By Jonty Ralphsmith
An emergency management exercise, ‘Operation Voltus’, was conducted on Thursday 10 February at Lysterfield Park with members from SES, Parks Victoria, Life Saving Victoria and Victoria Police all in attendance.
The crews worked collaboratively on a mock scenario of a seven-year-old child with autism going missing.
It was an important exercise that offered crucial learning as such drills have been limited in recent years due to the coronavirus pandemic, according to acting senior sergeant Matt Davey.
“We’ve all got a large number of members that haven’t been able to work with other first responders down at the field and build relationships,” said sen sgt Davey, also a member of the City of Casey’s Emergency Management Plan committee.
“It was a great opportunity to get us out and work together and see how we all do business and build relationships locally so when it comes time for the real event, we’re not just meeting for the first time and learning how the agencies work – we already have a good understanding of who’s who and how we work and what our response capabilities are.”
The search and rescue operation lasted about three hours with crews searching on the ground and with drones, identifying a number of items before the mock child was located.
Victoria SES Narre Warren unit controller Damian Burns said it was beneficial for their crews to take part in such a scenario.
“It was great to practice our coordination between ourselves,” Mr Burns said.
“One of our response capabilities is search so we need to be across search planning and strategy.
“We were regimented in how we follow orders and how we integrate with others when it comes to search and rescue at a low level – when search and rescue come, they are the experts but until they come, we are the experts.
“There was a good cross section of what you would expect to turn out if this was for real – beginners and people that were fairly advanced.”
