HOW WE STARTED
There were active volunteer Civil Defence groups in the Ipswich and Goodna areas from the 1960's who were trained to assist in times of aggression against our country.
In 1974 following the disastrous Australia Day Weekend floods it became apparent that what the nation needed was a highly trained team of volunteers to assist the community, not only in times of war, but more importantly, to respond when a natural disaster hits.
Consequently, each State drew up legislation governing these State Emergency Services, with our legislation being the "Queensland State Counter Disaster Organization Act 1975 - 1978" now amended by the Emergency Services Legislation Amendment Act 1995.
In August 1977, the Governor in Council granted permission for the Ipswich City Council and the Moreton Shire Council to combine for counter disaster purposes and the Ipswich/Moreton SES Unit was formed. In 1995 when the two Councils amalgamated, the Unit became the Ipswich City SES Unit. The Unit consists of 4 groups (Ipswich, Goodna, Marburg and Rosewood) and 2 Cadet groups (Ipswich and Goodna). The current membership is 205 adults and 106 Cadets and Assistant Leaders.

COMPUTER SYSTEM
We are known to be the most progressive Unit in the State. We are very proud of our computer development over the last eight years. The Ipswich Group were the front runners in the State by having four computers networking together, giving it the capacity to run activations via computers. Fundraising by members, Council funding and years of dedication and hard work made this network possible and from people who had programming abilities and who dedicated their time and effort at no charge to the SES. One of these dedicated hard working people is not even a member of the SES. He is presently rewriting the whole storm program to give us the capability to access the information available to us in an instant. All groups are linked via modems and it is now possible for all four groups to manage an activation as one.

EQUIPMENT
With the assistance of the Ipswich City Council all our equipment is near new and maintained on a regular basis. Under the ICC replacement program all vehicles are replaced every five years and only recently the Unit has changed to Turbo Charged engines to give a better towing performance.
To assist the fire brigade to light up a fire scene or the police clean up a major accident on our two major highways the unit has three large mobile generators capable of lighting up 500m of highway or a large fire scene.
The Ipswich district is situated on a very complex river and creek system and the Unit has four flood boats, a zodiac and an aluminium punt.