Residents told traumatic and emotional stories of their experiences during the Christmas storms during a forum held by the Inspector General Emergency Management at Vonda Youngman Hall.
The forum was one of thirteen being held across Queensland examining the severe weather events from 2023-2024.
Alistair Dawson APM said people’s experiences and views will form part of a review to identify enhancements to inform and ensure continuous improvement in Queensland’s disaster management arrangement.
“Disasters don’t always occur in the same shape and form which is challenging,” he explained.
He said the lessons from the severe event needed to be shifted into action and embedded into what we do, which he felt was being done.
Alistair said it was easy to stop and wait for help, but sometimes people had to dive in and help themselves as was the case in the aftermath of the tornado.
“The power of community here amazing,” he said.
“The community here is connected in a way that synergises their efforts across the mountain. That gives me the feeling there is resilience here and it’s constantly growing.”
It was highlighted at the forum that the influx of new residents as well as tourists to the mountain with little knowledge and connectedness presented a further challenge.
State Member for Scenic Rim John Krause said the Local Disaster Management Group was responsible for the response but didn’t have enough flexibility to provide community input and being based in Beaudesert couldn’t offer local input.
Scenic Rim Mayor Tom Sharpe reiterated the need for local management saying centralisation doesn’t work in regional Australia.
He said the Council planned to provide new residents with welcome packs.
Lessons learned
While Adam Chanter, who led the Chainsaw Warriors, argued lessons were simply not being learned.
“At what point do we understand what we are doing is broken. We need a process in place that mobilises community and is resourced to do the work,” he stated.
Adam proposed the immediate response led here could be used as a pilot program for government for future disasters.
“We have done our apprenticeship through a lived experience and now the support needs to be formalised.
“A system that’s connected, that has digital capacity is infrastructure focused and connected and led through the community is what we should have.
“If the government invest in the community, we could get it done.”
Alistair pointed out that there is a standard in the Disaster Management Act for shared responsibility already with resources at different levels.
The SES said they were planning education sessions for locals to ensure they were better prepared in the future and called on people to sign up to volunteer.
Local Clare Wray has researched our resilience as a community to weather natural disasters and found we are moderately resilient with a score of 45 out of 110.
She said community resilience means being connected and able to work together so they are able to function and sustain critical systems, even under stress, adapt to changes and be self-reliant if external resources are limited.
Factors covered in the resilience index included: community connectedness, even under stress, the ability to be self-reliant and learn to improve over time.
We scored lowest in planning and procedures, although Clare found most households had plans, but the community wasn’t involved and until last Tuesday’s meeting was not involved in the pulling apart of how the event was managed.
“Our parent/child relationship with the council was one of vulnerabilities as well as our isolation from other communities being on a mountain,” she explained.
Clare said community connectedness is the number one thing for resilience.
“We confuse a genuine love for the place with a connectedness,” she said.
In order to improve our resilience Clare has recommended peer to peer welcome sessions and packs, which Cr Amanda Hay plans to implement and inter/intra-regional scenario planning twice a year, which would involve members of all the groups on the mountain coming together to discuss plans to embed learning and strategies.
She also recommends school curriculum programs include educating kids on disasters, which was done successfully in a Victorian school following the Black Saturday fires.
A program called Stormbirds is being run to support children to develop knowledge and skills of disasters at the library at various times.
Lastly, Clare recommended doing a survey again in two years’ time.
