WITH more than 40,000 tonnes of flood waste already collected from homes, businesses and streets across the MidCoast region, clean-up from the recent devastating floods is well and truly underway.

The amount of waste removed on the first 14 days of the clean-up effort is significantly more than the 25,000 tonnes collected each year from red bins across the entire region.

MidCoast Council has been working with recovery taskforce members in a joint effort with the NSW Police, SES, RFS, Fire and Rescue, Australian Defence Force and Public Works Advisory – along with a range of local contractors – to deal with the majority of the flood waste in such a short period.

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“A huge thank you to the ADF and to the other agencies who have had members travel from outside the region to spend the last fortnight helping across the MidCoast.

“A number of these crews have now moved to other areas of need but their assistance has been invaluable,” said Council’s Director of Liveable Communities, Paul De Szell.

“The clean-up will continue as we welcome Disaster Relief Australia into our region, to assist our team and contractors along with local SES and RFS volunteers.”

Disaster Relief Australia is an Australian non-government organisation that unites the skills and experience of military veterans with emergency services specialists to deploy disaster relief teams in the wake of natural disasters.

“We are really pleased Disaster Relief Australia will be in our region to help support the continued clean-up of flood impacted areas,” Mr De Szell said.

“While the strike force teams were able to get into our main towns and business areas and make a big difference quickly, we are now facing a different more strategic phase of the clean-up where affected properties are more spread out and have a range of different issues for us to deal with.”

Mr De Szell said that with the bulk of the clean-up complete, the process for collection will now slow down.

Members of the community who may have been delayed with their clean-up due to insurance or accessibility issues, will need to phone the Flood Recovery Hotline on 1300 545 400 and register their pick-up.

“We’ve done a sweep of all flood-affected areas that we could access, but moving forward we will be relying on those who need the service to register for pick-up so we know exactly where we have missed.

“The clean-up is just the beginning, we will be recovering from this flood event for a long time.”