Transport association Western Roads Federation (WRF) has continued to call for the transport industry to prepare for freight disruptions across the country as a tropic cyclone warning has been issued across WA and the Northern Territory.
The warning comes as WRF recently led an initiative that brought together federal, Western Australian, South Australian and Northern Territory governments alongside emergency agencies, regulators and the transport industry to address freight disruption issues when trucks cross state borders.
After a face-to-face meeting in Adelaide back in July, a virtual meeting was held a couple of weeks ago to improve coordination.
The first agenda item was about devising a freight system approach to the WA, SA and NT freight resilience challenge.
WRF CEO Cam Dumesny says impacts on one part of the network can impact all three jurisdictions, meaning there’s a need for closer-coordination of all three regions to prepare and respond to disruptions.
He says the emerging recognition of the need to increase regional stock holding will result in a short-term buffer against outages while the freight system responds, but that there needs to be Commonwealth recognition and leadership on the matter.
“It also emphasises the need to maintain a resilient network of southern basing infrastructure focused on force generation, sustainment, health networks and logistics nodes to sustain combat operations and support Australian forces,” Dumesny says.
The second main issue discussed is industry and road safety during these incidents, with Main Roads WA and the National Heavy Vehicle Regulator working on improving response times to establish alternative routes.
Dumesny says road freight surges to meet demand during rail outages has led to spikes in serious accidents and incidents due to inexperienced truck drivers. He says consideration needs to be given to restricting or limiting access to experienced operators on the route during major outages.
Lastly, incident coordination and cooperation is also a focus, as limited mobile phone coverage hinders responses to incidents. For example, the Telstra mobile coverage is just 1,000km of the 3,000km of the Stuart Highway.
Dumesny says he has reached out to Telstra and the federal government to discuss ways of increasing coverage on these major cross-jurisdictional freight routes.
“Translating the strong interest from industry in working with Police and Emergency services more closely needs to be followed up. A concept is being formulated for a small-scale multi-agency exercise involving industry,” Dumesny says.