- Aug 5
- 2 min read

Emergency Services crews brave cold to feed NavShield competitors

Barrington Tops in the NSW Hunter region recently hosted the NavShield emergency services navigation competition, with Salvos crews providing catering.

BY LAUREN MARTIN

Have you ever cooked breakfast for 450 people? That’s a lot of eggs! Salvation Army Emergency Services (SAES) Response personnel and volunteers do it all the time. You could say they ‘eat that stuff up for breakfast!’.

But a recent SAES call-out in NSW was a bit more demanding than usual. For most of the past 12 years, the SAES has been on hand to support NavShield, an inter-agency emergency services navigation competition. This year, it was held at Barrington Tops in the Hunter region. And it was cold!

“For this activation, our personnel and volunteers need to camp onsite because it is so remote,” said Norm Archer, NSW/ACT State Coordinator. “We took in 1400 eggs, 150 kilograms of fresh meat and we were serving breakfast at 6am in zero temperatures to 450 competitors in a 90-minute window of time. That’s serving about three people a minute!”

Salvation Army Emergency Services response personnel fed hundreds of competitors in the NavShield emergency services navigation competition.

And that breakfast would have been important to competitors, who test their bush and compass navigation abilities through 100 square kilometres of wilderness terrain.

According to Norm, the event is important in the SAES calendar because it’s not an emergency. Therefore, it gives emergency services personnel and volunteers a chance to support and chat with emergency services personnel and volunteers outside of a critical incident.

“We are considered now, having been there year after year, part of the NavShield set-up team. There’s a strong camaraderie,” said Norm. “Due to having developed relationships over that many years, we are now starting to develop faith pathways when the opportunity arises.

“We fed hundreds of competitors and members of the organising crew, and many of them made the trip back to the feeding site to say thanks for the meals. And a heap of people pulled up in their cars to say thanks as they were leaving.”