True collaboration brings together government, industry and local businesses to overcome the logistics challenge that arose due to flooding disrupting the road and rail link between east and west. Importantly, 80 per cent of the freight which comes into WA from the rest of Australia is carried on the East-West rail line.
In January, a one-in-200-year flood event in South Australia, affected the Trans-Australian Railway, severely damaging multiple locations along a 300-kilometre stretch of track. The prolonged rail network outage caused a logistical nightmare for freight supplies into Western Australia.
The closure of the East-West rail line meant that for a time, road transport became the only way to move freight in and out of WA. This prompted the Minister for Transport to hold a crisis meeting where we collaborated with the National Coordination Mechanism Committee, the National Supply Chain and the WA Freight and Logistics Council to implement steps to ensure the existing road supply chain network into Western Australia was not compromised and supplies continued to arrive from the eastern seaboard.
In February, we began issuing two types of Temporary Special Assistance Permits. The first was to permit 53.5-metre triple road trains to travel from the WA border to the Kalgoorlie Intermodal Terminal, and return. This was part of a 'land bridge' around the rail closure in South Australia, which used triple road trains to transport containers from the rail terminal in Port Augusta to Kalgoorlie. At Kalgoorlie, the containers were put onto trains and transported to the Kewdale Intermodal Terminal.
The second type of permit, which allowed 36.5-metre road trains to travel between Northam and Perth under escort by transport inspectors meant the road trains did not have to drop a trailer at Northam, enabling further movement of containers to distribution centres
More than 500 Flood Relief Permits were issued during the exemption period. Under these special permits we saw road freight increase by 50 per cent. The additional heavy vehicle movements helped increase the amount of stock coming into the state fulfilling a task normally done by the rail network.
The special permits remained in place until mid-March to help clear the backlog as we all worked to get supplies into our shops and homes during this very unusual event.