Ipermedia
www.ipermedia.com.au
WARWICK EAST SS
[Start of recorded material]
Warren Elder:
[0:00:05.1] I’ve been Principal here at Warwick East for seven
years, and in my time we’ve recovered I think from four floods,
so that’s our main natural disasters.
I know a lot of the issues in terms of being prepared and
responding is knowing where all your stock books are, knowing
who the key people are is the main response factor, and having
your community and staff and students really well, I guess
informed on what the procedures and protocols are, that’s a big
thing in preparing for our flood season.
The two most frequent drills we hold at this school, and I know
all schools, but we have a lockdown procedure. We would use a
lockdown procedure, and we practice that at least once a term.
And our evacuation procedure, which would be in response to a
fire, we practice that again once a term. We move everyone out
of our school in less than four minutes, and a lockdown, we
have everyone in the one block in I’d say probably about seven
to eight minutes, yeah, so it’s good.
We have a disaster management protocol, and it covers a whole
range of things, including hailstorms and fire. We go through
our Emergency Management Plan each pupil-free day, and in
January, just to make sure that everyone is familiar with the
general roles, and all the roles are really well spelt out there,
what the class teacher needs to do, what the office staff need to
do.
Leigh Hobson:
[0:01:57.9] We have an Emergency Management Plan for the
floods. Each year we assess the weather towards the end of the
year, looking at our flooding season being during the school
holidays. The key issue being prepared for any event like this is
knowing what to expect at different height levels for the flood.
This is mainly through local knowledge and historical data. We
do have our flood heights listed from the last few years, and
where it went into each building, what height it got to, and
knowing at what stage we need to evacuate different areas of the
school.
We have a priority list of equipment that needs to be taken off
site or lifted during the floods. Part of our daily process is to
take a back up tape off site. If there’s a flood around, I do
ensure I have an extra one, just as a precaution. If you lose the
server, you don’t have access to any of your school G drive,
although you do have one school as it’s web-based now, so that
is a major step forward.
-1-
Ipermedia
www.ipermedia.com.au
Warren Elder:
[0:03:04.7] We’ve learned a lot about preparing for flood events
over the years, having faced a few, and the sort of things we do
is we would move some of the stuff prior to the Christmas
holidays, and if the classrooms are in a vulnerable area, we
might ask them to pack up some of their equipment into plastic
tidy trays and lift them up high, and some of the main things like
fridges and photocopiers we would move to higher ground prior
to the holidays, and in coming weeks I will, in my newsletter,
ask parents if they would be willing to be contacted over the
holidays to come in and assist with a flood occurrence, so that’s
something we do.
Leigh Hobson:
[0:03:53.7] We had a flood in January this year, which was quite
a surprise, we weren’t expecting it. At that stage the flood
height was expected to be six metres. So we moved some
equipment from the lower buildings, we took the tractor off site,
and we moved some of the grounds equipment. Through the
night I was contacted by the SES saying the flood estimation
height was higher than expected, so we met again here at eight
o’clock the next morning. There were volunteers already here,
so we went through the Emergency Evacuation Plan as to which
items we needed to move to safer ground.
Isabella:
[0:04:36.7] Well, the oval went under, like completely, it sort of
looked like a swimming pool, and all the upper classrooms did
not get flooded, but the old prep building went under, and so did
the Year 1 building.
Shannon:
[0:04:52.1] You had to have a lot of teamwork to fix everything
and get everything back. My Mum, Dad and I, we helped clean
out Mr Taylor the Groundsman’s shed out, like took all the tools
out, hosed them off, took them back in. We mopped and hosed
out the old prep room. It made me feel pretty good knowing
that, because I wasn’t too happy finding out that we had to wait
a week for school to start, so I felt pretty happy that I’ve helped
clean up.
Warren Elder:
[0:05:24.9] The main focus, because people aren’t present on
site during the Christmas holidays, we need to make sure that
we have a good plan in place, and our plan would involve a list
of people to contact, a list of people from Regional Office who
we would contact, our Facilities Manager and our local Account
Manager, as well as the Regional Director, and we would make
sure that we have main key holders like myself, we would know
when I was away on holidays or available to be contacted. We
would run through that with staff.
Leigh Hobson:
[0:06:01.0] In the clean up of the flood, our communication is
via the website. This year we had a school closure. I linked the
-2-
Ipermedia
www.ipermedia.com.au
Department’s website to ours, so that our parents could just go
onto our website and follow the link to the Department’s
information.
