“We had virtually no rain over the weekend. All this is happening because of rain in the upper catchments. This is nothing out of the extraordinary. People here are fairly used to a bit of water and at the moment the Mitchell River is still within its banks. The caravan park next to the river in town has been evacuated because the river hasn’t yet reached its peak.
“Crews from Bairnsdale and Mount Taylor have been out recording the river level and taking photos. It’s essentially recording history. When the river gets to a certain level, what does that mean for the town.
“We have had volunteers working out of the IMT and Ops Manager Stephen Walls has been the Incident Controller since Sunday.”
As District 10 Operations Manager Allan Rankin sees it, “The impact has been minimal.”
“We initially had reports of significant inflows into Lake Glenmaggie and there was potential for flooding from the water releases. The advice from the upstream gauges was found to be erroneous with the expected 40,000 megalitres a day actually being 28,000 megalitres a day. It was a gauge error as opposed to what was in the system.
“As a support agency to SES, our job was to notify our people and they were prepared to support. In reality, SES was stood down quite early on Sunday and our resources were never actually put into operation.
“There has been a small handful of roads with water over them and some minor inundation of farm land within the Macalister irrigation district. From our point of view, all we’ve seen are some higher river heights but they have largely stayed within their banks.
“There will be a lot of flow into the Gippsland Lakes which will give them a good flush. Overall I’d say that we have had no issues in District 10.”
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