February 5, 2013
The AGL Action Rescue Helicopter team was kept busy around Bundaberg and the North Burnett during last week’s flood emergency (see below), but it still had time to make two emergency calls into the South Burnett to assist local residents who had become stranded.
On Tuesday, January 29, the chopper airlifted a 67-year-old man suffering a serious abdominal condition from Murgon Hospital to Kingaroy Hospital when flooding made road transport impossible.
On the same day, it transported a 46-year-old man in need of renal dialysis from Proston to Toowoomba Base Hospital. He was also cut off by the floods.
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A week ago today, 18 rescue helicopters swarmed over the flood stricken streets of North Bundaberg, winching hundreds from their rooftops to refuge.
What many don’t realise, is that by then the region’s own AGL Action Rescue Helicopters had already saved dozens of lives. Braving atrocious weather in the wake of ex-tropical cyclone Oswald, the AGL Action Rescue Helicopters were the only air assets able to get through from the south to begin the rescue effort three days earlier.
For eight days, the Action Rescue crews worked tirelessly to save more than 100 people aged from just seven days to 92 years.
They winched families stranded on the roofs of their inundated homes, they rescued people left clinging to trees as the flood waters roared past, they evacuated the elderly and medical patients from hospitals and nursing homes, always putting their community ahead of themselves.
Bundaberg pilot Peter Potroz’s home was completely cut-off and his out-lying buildings inundated while he was in the air saving others from a similar fate.
The not-for-profit Rescue Service committed its own Bundaberg hangar to the rescue effort, becoming a triage point for 150 hospital evacuees and the staging point for the army’s black-hawk helicopters and personnel.
The service’s engineers worked around the clock, foregoing their Australian Day long weekend to ensure all three AGL Action Rescue Helicopters were committed to the effort. One had been due for its 300 hours service.
The AGL Action Rescue Helicopter Service is the state’s busiest Community Helicopter Provider and second only to the Queensland Government’s EMQ Helicopter in Brisbane – but during the flood crisis crews flew in excess of 83 hours to execute dozens of life saving rescues – a figure normally flown once every month.
In the first two days alone the Service’s “Rescue 511” flew 1600km, saving families in the out-lying communities of Bundaberg, the Fraser Coast, Gladstone, Gympie, Maryborough, and the North and South Burnett.