To prepare for the children to come back to school this year, we
had to have the sandpits emptied and replaced with clean sand.
We had the gardens replaced with fresh chip bark. The lawn
was mowed and the clippings taken off the ground. The main
priority is the health and safety of our students and staff.
Warren Elder:
[0:06:41.9] During the recovery process, the support I get from
my Facilities Branch from Regional Office is the most
reassuring, and you know that I can do my job as a Principal of
the school and focus on teaching and learning, and knowing that
every safety factor and every replacement in terms of resources
and facilities will be taken care of really by the experts whose
field it is, and I know that they really give us a very high
priority.
In terms of capital works at Warwick East, we have removed
two older buildings that were sitting on the ground level, and
they’ve been replaced by a new modular prep, which will stand
approximately two metres off the ground, and we know that it
will be above the 1976, which is the highest recorded flood we
have. Not only does that mean that that will be three more
buildings that won’t go under floods each tie, but it also gives us
another location to move resources to prior to the Christmas
holidays or in response to a flood event. So we have fewer
buildings that will flood, and we have more locations where we
can remove resources to, to be above the flood.
The biggest priority was to make sure the facilities were ready.
We made sure that we talked to students about what had
happened, and we made sure they knew, they saw all the photos
we had of the floods, and we made that into a slide show that
every student was able to see, so they understood what had
happened on site during the holidays, or what preparations had
been made leading up to them coming back to school. So those
students who didn’t live near the school, they were really
informed about all the things that had happened, and they knew
all about the volunteers, and they knew all about the fact that the
sandpits had been cleansed and the lawns had been mown, so
that they were also very confident that the facilities they were
coming back to were safe and hygienic, and I believe that laid
the foundation for them then to go into normal classes and not
be concerned about other issues.
Donna Angel
[0:09:12.1] The key actions are to make contact with the
families, find out how they’ve been affected by the flood, and
then look at scoping what the needs are, whether there’s some
-3-
Ipermedia
www.ipermedia.com.au
way that the school, or the Chaplains who serve us can support
them, by providing bags, resources, books, lunch boxes, food,
whatever’s needed to start off on the track to get them back to
school, as well as to find out what the family needs. They might
need just some emotional support at home, or they may need
connection with another service that can assist them.
I think it’s important for staff to be watchful about their own
health, and that’s where I guess the role of the Chaplain comes
in, to be looking out for them. There will be some signs that
they may not be aware of, because they’re just trying to cope.
Taking time out sounds like a great idea for staff. It’s not
always a reality for them. They also often feel that they need to
keep going and get away from what’s going on at home, and do
something proactive. But it’s still important to be conscious of
how they’re handling stress, whether they need to perhaps touch
base with their health professionals, and perhaps just so some of
those little extra things, like looking out for them, providing a
cup of coffee, just those little caring touches that people really
need when they’re feeling a little overwhelmed and not doing so
well at home.
Long term, I think as time goes on you can still see some
impacts around staff, particularly as it comes up to summer, the
wet time of the year, what’s going to happen this year, the mind
starts going further ahead and pre-empting what could happen.
There have been some strategies I’ve observed that we’ve put in
place at the school. An important function that I’ve been able to
be involved in is still to try and be mindful of staff morale, and
to keep some of those nice things going, like social activities,
keeping the social club vibrant, allowing staff to have time to
get together, to talk through things, debrief, talk about their
experiences and share that.
Warren Elder:
[0:11:26.6] Make sure that your wider school community,
including parents, are aware of what your emergency procedures
are. Make sure that you have really accessible records of all of
your stock and where it’s located prior to an event, if you have
warning, and we often do. Have a very clear plan for what you
would do in responding to that emergency. You particularly
need to know what you’re going to do in the immediate
aftermath of a flood, and have a very clear picture in your mind
of what the priorities are there, but also there’s other stages of
responding, and things like what happens a week later and two
weeks later, and a priority really is contacting your local
Facilities Branch, and making sure you get them on board ASAP
after the event so they can mobilise Q Build, and start taking
stock of what damage has been done and what resources need
replacing. So you really need to make that contact very early
with your regional staff.
-4-
Ipermedia
www.ipermedia.com.au
[End of recorded material]
-5-