The Northern Grampians Police Service Area includes some of the most stunning scenery in Victoria at Halls Gap and the surrounding Grampians National Park.
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As a result, tourism has boomed with 1.25 million people making day trips into the area and another 1.1 million tourists spending about 3.24 million nights in the Grampians region over the last 12 months.
This equates to an average of about 12,300 people travelling into the area (and 8900 staying overnight) every single day of the year!
This certainly presents policing challenges and one of those challenges is the increasing number of calls for assistance from injured and/or lost hikers.
This peaked in 2018 at 43 - a 55 per cent increase in calls for police assistance since 2015.
When compared to the total number of visitors this is not a large number, however, every incident requires an Emergency Management response which usually involves Victoria Police leading and co-ordinating with our agency partners including the SES and Ambulance Victoria.
Some searches take only an hour or so, some take many hours.
In January 2018, the successful search for Julio Ascui took five days.
This last incident prompted us to examine our capability and we identified that we could no longer rely on just one or two experienced and knowledgeable members to deal with this workload.
We identified that we needed to provide targeted training and development to more people to continue ensuring the safety of the community.
We identified that the most appropriate group to develop were our Stawell Police members and we developed a Victoria Police first – the Stawell Frontline Search and Rescue training package.
The package consists of existing training supplied by the Victoria Police Search and Rescue Squad and Victoria Police Driver Training Unit.
We have supplemented these courses with local training focused on familiarisation with the Grampians National Park and exercises with emergency services stakeholders.
The first group of members were trained towards the end of 2018 and some of our people have already put their skills to use responding to incidents over the summer period.
We see this uplift in our capability as a key way to respond to the challenges that increased tourism brings.
We are more than happy to respond to these challenges in support of the clear benefits that come with increased economic activity in the community we serve.
Paul Bertoncello Northern Grampians Local Area Commander
