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Country Fire Service / ES Reform
« on: July 11, 2014, 04:52:53 PM »
With the current discussion around the Emergency Services Reform I thought I would run an idea past you all to see where it lands.....
Greater Metro area and all prescribed cities in SA be under the control of the SAMFS (fire, rescue and HAZMAT)
All areas outside of these areas would be prescribed CFS area. SES would still look after natural hazard and some rescue events across both areas.
CFS would manage all responses within their gazetted area including the current towns managed by MFS country command. This would give CFS the opportunity to have both full time firefighters and Volunteers. If a town is busy enough to currently warrant a retained brigade then those towns may get a minimum crew of full time day firefighters (CFS) backed up by volunteers (aka Mildura). A realistic risk assessment would need to be done on this before it became reality and most towns would revert to volunteer only.
In the Metro areas MFS would have the opportunity to also have paid firefighters backed up by volunteers if they thought the concept would work within their service. Those volunteer brigades like Salisbury could be used as surge capacity brigades for the CFS if MFS did not use them within their response plans.
In order to save a few dollars as the government wishes (don't look at the shared services model)then a number of services such as prevention, community education etc. could be amalgamated with service delivery via the separate directors (bid for service).
The advantage of this model is that we DON'T become one fire service. We DO become the master of our own destiny and we DO end up looking after our volunteers appropriately. There are cost savings built in, we drop the duplication of services seen in some country towns and we get consistency of service across the state
Anyhow just a thought for discussion....
Greater Metro area and all prescribed cities in SA be under the control of the SAMFS (fire, rescue and HAZMAT)
All areas outside of these areas would be prescribed CFS area. SES would still look after natural hazard and some rescue events across both areas.
CFS would manage all responses within their gazetted area including the current towns managed by MFS country command. This would give CFS the opportunity to have both full time firefighters and Volunteers. If a town is busy enough to currently warrant a retained brigade then those towns may get a minimum crew of full time day firefighters (CFS) backed up by volunteers (aka Mildura). A realistic risk assessment would need to be done on this before it became reality and most towns would revert to volunteer only.
In the Metro areas MFS would have the opportunity to also have paid firefighters backed up by volunteers if they thought the concept would work within their service. Those volunteer brigades like Salisbury could be used as surge capacity brigades for the CFS if MFS did not use them within their response plans.
In order to save a few dollars as the government wishes (don't look at the shared services model)then a number of services such as prevention, community education etc. could be amalgamated with service delivery via the separate directors (bid for service).
The advantage of this model is that we DON'T become one fire service. We DO become the master of our own destiny and we DO end up looking after our volunteers appropriately. There are cost savings built in, we drop the duplication of services seen in some country towns and we get consistency of service across the state
Anyhow just a thought for discussion....