By Casey Neill
Clear the back yard, clean the gutters and stay inside.
That’s the advice from the Greater Dandenong SES unit controller ahead of extreme storms predicted to hit Victoria this weekend from Friday 1 December.
Shane Bolton said his team was preparing to render assistance to victims of the deluge from Friday to Monday, with a month’s worth of rain expected.
“I’ve got our members registering their availability now – because everyone’s volunteer they can’t be avail all the time,” he said.
“We’re putting our crews together and also scheduling breaks.
“We’ll be doing a day shift and then another shift until midnight for four days.
“We’ll have three crews for all of that.”
Mr Bolton said there were usually four or five people on a crew.
“We’re getting sandbags. We’re ordering sand to fill the sandbags,” he said.
“We’re scheduling our incident management team.
“We’ve got people on the field managing the situation.
“We’ll be liaising with the Dandenong incident control centre, which will be open tomorrow (Friday) I’d imagine.”
He said the low estimate from the Bureau of Meteorology was for a moderate storm event “which we’ve probably all seen before”.
“But the high estimates are an extreme storm event, which is likely something that we’ve never seen,” he said.
“We’ve got flood overlays for the whole of the city of Greater Dandenong.
“We’ve got all of those and we know them like the back of our hand, but it really just depends on how much rain and in what period.”
Mr Bolton urged Greater Dandenong residents to bring garden furniture, play equipment and trampolines inside if possible.
“If you can’t do that, tie it down,” he said.
“Clean your gutters. Stay out of the weather.
“The big message in the whole lot is don’t enter floodwater.
“You don’t know what’s in the water.”
