Members of Rotary International from Holbrook to Melbourne have banded together to lead an essential ‘hands-on’ project as part of the bushfire recovery efforts in the Upper Murray.
Graeme Sayer from the Rotary Club of Belvoir Wodonga says like many volunteer groups and individuals, Rotarians were quick to respond in whatever way they could.
“Our Rotary district very quickly put a project together to get some people here to do some volunteer fencing for the Corryong community,” Graeme said.
While there are team leaders who have experience in fencing, other Rotarians and volunteers are joining in with a lot of the grunt work.
“A lot of the work we’re doing is demolishing fences where the posts have been burnt and the fence can’t be repaired, so we go out and do that,” Graeme said.
“We’ll then go through and put the fence up. We see the priority as perimeter fencing, we’re not doing any internal fencing at this stage.
“What we can do with about 40 people is a drop in the ocean of what really needs to be done, but the farming community and the Corryong community can see that we’ve responded pretty quickly to help them”
While Rotarians are playing their part in the fence building project, they’re keen for anyone to join them.
“We had police officers come off duty a couple of days ago, they said they’d like to help, so we have nine off-duty police officers helping with the fencing,” Graeme said.
“We’ve had a couple of people travel down from Brisbane, someone rang from Burke to tell us they’re coming next week.
“We also need to thank organisations back in Albury Wodonga like Scot’s School and Westmont who are cooking dinners for us and bringing those up on a daily basis.”
If you’d like to register interest in the Upper Murray fencing building project, send an email: [email protected]
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