A busy night on the fire truck

Started by branxhunter, March 18, 2018, 02:27:57 AM

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branxhunter

Our fire brigade got a call out to a big bushfire at around 10pm last night, got back home 10.30am this morning. Slept through to 4pm and still feel shattered.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-03-18/v ... rt/9560098

The wind down here was horrendous last night. Trees down across roads, powerlines down. Hit one tree across the road last night while responding - the headlights on the truck are pretty ordinary. Luckily not too much damage.

Ours was the western fire, mapped extent is around 3,400 hectares.

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The eastern fires have been dairy country and devastating. I heard of one farmer who lost his entire 700 cow dairy herd and all this years calves.

Marcus

Paul Hoskins

Marcus, it sounds bad. Glad you're ok. Get more rest & sleep for yourself. .....Paul H

gitano

Be nicer than necessary.

branxhunter

No, rested up yesterday then back at work today.

In regional and rural Victoria the fire agency is known as the Country Fire Authority, or CFA. The state is split up into Regions, and each Region is then covered by different Groups, and each Group is made up of different Brigades. Members of most of these Brigades are volunteers; some of the larger urban brigades have full-time paid members. The CFA also has paid members in the overarching administrative/co-ordination roles across the Regions and State.

Each brigade will have at least one fire truck (or tanker), some might have two, or will have a tanker and a 4WD tray-back utility set up with a tank, pump and other equipment known as an Ultralight or slip-on (this is what we have).

This is a medium tanker the same as ours: https://www.flickr.com/photos/55202704@N03/14558683998/player/fe83fb0bf2

This is an Ultralight like ours: http://www.flickriver.com/photos/ozemerg/28296161759/

Each Brigade will have a shed or station within which the tankers etc are housed. In our local region these sheds are around 10km apart.

At the fire on Saturday night there was around 44 units which would have been mostly tankers with some Ultralights and also some Forward Command Vehicles (FCVs). These are 4WD vehicles set up with multiple radios that are used to co-ordinate the group of tankers and other units that consist what is know as a Strike Team working in a particular area or sector.

Here is an FCV: https://www.flickr.com/photos/ozemerg/28308460179/

Initial response to a fire (or indeed other incidents) is co-ordinated through a centralised system via radio - for the western half of Victoria this is VicFire located in Ballarat. VicFire sends a pager message to a prioritised list of Brigades until a specified number actually respond by turning out. During benign conditions this might only be three brigades, on Hot days the number is five, and during an incident the incident controller can request any number they want (when you hear 'make tankers 20' you know it's serious).

Control of a large fire like this one is fairly quickly passed to a Local Incident Control Centre or Local Command Facility.

At a guess I would say their were probably 30 different Brigades represented during the the initial overnight response at the Hawkesdale fire. During the early stages while still being co-ordinated by VicFire I heard the lady say that she had 150 Brigades responding to the 4-5 active fires across SW Victoria.

While these 44 units (plus support staff) were engaged in fighting the fire during the night the administrative/co-ordination staff were busy organising the relief crews to come on for the Sunday day shift and following night shift.

So this is a long winded way to say that there is a (usually) well co-ordinated and resourced system, made mostly up of volunteers, that swings into gear. After Saturday night I haven't been required to go a truck.

Marcus

gitano

Sounds like a 'well-oiled machine'. I'm sure there are wrinkles, though. Always are when humans try to 'organize' things. :D

Is this time of year the "fire season" or is it winding down as summer ends?

Paul
Be nicer than necessary.

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