Fully equipped modern $1.8 million centre for earthquakes, bushfires, floods, and other major incidents.
Newcastle’s new emergency operations facility set to help response to earthquakes, bushfires, floods, and other major incidents.
Newcastle
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Just weeks before the 30th anniversary of the Newcastle earthquake, a modern emergency operations centre has got the tick of approval unanimously from Newcastle councillors.
It will be a fully equipped space for emergency services and welfare agency personnel to manage and co-ordinate responses to natural disasters, such as earthquakes, bushfires, floods, and other major incidents.
And it will have all the hi-tech equipment needed for a comprehensive and speedy response from all agencies including police, RFS, NSW Fire and Rescue and SES.
That will include eight dedicated workstations, a 32-seat room or breakaway space, conferencing facilities with weather and traffic cameras as well as high-speed wi-fi, printing and scanning.
Impressively, it will also house a kitchen area capable of providing meals during a citywide blackout and two diesel powered generators capable of indefinitely powering 100 per cent of the building load.
“The new facility will be a modern fit for purpose operation centre which will have all the IT and digital equipment in a space that can accommodate 20-30 people in emergencies,” City of Newcastle Director of Governance David Clarke said.
“You have a lot of people come together on very short notice of many different agencies where access to different information, sharing of resources and the ability to pinpoint what’s going on is very important.”
The ageing existing facility at Tighes Hill has now become unsuitable for emergency operations, with the latest catastrophic bushfire events in the Hunter co-ordinated from Newcastle’s City Library as a temporary location.
“Our existing facility in Tighes Hill is an old building which really lacks facilities and equipment and IT resources that are necessary to support such a centre,” Mr Clarke said.
State Emergency Service’s (SES) Newcastle Commander, Ian Robinson, said the new facility will be a really good addition and back up support in the case of any natural disaster.
“The real advantage is that none of the existing services communications equipment talks to each other, that doesn’t happen,” he said.
“The police, fireys, SES, the ambulance all have different radio communication technologies, they don’t interconnect and they don’t cross talk so it puts everyone in the same room.
“The liaison can tell each other in real time this is what is happening for us so it provides updates in current circumstances and gives us the opportunity to get orders put out quickly.”
The sixth floor of the City of Newcastle’s Administration Centre on Stewart Av is where the operations centre will be established.
It is expected to cost $1.8 million and be operational by May 2020.
“We all hope emergencies won’t happen but sometimes they do,” Mr Clarke said.
“The emergency services need to be able to see what’s happening in the field, they need to be collecting data from people in the field and communicating those resources.
“It really gives us the best picture of what is happening on the ground.”