Following the destruction of the Black Saturday bushfires, Elise Hughan explores how one small contractor brought Gippsland’s major transmission station back on air.

On 7 February 2009, bushfires raged across Victoria devastating homes, communities and lives. On a day that peaked at over 46°C, Central Gippsland was hit and with it 11 lives, 146 homes and nearly 26,000 hectares of land were lost.

The Mt Tassie Transmission Station provides the majority of transmission services for TV and radio in the Gippsland area. When services ceased, regular maintenance workers Grouts Electrical were escorted by police the following day to investigate the situation.

“It was nothing like I’d ever seen before,” says managing director John Grout.

“There was an area where the fire must have been so strong and so intense that the actual ground was burnt. Not just the trees, but the dirt was scorched.”

Upon arriving at the Broadcast Australia site, the electricians discovered the entire switch room housing the main switchboard and generator had been destroyed.

An office to the side was missing its roof and the control systems for the building, including heating and cooling, had been wiped out.

Surprisingly, the section of the building that housed the transmission equipment was untouched by fire and only suffered smoke damage.
It was at that point that Grouts Electrical, now known as Platinum Electrical Contractors Gippsland, began work in an operation that would last over 18 months and earn them a 2011 NECA Victoria Excellence Award.

“We knew the bushfires were happening,” John says.  “We’d been listening to the radio and we could see the enormous amount of smoke.”

“It wasn’t nice driving up and through all the destruction. You knew people had lost their homes; some people had lost their families. But someone had to do it and it was us.”

As repair work began, Broadcast Australia monitored the safety levels of the site. While some areas were cordoned off owing to structural concerns, others were excluded due to the risk of asbestos in the partially demolished building.

“I can’t remember how long it took from the day we were there to when we got the temporary system operating,” John says.

“The main switchboard that was destroyed virtually fed a series of distribution board inside the building. The first thing we had to do was ascertain how we could actually power the thing up.”

Two generators were brought on site, each not singularly large enough to power the station. As the high voltage supply had also been destroyed, temporary main switches were installed. These were fed into the auto transfer switches and distribution boards wired to restore power to the station.

“Once we’d done that, naturally we needed to test and make sure it all worked and was safe. We then had to remove the remnants of the damaged cabling and connect that system temporarily,” John says.

Even in the weeks following the fires, police tape blocked off areas to the public.

“There was a sombre mood for a while. Everyone was shocked. Almost everyone knew someone who had lost their home.”

Despite having previously worked in buildings that had experienced fires, John says the scale of the damage at Mt Tassie was something he and his team had never experienced.

“It was a huge priority to get things working again. The challenge was that, once we had the site temporarily operational, we had to be very careful about how we made it permanent. We couldn’t shut people off for too long.”

Each generator was made to work at half capacity to achieve this, ensuring that there was backup power provided, and the circuits on both the old and new systems were fully working and powered.

There was a period of over a week where John and his team worked between one and four in the morning on cutovers, while additional night work was programmed to try and minimise the impact of power-outages in Gippsland.

John, who had a young daughter at the time and was also working days to maintain his business, admits that night work was challenging but needed to be done.

“You only have to think about what all the people who lived in the area had to go through and it’s not a big sacrifice to do that sort of thing,” he says.

As the months of restoration continued, the weather on the mountain began to cool down. Fortunately for Grouts staff, Mt Tassie was spared from the usual winter snow that season, helping to minimise disruptions to repair work.

There was an entire section of wiring, cable trays, switchboards and generators that were installed in the middle of winter when the structure and walls of the generator room hadn’t been rebuilt. John recalls wearing a lot of layers in the freezing weather.

“We’d sometimes go and have brew or lunch and we’d come back out and the whole room would be filled with a cloud. It was bizarre.”

As the permanent system was planned, Grouts Electrical moved the location of the main switchboard from the previous burned generator room to the transmission room that had suffered little fire damage.

The most important consideration of the process was to give the transmission station the ability to be controlled from a remote location. The operation network in Sydney needed to have the information and ability to ensure all systems at the site are functioning properly; from how much fuel the generator has to whether or not a fault has occurred.

“That centre has to know if there’s a fault or a problem on the site, and they have to control it remotely,” John says.

But despite being remotely monitored, Mt Tassie was actually manned at the time of the Gippsland fires. One person had been called to repair a fault at the station and was on site when the fire swept through.

“If he wasn’t there, the damage would have been a lot more extensive,” John says.

“He got the fire fighting system set up and as the front came over he put out the spot fires around the building and managed to keep himself alive as well.”

Following the repairs, the fire fighting equipment was updated and upgraded. Having been damaged in the fire, a new system that was both better and larger than the older was installed.

The new system consists of two tanks and a large pump that allows the water to be driven from the bottom tank to the top one. While Grouts were involved with installing the electricity and controls to the pumping system, another contractor positioned various inputs around the site where hoses can be plugged in and have access to water in the possibility of future fire threats.

“Essentially, at the end of the day all we were doing was resupplying sub mains to distribution boards for the main part, so that wasn’t too unusual,” John says.

“The main thing for us which was a bit out of the ordinary was the monitoring system that was installed.”

With over 50 alarms that relay to the network centre operation, John says that implementing the alarms and ensuring they integrated with the system as a whole was a challenge but the group never felt they had something to complain about.

“So many people suffered so much throughout that area that whatever little challenges we faced on site sort of paled in comparison,” he says.

As the transmission technology was installed, so too were new elements for the building’s system. These installations included an HVAC system to replacethe burned one, a new emergency and exit lighting system and a mechanical system with sensors and controls throughout the building. In addition to this the damaged cabling had to be removed and the burned office area needed to be rewired and rebuilt.

“It’s remarkable how quickly it all grows back,” John says.

“If you went for a drive up there you can still see burnt trees, but all the foliage has come back, all the ground cover’s come back.”

With work completed on the project Grouts Electrical were recognised for their efforts by being announced winners of the 2011 NECA Victoria Excellence Award in the Small Contracting Business.

“It is bitter sweet to win an award for a project like this,” says John.

“It’s always nice to win an award and be recognised, and we did do a good quality job under some difficult circumstances.

“But it would have been nicer to win a job that’s work came about without so much destruction caused to other people’s lives.”