11/01/2026
We’ve had our Community Meeting this morning at the Dargo Hall. A great turn out from the community and agencies. A lot of information around the work that crews have been doing and their plans for this week. Some of the key messages:
- with temperatures and weather settling during this week, they will be focusing on some activities to try and get these fires under control
- road closures are necessary to protect people. When a closure becomes emergency services only, you will not get through resident or not. When they become open to residents, you must be a resident and your license needs to reflect this. It is about reducing unnecessary movement and whilst it is appreciated that people have secondary properties, livestock etc. these decisions are made for the safety of reducing movement on roads when the unpredictability of a fire can change at any moment. Letting you through because it’s safe right now, does not mean it will still be safe in 30 mins time. Closures are frustrating people and it’s understandable, but your safety is their biggest focus.
- if you don’t have enough supplies to be self sufficient, you need to consider your choice of remaining here. This comes down to food, medications and any other essentials. Where true emergencies occur at short notice obviously measures to address this would happen, but where you have a choice and an option to leave, remaining here because you might not get back, is not a reason to run out of supplies. We can’t put that extra strain on services to sort you in those situations.
- if you do choose to stay, know that a fire truck cannot be stationed at every home. Essential assets in town will be the focus. So ensure you are prepared to fight and your fire plan is solid. You can’t expect extra help when things get really bad because resources will be stretched, so plan to defend with what you have.
- resources are stretched across Victoria considerably. This does limit to some degree, what can be allocated to each area. They will allocate as much as they can at any given point to defend our community, but what we’ve seen across the State this week really stretches that.
- you know your property best. You know your boundaries, you know historical facts about previous fires. Agencies are really open and wanting to talk with you about this if you have knowledge that can help them to focus on asset protection. You are the expert on your property, they simply cannot know everything and they rely on you for this knowledge. If you have concerns, talk to them. (We’ll look at getting some further info on contacts for this)
- our community are not feeling like they have clear ideas on where to go if they need to evacuate to an area in town. We’ve done a lot of work as a community on our Local Incident Management Plan (LIMP). We need to take these experiences and learn how to continue developing that LIMP and familiarising ourselves with it. There is no specifically official designated safe area to evacuate to. We know the community designated assembly areas on our LIMP are the Dargo Hall, the Dargo Hotel and the River Inn. Depending on the threat at the time, as a community, we will have to work together to make the best choice in regards to this. Let’s highlight this an ongoing community activity. So many people with so many great ideas on resources and solutions. Let’s all get together again when we can.
- we know this could go on for weeks. We’ve experienced it before. We’re not out of the woods and the threat will increase and decrease hourly and daily. Make sure you are looking ahead at the weather and are aware of those high risk days and plan for them.
If you had some other important take aways from the Meeting, please feel free to share them!
For those out of Dargo, wondering how we’re going today, things are fairly settled for the time being 👍
