Wagga-based Active Print has had to hold off its planned move to a new site until January. Owner David Foster told ProPrint the company was set to migrate its entire kit base and workforce across to a new site in East Wagga last weekend, but was cut off from its new facility by road closures for two days.

The company was set to commission a new five-colour Shinohara press purchased from Currie Group at the new site and commence staff training on the machine. The machine was delivered to the new site two weeks ago.

Active Print did manage to move some of its kit into the new site and has been operating between the two sites over the past few days, the full move has been pushed back to January.

“We’d gotten all the guys up from Melbourne to move us,” Foster said. “Being in the country, these things take a bit of time to co-ordinate.”

Foster said that the new site is “well above the flood line” and has been otherwise unaffected by flooding in the area.

Meanwhile, Patrick Almanci from Snap Printing Wagga Wagga told ProPrint the company had missed one of its paper deliveries from Melbourne as a result of the flooding.

Almanci said the delivery problems were overcome when its merchant organised a special delivery to compensate for the issue.

“They’ve been excellent,” he said. “We only lost a bit of production time.”

Almanci added that, apart from the missed delivery, the effect of the floods on company operations had been “pretty minimal”.

“We’ve been very lucky,” he said. “We got a bit of water in from the heavy rain and briefly lost a bit of power supply to our phone system.”

Last night, between 40 and 110mm of rain fell over the Murrumbidgee catchment upstream of Wagga Wagga, which the Bureau of Meteorology said is expected to produced “renewed major flooding” in Wagga Wagga in the next 24 hours.

Oxford Printery is the printer located closest to the banks of the Murrumbidgee, and is monitoring the situation closely.

Neil Cole from Oxford told ProPrint yesterday (9 December) that while the company had yet to experience any flooding or problems with supply, the next 48 hours “will be the telling factor”.

“We’re just on the other side of the levee bank, so if the water did go over we’d be severely affected,” he said.

“We’ve got the sandbags ready to go, but there’s been no talk of an evacuation yet.”

 Most of the printers contacted by ProPrint praised the efforts of the local council and community members in combating the floodwaters.

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