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Topic:Extreme Weather Events
Emergency service crews have staged a dramatic operation to salvage the wrecks of more than a dozen vehicles along Victoria's Surf Coast.
The vehicles were washed to sea when a record-breaking downpour burst the banks of rivers around Wye River and Lorne during school holidays last week.
(Supplied: Victoria State Emergency Service)
(Supplied: Victoria State Emergency Service)
(Supplied: Victoria State Emergency Service)
(Supplied: Victoria State Emergency Service)
(Supplied: Victoria State Emergency Service)
As tides burdened the wrecks with sand and water, crews had to work quickly to remove them from the pristine coastal environment.
"Great Ocean Road is known across the world for its environmental values," Chris Longmore from Victoria's State Emergency Service said.
"We're also in an area of significant cultural heritage values for the Eastern Marr people.
"We needed to work really closely with traditional owners, with land managers, around how best to respect environment and cultural heritage values but recover those vehicles."
An unprecedented 180 millimetres of rain fell in just a few hours during a storm last Thursday, causing flash floods in the communities of Lorne, Cumberland River, Wye River and Separation Creek.
Videos of cars being swept out to sea along with surging stormwater were shared not long after the downpour.
Crews had been considering whether to remove the vehicles by land or sea before deciding to winch them out by air with a Black Hawk helicopter.
A marine salvage crew helped secure the wrecks to a helicopter overhead.
"Others had some quite large boulders, sand and other debris that had built up over the last week of being in this environment.
"The crews needed to support a reduction in weight in those vehicles or digging and making those vehicles more accessible.
"But we were able to achieve that on most of the vehicles we sought to recover today."'
Mr Longmore said each extraction was a complex process.
"It's always an unknown. What appears simple from the surface, once you get down and start to try to recover and extricate those vehicles and caravan chassis, can become more complex," he said.
"The team did a fantastic job, and some vehicles came up really simply and were really being held down by water."
Authorities shut a stretch of the Great Ocean Road for five hours earlier on Thursday while the operation was underway.
All but one of the vehicles that crews attempted to recover — a caravan chassis buried "beneath a significant amount of sand" at Cumberland River — had been winched away, Mr Longmore said.
Emergency services said the vehicles would be taken to "a secure location" before their owners would be contacted and arrangements made for the vehicles to be collected.
Accidents and Emergency Incidents
Extreme Weather Events
Floods
Geelong
Human Interest
Lorne
Melbourne
Storms
VIC
Wye River
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