Community
3 September, 2025
Busy weekend for SES
THE Cobden State Emergency Service (SES) unit had a busy weekend amid stormy conditions as they rushed to clear roads of trees and debris to keep the community safe.
On the night of Friday, August 29, Cobden SES attended over 30 jobs across the district and were out for six hours in the dark.
Deputy controller Sue Sartori said most of the jobs were ones they found when attending other ones, racing from incident to incident to clear the way for traffic.
“There were seven jobs on the night that were called in, that the dispatch contacted us for,” she said.
“All the rest were jobs we came across, like we’d just be finished up clearing one tree then there’d be another one.
“Because there are only milk tankers on the road, no one was calling them in, but certainly the milk tankers wouldn’t have been able to get through.
“There were massive gum trees right across the road.
“There was no way anything could get around it.”
Ms Sartori said they had two crews out to cover a wide area, but as an ageing unit, more younger members were needed to keep up with the demand.
“We had two crews go out, one with four and one with three, and we were able to cover the Jancourt area up to Simpson with one crew and Scotts Creek up towards Timboon with the other,” she said.
“That’s why we need lots of members, so we can send those two vehicles out at the same time, otherwise we would’ve been out a lot longer than six hours.
“Imagine having to come back then go to the other areas.
“We’re an ageing unit, so the more young ones that come along, the better.
“Everyone would have woken up to a hell of a mess if we hadn’t been out on Friday night – they just wouldn’t have been able to go anywhere.”
Ms Sartori said she wanted to highlight the importance of the work the SES did on nights like these – completely on a volunteer basis.
“We were prepared, we all gave our availability and also if we were available for deployment to other units,” she said.
“We were just laying in bed waiting for the pager to go off.
“We almost had a tree hit the truck – there was a massive gum tree that fell down, I think it was the Cobden-Lavers Hill Road.
“We had to slam the brakes down – it was right in front of the truck so we were lucky.”
At the end of the day, Ms Sartori said storm events were the preferred option when it came to types of jobs they were called out to at the SES.
“We’d much rather go to storm events than car accidents,” she said.
“If we didn’t pick the trees up off the road, there would be car accidents.”
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