You’ll never guess how this Adelaide mum spends her days

Soozie Bice has become pretty nifty with a chainsaw. In fact, she can climb onto the roof of a home and cut up a tree like nobody’s business.
That’s just a typical day in the life of Bice, 65, an State Emergency Service (SES) volunteer for the past six years.
The Adelaide mum of three boys has always been involved in her community in some way.
“That was probably one of the reasons why I joined the SES, because I was looking to do something again in the community,” Bice tells 9honey.
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Bice loves her community in Blackwood at the base of the Adelaide Hills.
“You go shopping and bump into people, that sort of thing,” she says.
“So it’s a really lovely community where I live.”
Previously, her only contact with the SES had been when she took her kids to the Royal Show.
“I lost one of them and so they found him for me, which was a bit terrifying for a mother,” she says.
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It was during a holiday to Perth that she found out a friend was involved with the SES.
“I really didn’t know anything about them, but it sort of spoke to me when he told me what he was doing,” she says.
“So when I came back to Adelaide, went for an information night and then went for an interview and took it from there.
“I had no intention of doing anything like getting up on someone’s roof in the middle of a storm with a chainsaw.”
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Now she’s done this more times than she can count.
“I’m qualified in working at heights, swift water, large animal rescue, chainsaw operations, everything, so it’s been a lot of great skills to learn and anyone can do it.”
Most of her SES work has been helping out with storm damage.
“It just seems to be more frequent now and more severe weather,” she says.
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Her boys are now grown, and pretty impressed by their mum’s SES work.
“I think it’s been a great mentor for them, a good role model for them. I think they’re quite proud. I’ve been given so many wonderful opportunities with the SES.”
Her first job with the SES was simple traffic management.
“It was on a tree that had come down over a busy road that was a winding road up into the hills. Cars were coming sort of around the corner without realising there was a tree on the road,” she says.
“I had to do traffic management and direct them to go another way. Not everybody likes that. Sometimes they try to get past you.”
Bice describes the “look of relief” on people’s faces when they arrive to lend a hand when they have storm damage to their homes.
“Most people are surprised when they find out we’re volunteers, but we’re highly trained and the SES is a very, very organised association to be involved in,” she says.
They work in tandem with other emergency services, such as the County Fire Service (CFS).
“We might help the fire service in a bushfire just for staging or helping them with welfare but we’re not there to be on the fire ground. We help with storms and floods.”
The most traumatic incident she has worked on was when a tree fell on a car, killing the driver who was wife of a local CFS volunteer.
“The daughter was trapped in the car and it took two hours to get her out,” she recalls.
“We had to hydraulically lift the tree off of the car, it was a big tree, and that was in the middle of the night. That was pretty traumatic.”
The SES provides counselling support to its volunteers after such incidents.
“I think it’s amazing the damage trees can do, and particularly when they come down on homes. You just look at it and think, ‘Wow, those people were lucky not to get killed.'”
In another incident a “massive gum tree” fell on a home and “smashed” it.
“You look at a tree and you don’t realise that inside it could be eaten with termites or there’s something about that tree that it’s stressed and then it might just drop a limb,” Soozie explains.
“I was at one last week where the pine tree had actually broken at the base. It hadn’t uprooted it, it just kind of snapped through the base and come completely down over a house and punctured the ceiling in three places.”
Soozie has also worked on land searches for missing people, usually children or dementia patients
“A child might keep to a track, whereas a dementia patient will often just follow a path and often they just keep walking, they just keep going, whereas a child will get lost in the bush and might sort of stop somewhere and hide behind a bush,” she explains.
They also do forensic land searches for the police looking for evidence of crimes.
“So it might be for a weapon … that they’re investigating something. And often with the police, it’s more about eliminating an area so they can say that area’s been searched and there’s nothing in that area.”
Ahead of jobs like this, the police will give them a brief and off they go.
In addition to counselling, the SES volunteers also support each other.
“That’s a wonderful thing about being involved in something like this, is you really do create some great bonds. You have to work as a team,” she says.
“You’ve got to have each other’s backs. So it’s a wonderful camaraderie, plus the socialisation. It’s a great team.”
NRMA Insurance and SA SES are working together to South Australians better prepare for storms and floods in the face of the increased frequency and severity of extreme weather. The partnership forms part of Help Nation – an NRMA Insurance initiative to educate Australians on their local risks and how to prepare for extreme weather. Find out more at SASES – Storm.
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