The New­cas­tle Earth­quake Dis­as­ter hap­pened at 1027 hours on Decem­ber 28, 1989, that is 25 years ago — with those involved and offi­cials hold­ing a memo­r­i­al ceremony. 

Although only at 5.5 on the Richter scale, the earth­quake had dev­as­tat­ing effects on the City of New­cas­tle, the 6^th largest in Aus­tralia. There were 12 lives lost. A big­ger loss of life would have occurred except many were on sum­mer hol­i­day. The dam­age bill exceed­ed $600 million. 

Many inner city build­ings were his­toric up to 100 years old, built from sin­gle and dou­ble cav­i­ty brick. 

Much of the area was built on low lying for­mer swamp lands that did not pro­vide for sol­id foun­da­tions, and no match for the earthquake. 

With all pow­er and tele­phones out of action, it was obvi­ous that Ama­teur Radio would be needed. 

WICEN played an impor­tant part in the recov­ery efforts. As soon as vol­un­teers arrived at State Emer­gency Ser­vices (SES) head­quar­ters they joined the many res­cue crews. 

There were no radios in the trucks and WICEN stepped in to help, with effec­tive use of the local area 2‑metre ama­teur repeater. 

The New­cas­tle Work­ers Club had col­lapsed caus­ing 9 deaths. Four hotels, a school, his­tor­i­cal build­ings and hun­dreds of homes were wrecked. 

The SES con­troller need­ed a buffer between him, the pub­lic and news media. WICEN took the respon­si­bil­i­ty for han­dling pub­lic wel­fare inquiries and issued all press releas­es on behalf of the SES Controller. 

A num­ber of the bar­ri­cades were manned by radio ama­teurs pro­vid­ing a radio link as required. Many police had mobile phones, but the tele­phone sys­tem was useless. 

Local tele­phone links were out of action. When restored, the con­ges­tion was so great the pub­lic phone sys­tem was next to use­less for a long time. 

As army and police rein­force­ments arrived, sev­er­al radio ama­teurs were tak­en off bar­ri­cades and re-assigned to res­cue teams. Also pro­vid­ed were links with the local hospital. 

Despite the extra­or­di­nary role radio ama­teurs shown dur­ing the dis­as­ter recov­ery efforts, they received very lit­tle offi­cial recognition. 

The WICEN report makes very inter­est­ing read­ing, and showed once again that the 63 radio ama­teurs involved did an extra­or­di­nary job dur­ing the dis­as­ter recovery. 

— Jim Lin­ton VK3PC, Chair­man IARU Region 3 Dis­as­ter Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Committee.