Cape shire still cut off

A REMOTE Cape York community is furious following a communication network failure labelled as an “annual event” as travellers stranded almost for two weeks due to floods await assistance.

Three groups of travellers visiting the Portlands Rd area north of Lockhart River have been trapped since April 14 in between the Pascoe and Wenlock rivers, with a pregnant woman flown out on Thursday. And, another four vehicles of Lockhart River community members remain trapped near the Pascoe River.

Speaking from Cairns on Wednesday, Lockhart River Mayor Wayne Butcher said this was the second week this year of no mobile phones, no data and no communication.

“We are trying to work out how to get more food to them, that’s the only concern but there are no comms in Lockhart so it’s hard to do anything at the moment,” Cr Butcher said.

“We can’t run our day-today business, we can’t run the Shire, we can’t call for an ambulance,” he said.

“This has been going on every year for the past 10 years I’ve been the Mayor, we’ve seen promise after promise to fix the problem but no commitment to getting the job done.

“Every year we send out the same message – from Cairns, because we can’t send it from there – and every year we get the same promises, especially in an election year, but nothing changes. And the dangerous thing about it is it happens in our wet season, our cyclone season, we’ve had people stranded between rivers for more than 10 days now but the only way we can find them is to send out a helicopter.

“So we’ve had to drop off food and medical supplies but we’re just doing it on instinct, because we’ve had no communication at all since last weekend, people have to be missed before we even know they are missing.”

It wasn’t the first time the shire had gone without basic services, after losing electricity for days and having no fuel for two weeks, in April last year.

And in February last year Cr Butcher said after reporting a mobile network outage, Telstra provided an estimated repair time of 13 days.

Three years prior, Lockhart River went six weeks without communication after lightning struck a phone tower.