When ATCO sent a pop-up mall to save a village

BCA’s Biggies Awards finalist: Structures and logistics company ATCO Australia helped small businesses to trade through the bushfire crisis.

Homes and businesses were destroyed when fire ravaged the historic town of Mogo.

The Business Council of Australia’s Biggies Awards finalist: Structures and logistics company ATCO Australia helped small businesses to trade through the bushfire crisis.

-

When fire tore through Mogo on NSW’s south coast last year, homes and businesses were reduced to ash, leaving traders stranded without a space to operate their businesses.

Within weeks, structures and logistics company ATCO had erected a pop-up shopping mall, allowing small businesses to trade through the crisis and restore hope that they would be able to successfully rebuild their community.

The donation of 13 modular buildings — designed, sourced and dispatched to Mogo and installed in just two weeks — followed an approach from the Business Council of Australia.

The peak body had reached out to ATCO soon after setting up BizRebuild, an initiative to drive a co-ordinated business response to the Australian bushfire catastrophe which erupted in the summer of 2019-2020.

As Mogo business operators have since said, ATCO’s modular buildings — which cost about $200,000 but were worth so much more to the ravaged town — enabled them to get back to work and get their lives back together again.

The Mogo pop-up mall provided a tangible, immediate way for the community to rebuild, providing temporary accommodation for local businesses who lost their premises, equipment and merchandise when the village was hit hard by bushfires on New Year’s Eve.

It also provided new accommodation for the Mogo Local Aboriginal Land Council.

ATCO global CEO Nancy Southern says: “I am so proud of the people of ATCO.

“Their hard work, determination and courage have truly made a difference in the communities we serve.”

At the launch of the Mogo pop-up mall, Southern donated an additional $1m to BizRebuild. ATCO also donated $118,000 to local charities, including the Red Cross.

ATCO’s NSW operations manager Aaron Vella and NSW manager Brett Turpin were on the ground in Mogo, a community of about 300 residents near Batemans Bay, just weeks after the fires hit.

“It was pretty daunting to see the whole town burnt out and blackened,” Vella says.

“It provided a bit of hope when people heard they were going to have a pop-up mall within two to three weeks of us seeing the site.

“When we opened the Mogo mall it was a bit of cheer, people clapping and smiling.

“It made me proud to work for ATCO.”

Teaming up with the local chamber of commerce, ATCO set to work to build the demountables into new premises for the businesses that had been razed to the ground when fire destroyed much of the main street.

Vella says it was exciting to see how the mall had reversed the fates of the small businesses, including an accountancy firm, the Aboriginal Land Council, a leather shop, and a dog grooming business.

Vella returned to Mogo last November to check in on the business owners who had also been hit by the COVID-19 pandemic.

“One of them gave me a hug and said thank you and that they’re grateful for what we’ve done,” he says. “On a personal level it made a difference, it was a project where we made a difference to people’s lives.

“Normally we just put buildings into schools or construction sites. But it was a bit more personal this time.

“We don’t normally get hugs from clients.”

ATCO managing director Tom Parojus says he was proud his company’s efforts had allowed small businesses to be self-sufficient.

“Within the space of a fortnight we had ascertained their needs and found a building to suit and co-ordinated the whole business operation from Mogo,” he says.

“What our shopping centre did was to allow businesses to continue making an income within their local community.”

He says the benefit of temporary structures was that they were able to be occupied immediately, while the slow process of rebuilding was underway.

“If it wasn’t for our buildings there is no way they would have been able to trade,” he says.

“If you had built new buildings it would take 18 months to two years to build. We were able to get those up within two weeks.”

ATCO was established in 1961, originally leveraging its expertise in temporary structures and logistics to service Australia’s resource sector.

The company now employs about 6500 people globally and operates as a one-stop provider of integrated energy, housing, transportation and infrastructure solutions.