A day in the life of Team Leader Kyran Rennick

18 Mar 2011

As a team leader for south Queensland, Kyran Rennick recently played a pivotal role in the emergency responses to the extensive flooding that hit the region.

For Team Leader, Kyran Rennick, maintaining Broadcast Australia's television and radio services across south Queensland is all just part of the job. Normally, this involves maintenance planning, delegation of repairs, and assigning faults to technicians in his team of eight.

However, during the recent floods in Emerald, Rockhampton and St George, routine maintenance work took a back seat to emergency management. During these challenging conditions, Kyran worked hard to maintain all broadcast services, placing particular emphasis on ensuring continuity of the local ABC local radio services. These provide crucial real-time information to affected communities during emergencies, and provide the backbone to the disaster radio network.

Pre-emptive planning

According to Kyran, the disaster response began well before the floods themselves hit the area. "I organised our technicians to go out to the various transmitter sites to check the emergency power plants were fully operational, and that the generators' fuel tanks were topped up," he said. "As a precaution, we also installed back-up satellite receivers at some of the key transmission sites."

During the floods, Kyran had to report on the up-to-the-minute status of all company facilities in his area, in order to prioritise emergency efforts. As part of these responses, he arranged for two portable emergency 'fly-away' transmitters to be transported to the flood-affected towns of Emerald and Rockhampton, thereby helping ensure ABC local radio services were maintained for those areas.

"This proved to be a logistical challenge to get these units where they needed to be," said Kyran. "However, with no access to the main transmitter sites in these towns, it was imperative to get back-up transmitters in place in case the main transmitters ran into difficulties."

Keeping the ABC on-air

When the floodwaters hit St George, Kyran and his team further managed to improvise a third fly-away kit at short notice, using nothing but ingenuity and the spares they had to hand. Throughout the emergency, Kyran's team were successful in keeping the ABC broadcast services online for the south Queensland area.

Kyran also provided invaluable assistance to the ABC directly, by arranging air-transport into Rockhampton for additional satellite uplink equipment. For all his outstanding efforts during these dangerous and difficult circumstances, Kyran has won one of the company's prestigious High Five Awards.

However, Kyran remains typically modest about this achievement. "I don't consider that I did anything out of the ordinary," he said. "It's my job to keep the networks operating in the south Queensland area. With the tireless efforts of a great team, this is exactly what we managed to do."

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