Gippsland floods: Heyfield and Yinnar BlazeAid camps need tractor and volunteers

Disaster-aid charity BlazeAid is back helping flood victims at the same place it helped bushfire victims only a couple of years ago.

Blazeaid has set up a base camp at Heyfield to help farmers clean-up debris and rebuild fences after the June floods. Picture: BlazeAid

Disaster-aid charity BlazeAid, which has now launched two base camps at Heyfield and Yinnar, needs volunteers to help farmers clean-up debris and rebuild fences destroyed by the Gippsland floods.

BlazeAid operations manager Melissa Jones said the floods had left an “absolute mess”.

“There’s piles and piles of debris that to be frank can’t be really lifted by hand, they need big machinery in there to move it – it’s that much.”

“There’s big tree logs piled up around the fences as well.

“They’ve got burnt logs there that came down in the bushfire affected areas a couple of years ago. They’re starting to surface on people’s properties.”

Farms remain flooded at Heyfield. Picture: BlazeAid

But despite the damage, Ms Jones said BlazeAid was struggling to get farmers to accept help.

“They’re all going ‘So-and-so down the road needs more help than me. I’ll be okay.’ And they’ve got kilometres of fencing to be cleared,” she said.

“It’s very fresh and new at the moment. We’ll be there three months at least so perhaps in time when they see their neighbours getting help they might put their hand up.”

Ms Jones said the Heyfield camp had about 18 volunteers on Monday, after setting up the camp late last week.

The Yinnar camp, which launched Monday, is in the process of chasing up farmers who registered for help and is expected to have volunteers on the ground working by the end of the week.

Yinnar camp co-ordinator Luke van der Meulen, who co-ordinated a BlazeAid camp at the same place in 2019 after the bushfires, said they needed volunteers.

“We could never have enough,” he said.

And that the group also desperately needed a small tractor that could pull trailers.

“Some of the places are going to be hard to get into already but with loose wet ground that’s going to be making it even harder,” he said.

The Victorian Farmers Federation is still waiting on a reply to its call for financial assistance from the Victorian Government over a week ago.

“I do not think the scale and impact of this enormous disaster has been fully appreciated,” VFF president Emma Germano said.

“Thousands of farmers were hit by this devastating storm and ensuing floods with the damage bill running into the hundreds of thousands of dollars for many of these farmers. This warrants government assistance.”

Ms Germano also said the Government’s recent announcement of an agriculture recovery manager was inadequate.