North Western Area Command Centre Tamworth: Construction to start on 'long awaited' new Tamworth RFS headquarters

Tamworth MP Kevin Anderson turned the first sod on the $8.24 million North Western Area Command Centre on Friday.

The new facility, set to be built on County Lane, off Gunnedah road, near the Tamworth airport, will serve as a firefighting hub for dozens of permanent RFS staff. In a crisis, it will also serve as a Fire Control Centre, directing thousands of RFS volunteers in the Tamworth region.

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Acting Director of Area Operations Chief Superintendent Jayson McKellar said the centre would serve as the central node for a zone that covers 144,500 square kilometres of the state.

Tamworth is the perfect spot for the area's central headquarters, he said.

"It's a population centre, it's somewhat the capital of the North West so it's a sensible choice," he said.

Friday's announcement has been a decade in the making.

RFS District Manager Allyn Purkiss described the new centre as the "long awaited fire control centre and new area command office".

Tamworth Regional Council Deputy Mayor Phil Betts also commented on the long wait for the new institution, telling a crowd gathered for the sod turning "this is a significant moment for our region; this has been a long time coming.

"It's had more starts than Phar Lap to get going."

The 50-year RFS veteran and former brigade captain said he'd seen fire campaigns administrated from a lounge room, and coordinated from the existing RFS headquarters on Lockheed Street.

In the old days "we had bags and gum branches and if you were extremely lucky you had an old truck with a 44 gallon drum of water on it to wet the bags in," he said.

"We actually ran a section 17 [bushfire] from a lounge room up in New England Gully. We though we were flash rats with gold teeth then."

During the horror 2019-20 bushfire season, many Tamworth-based senior staff were forced to commute to Quirindi's Fire Control Centre on a daily basis to coordinate operations.

Cr Betts said it was "apparent that [Lockheed Street] was just not cutting the mustard for what we really needed."

Tamworth MP Kevin Anderson said the facility will be a "state-of-the-art facility" built with the capacity to grow as the need does.

Asked why the project had taken so long to fund, he said government needed to make sure "everything was in order".

"We're here today. There's been a lot of work gone into this particular project, a lot of moving parts, it's like a big jigsaw puzzle. The land has now been acquired, all the ducks have lined up, the stars have aligned, the money's there... lets get on with it," he said.

"Just basically making sure that everything was in order. It's a big project, making sure that Rural Fire Service were happy. They're going to be coordinating pretty much the New England North West and further parts of the state from this site. So to ensure the coordination was right, the location was right.

"And the fact that this is a growing city with the capacity and the capability to meet the needs of not just our region but the much broader region. This location had to be locked down, it has now, we're really pleased to see it go ahead today."

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Chief Superintendent McKellar said the RFS had contingency planning in place in case of flooding on Wallamore or Gunnedah Road, and said the location was an ideal one.

"Whenever we build an emergency services facility all of those contingencies are factored in," he said.

"Emergency power, access and we also have a contingency plan if we had to go to a business continuity scenario where we have to go somewhere else. Our other Fire Control Centres in other area commands in the Hunter, in the North East, can obviously assist with that."

Mr Anderson announced that the job will be completed by March 2022 by Tamworth company Richard Crookes Constructions.

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Senior Estimator Kyle Bosworth said work will get underway in June, with about 200 employees, almost all local, working to complete the the job in just 50 weeks - or faster.

"We're hoping to achieve it in a little bit better timeframe than that," he said.

"50 weeks is what we're hoping to achieve as a worst-case scenario."

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