mr Hodgins and the other Orange crew members spent a lot of their time removing and cutting up trees that had fallen on houses.

“We did eight chainsaw jobs on trees,” he said.

“Also we did recon work, going around seeing how big the jobs were and getting them tasked to the appropriate skill level and welfare, we were dropping off food and welfare packs to people that couldn’t get in or out.

“There was still a great number of people that were flooded in down towards the lake at Wyong ... low-lying areas were pretty flooded as well.

Mr Hodgins said there were still people without electricity three or four days after the storm hit but overall people were thankful that they were there.

He said at Wyong there were between 80 and 100 other SES volunteers including 56 SES volunteers from Victoria as well as 80 Rural Fire Service volunteers.

The Orange volunteers were deployed from the Bathurst regional office and replaced a crew from Bathurst that was at the site for two days, when the trio left on Sunday, they were replaced by volunteers from Lithgow and Portland.

tanya.marschke@fairfaxmedia.com.au