Transcript
Ivy Jensen: Welcome to Talking Water with GMW. This month we are joined by Incident& Recovery general manager Daniel Irwin. Daniel talks about the different forms of support available to customers affected by the recent flooding, as well as how GMW will ensure its assets and infrastructure are all returned to normal working order. We release new episodes on the first week of every month, so check back in for more.
Sheree Fitzgerald: Daniel, thanks for your time.
Today we're going to talk about Goulburn-Murray Water and its role in incident and recovery for floods. A great place to start. Can you talk us through what Goulburn-Murray Water is doing to help the region recover from some of the recent floods?
Daniel Irwin: First and foremost, it's worthwhile recognizing that Goulburn-Murray Water covers such a large area, there are some parts of our network and district that are still inactive. We're continuing to work with local emergency services and the community in terms of working through the flood response. But then we also recognize that there are areas that are moving into that recovery phase.
So from Goulburn-Murray Water's perspective, we've established a dedicated flood recovery team with the aim of supporting that recovery for our customers and the community as well. The team in the initial stages have looked to identify initiatives that GMW can offer in support of our customers as they commence their recovery efforts. But then also understanding that GMW has many assets that have also been impacted by the floods. And so we've started the inspection of those assets to understand to what extent our assets have been damaged during this flood event as well.
Sheree Fitzgerald: All right. So what are some of the ways that Goulburn-Murray Water are helping customers through that process?
Daniel Irwin: I guess, importantly, we understand that this is going to be a long process for many of our customers, given the extent of the flooding and the damage to their properties and businesses. So we're assisting our customers in identifying what grants and information is available from a federal perspective and a state perspective. So certainly trying to link our customers into those opportunities.
But then more locally, I guess some of the smaller things that gold mine water can do to support our customers in this space as well. We're looking at offering a replacement of any water, entitlement records and statements free of charge. We're also made a decision to defer anyone whose fixed accounts were due in December. We've extended the due date on those by two months out to the 16th of February.
And we're encouraging anyone who is currently paying by instalments if they are experiencing any hardship or difficulties to make contact with GMW as early as they can and will work with those customers to find a suitable arrangement for anyone who has requested. Some of our customers already received a credit as a result of the irrigators share distribution and so where they have requested a refund of that credit.
We're processing those as quickly as we can. So some of the ways that we're aiming to help our customers and that information's available on our flood recovery web page. So there's a number of ways people can contact us, obviously through our reception contact details. We also have set up a dedicated flood recovery email address so that customers can contact us directly as well.
Sheree Fitzgerald: Daniel, a question around the scale of the recovery process, and you spoke about flooding being at different levels from working through a recovery process while some of our customers are still having to deal with the oncoming flood. What's the scale of the recovery process?
Daniel Irwin: Yeah, so during the response phase, we have already been out undertaking works urgent works, I guess in the response context to some of our levees and channels to assist in our local emergency services in managing those flood events. And we'll continue to do that as required. In some areas we have gone out and repaired some levee damage, particularly at Loch Garry.
So that has recently been repaired, noting that there is still further work to be done out there as access allows. We have more recently in some of our irrigation areas, commenced the inspection process. So there's somewhere in the order at the moment of around 450 kilometers of channel that we're inspecting, and that's just in our central and eastern regions. And then we obviously need, as access allows, again will identify a similar amount of channel probably to be inspected over in the western parts of our region. So as we're progressing through undertaking those inspections will be identifying any damage to those assets and then will obviously prioritize those repairs and conduct those repairs in the coming weeks or months, depending on what access allows.
Sheree Fitzgerald: And how long are we expecting the flood recovery works to take?
Daniel Irwin: Yeah, look, it's really probably too early to tell just at the moment exactly how long it's going to take. We do know it will be weeks into months and a lot of that just depends on when we can actually get access to a lot of our assets. So we will obviously prioritize returning services, you know, prioritize any works at our storage sites, our irrigation areas, but then it's likely to be a longer period of time before we can actually get in and look at our drainage infrastructure as an example.
So we're expecting it to be weeks in two months.
Sheree Fitzgerald: And how will Goulburn-Murray Water prioritize the repairs that it undertakes?
Daniel Irwin: So we're really looking at this from a service and public safety perspective. So definitely our first priority is to make sure that anything that poses any immediate safety risk to our staff or to the public will be a really high priority to ensure that we get that repaired. And then we will move into sort of prioritizing works to reinstate services or our customers.
As I said, in some instances, some of that prioritization will be based on when we can actually get access to some of those structures in a safe manner.
Sheree Fitzgerald: And I know we touched on this a little bit earlier, Daniel, but for any of our customers who are listening in, how can they access some of our flood recovery support?
Daniel Irwin: Yes, I would encourage our customers to visit our flood recovery web page or contact our customer call centre on one 1800 013.357.