From the President

My Musings…..

Wayne Squires – President FBPA

This month I want to bring back the focus of this column to the aftermath of our terrible weather event in February. Or more specifically what the Progress Association undertook to do as part of the debriefing/public meeting process that was held in March.

Specifically, we agreed to work toward two goals. These were:

• To bring the Community Function Centre (CFC) up to a least an emergency shelter standard. To this end we now have the CFC fully air-conditioned, the roof re-screwed and strengthened in places where batons had been found to be defective. We are currently chasing more grants with the RACQ Foundation for a battery system and extra solar generation panels, to make the CFC not only a safe place but also a comfortable space during emergency situations. To this end we are meeting with council and emergency management personnel on the 5^th September. I will keep our readers up to date with this initiative as more information is available.
• The second initiative that we agreed to undertake was to maintain a register of people who may be vulnerable should services that they rely on not be available. In other words, if we are cut off as we were in February (with no power, communications or transport options), who are the people we need to see and get help to quickly.

These will often be the aged in our community who rely on services such as meals on wheels, home care visitation by nurses or other in-home care services. However, these are not the only people who should be on our register, there will be people in our community who have just returned from operations or who have fractures and cannot get about easily, and I am sure, other categories of people that we have not even thought of who should be on this register.

In such an event this people cannot wait even two days for help. They rely on help each day! (Obviously no help can be provided during the worst of a cyclone). If their usual services cannot get to them then the community will have to take on this responsibility (as we did in February).

However, if we do not know who needs help then we cannot help. Whilst we figured out through a lot of different sources this year who needed help this certainly took time and delayed help getting to people who were in desperate need.

This is why we believe that this register is such an important part of community self-help. We have found that we cannot always rely on government help in extreme situations such as we endured in February. We therefore must rely on our own resources as a weather system can leave us on our own.

We put this idea out for consultation earlier in the year through this newsletter and we only had positive feedback. Everyone who I talked to thought it was a great idea. Putting it into practice is somewhat harder.

Everyone is entitled to their privacy and so such a register must be kept strictly under control and only released to our warden/or other responsible person in the case of an emergency. Our secretary has agreed to keep the record on the association computer in a locked file that only he and the President of the association know the how to unlock – should both the Secretary and President be away during the wet season at the same time the unlocking code will be given to another member of the executive.

In next months newsletter I will publish a draft of the form that needs to be filled out so that members of the public can comment on it and/or suggest improvements. This process is by no means set in stone and we are happy to take constructive suggestions to make the process easier and simpler. At this stage the form will need to be filled in and sent back to the post office by letter – I had hoped to have a simple drop box in each of our retail stores, but I am informed that this will not meet privacy requirements.(Someone else can mail the form for you though).

Once received our secretary will add your name to the list. I envisage that these forms will be available at all stores in Forrest Beach and some agencies in Ingham. I am hoping that all service providers will encourage their clients to fill out a registration form.

The list will be deleted in late March or April when the last threat of cyclones or other extreme weather has passed. We will then start the whole process again in October next year.