[music]

[on-screen text: James Wolff Melbourne Water, Crew Lead, Civil North East With Fire]

James: My name’s James, I’m a crew leader here for Melbourne Water at Healesville. My job is organising the crew on a day-to-day basis and protecting the catchments from fire.

So we’ve got a series of fire preparedness work that we do to make sure all the catchments are available and all the roads are accessible. So if we do get fires in the catchments, to be able to access every area. That includes cutting trees off the tracks, doing drainage and road maintenance work so that if there is a fire in the catchments we can respond in a timely fashion and put out the fires.

We look after the water catchment areas which surround our reservoirs that are closed off to the public. We produce really good quality water that needs minimal treatment by the time it gets to people’s households. If the catchments were to burn, especially if there was a catastrophic fire, the water quality would suffer greatly. I’m proud to work in a really good, inclusive team at Healesville and the rest of Melbourne Water to achieve some really significant goals.

So if we get like a catastrophic bushfire go through the catchment areas, the way that Melbourne’s water network is set up, we can draw from other catchment areas and other pipelines to replace any water that’s lost if the catchment is offline or if a reservoir is offline.

[Melbourne Water logo]

[End of transcript]