A marine salvage and rescue crew from Busselton have been sent to North Queensland to help cleanup the destruction of Cyclone Debbie.
Eight team members from Geographe Marine Salvage and Rescue will likely spend the next six months working on a rotation to help the towns of Airlie Beach and Shute Harbour cleanup the destruction.
Geographe Marine Salvage and Rescue supervisor Tom Pusey said their truck left on Sunday night and it had taken a good week for the team to prepare for the journey to the eastern states.
“We are getting reports that people still do not have power, running water, sewerage or anything like that, it was one of the epicentres of the disaster,” he said.
The team mobilised their 8x8 truck - which is the only one of its kind in Australia - a salvage boat and a land cruiser – Mr Pusey said on top of that they had taken over more than four tonnes of equipment.
“We have taken generators, pumps, cut-saws, chainsaws and lifting equipment. Everything we that we use for a salvage operation was packed onto the back of the truck and trucked over to Queensland,” he said.
Our truck is quite a unique piece of equipment, we will be able to access these places, we can take all our stuff into these locations, and winch off the truck which has 250 tonne winches on the back. It is such an incredible piece of machinery, it was a mission to get it here and this is its first big-big exercise which we have headed over to the other side of the country for.
- Tom Pusey
Mr Pusey said many communities were still cutoff by flooded bridges and roads which had prevented equipment getting into towns.
He said they were expecting to be one of the first teams with heavy equipment on the scene because cranes and excavators could not access a lot of the places which were damaged.
“Especially in places like Airlie Beach and Mackay they are still waiting for equipment,” he said.
Mr Pusey said an insurance assessor had called on their help when reports started coming in that around 500 boats had been damaged during the cyclone.
“Entire marinas were taken out and boats were up on cliff-faces,” he said.
“They heard there was a team in WA that could deal with this kind of situation and had heavy equipment.
“From there they got in contact with us and it has been go-go-go to get the truck mobilised.”
Mr Pusey said the Geographe Marine Salvage and Rescue director Luke Purdy and his team Jordan Verrell, Mason Vickers, Bill Kent, Kade Mass and Matt Bevis arrived in Cairns on Wednesday morning and drove down the coast to assess the damage.
He said their team would focus on marine salvage at Airlie Beach and Shute Harbour over the next couple of days and would setup a base camp to make further assessments.
“Once the equipment is there and they have assessed the situation we will start doing a fly-in-fly-out roster with Jayde Towers and Jamie Cream,” he said.
“Salvage work is physically demanding, you do a week or two weeks and are absolutely pooped afterwards.”
