SA Firefighter

Pity its not the same for both services. I guess the CFS aren't interested in reducing the number of false alarms its volunteers attend.

Theres usually 2 MFS pumpers running to most of their jobs anyway, add in SEAF00's pumper and now give MV a type 2 and your going to have 4 pumpers responding to calls. Same goes for Salisbury. On one hand people cry about duplication of resources, yet your saying lets give type 2s to brigades surrounded by pumpers.

more of a strange response...

MFS: INC # 43 - 10/10/07 11:27,RESPOND RCR,OLAVE HILL RD,HAWTHORNDENE, MAP 155 F 10 ,,NEAR INTERSECTION OF TURNERS RD. SINGLE VEHICLE ROLLOVER.,4719 8424
9019*CFSRES:

then

MFS: INC # 43 - 10/10/07 11:30,RESPOND RCR,OLAVE HILL RD,HAWTHORNDENE, MAP 155 F 10 ,,NEAR TURNERS AVE. SINGLE VEHICLE ROLLOVER. ASSIST BLACKWOOD,4924*CFSRES:


should of been 4719 & 4924 to begin with...


have to wonder if some data has been rejiggled lately without consultation with all groups/parties when ya see differant/strange responses going down...

Negative to both of those. That response was correct and as per agreements. Responses aren't specified per street, the response is specified by a zone and the zone is then assigned to a street.
Olave Hill Road Hawthorndene is in the same response zone as Upper Sturt Road Upper Sturt. Since Upper Sturt Road is so long the response for a RCR has been defined as being rescue from Blackwood and Stirling with fire cover from Upper Sturt. So what happened was exactly what it is set in the computer system and agreed to. If it was Turners Ave cnr Olave Hill Road then that would be the 4719 & 4924 response.

So its not strange at all when you actually know what has happened and has been agreed to. SACAD wont change or reduce these "strange" responses. Infact all this discussion goes to prove my point that humans/locals can take more factors into account and can make better decisions than a generic computer response spat out from a data base. This is why any future system needs the flexability for a response/ upgrade to be defined by a human/local at response time.

You all want it both ways. First off you complain when its not as per the database, then you complain when it is done as per the database.
You should just chill a bit over this fanatical response precision. You cant have operators that know every bend and landmark and it cant all be incorporated into a database be it BOMS or SACAD.

pumprescue:

all radio transmissions are logged in CRIIMSON, I have asked for a log only in the last week and they faxed it to me, had all the times and sitreps, sooo, that says to me that they are indeed logging everything,

Its very workload and personnel dependent.

So they are strongly pushing for the smaller amount of TG's

I fully agree with MFS not having to juggle a whole heap of talkgroups.

As for your point "It probably wasn't that important" in regards to logging, you deserve a slap around the head !!!!  I bet the first 10 mins of Ash Wednesday wasn't that important, or Wangary, or the MVA where 3 people died, until the coroners inquest, you can't have been involved in many decent incidents if you sprout forth that woffle, my god man, what are you thinking !! Logging radio transmissions is vital, you or anyone can't tell me otherwise.

When things get hectic and hit the fan there are better things to do than to have operators writing stuff down. Its a matter of priority and utilising the resources properly. I'd rather have someone at a station/base under take actions that aid the response rather then writing stuff down. You could have a full video recording of every person for every second and the outcome of each of those or any incident would be exactly the same. Writing something down doesn't put a fire out! Its for this reason I "sprout forth" as I have actual experience of being involved in real incidents where time matters and the highest priority task comes first. Logging is not the highest priority. You have no idea what you are talking about. Go out and get some real experience. If your not prioritising your doing things in the wrong order.

If your so concerned about having a record why not have a bit of a shot at CFSHQ for not having every GRN talkgroup and every CFS station telephone recorded all the times? But as I said even if all that was recorded the outcome would be same, it would have just cost a whole lot more. I doubt that any coronal findings would even be different, not that it matters as they are after the fact.

really wish people would stop thinking they know , and actually find out, I bother to go and find out, I bother to read memo's from CFS. I still have my opnions on what would be a better option, but we will still be back in the dark ages after I post this, and the way the state's group officers carry on, will most likely be for some time to come.

You mean about how you know that groups with duty officers don't even do 100 calls a year or that I haven't been to MFSHQ for 15 years?

I know what I know. I don't know if I know more than what you know, but I'm fairly confident that my understanding behind the principles are solid. I also know that you don't know how it will be because as I pointed out its not decided yet so its just speculation.

Reading the memos from CFSHQ have less to do with being informed than what you may think. There is more interesting and insightful chat  to be had with the people who actually make the decisions. You'll actually find group officers are more progressive than what you think. Its not about change, its about change for the better with the resources available. I'm sure the Group officers would love a fully staffed operations centre to do all the things that you want, but what the state is offering isn't that. I don't understand why your being so aggressive towards group officers and not toward the CFSHQ and government staff. I also don't see why your so negative on duty officers. They are just there to cover till such time that a base or station opens. It also allows crews to stay on one talkgroup rather than changing talkgroups at the most critical time. Your arguments don't make sense. What I can gather is that you are comparing the current system with some fanciful future ideal system. If you compare anything at the moment with the best thing you can dream up its not going to look very good. Were living and working now and therefore groups do what is the best thing for the public now. Once again I think you need to get some experience and focus.

We still can't seem to get over this ownership and power trip, it isn't the Sturt Fire Service, Kyeema Fire Service, Heysen Fire Service, Mt Gambier Fire Service, Lucundale Fire Service etc, IT'S the Country Fire Service, much the same way its the Metropolitan Fire Service. Only when people realise this, might we see some change, and that's obviously going to take another generation. Thankfully some of these old group officers are coming to the end of their time............

Your right off topic and have lost me here. What do power trips have to do with anything? We see change every day. I don't know who these "old" group officers are and I don't see what they are doing is wrong. As I said before, they have more experience than the majority of CFS staff members and thats why things such as changes to communications go to regional group officers meeting for comment. You obviously haven't talked to enough CFS staff to see how out of touch they really are.

I don't know what your problem is so I can help you out. I'm also a bit confused as to why your making such a fuss about a duty officer system that CFSHQ seems to be supporting in the interim to whatever comes next. Make some clear arguments and points rather then hypothetical or rants about the "power trips".

Oh and don't say that groups with duty officers don't tow the CFSHQ line as not only have those groups had it OK with CFSHQ but it is now being promoted by CFSHQ.

RescueHazmat:

When is logging incident occurances not important???..

I didn't say it wasn't important I just said it wasn't THAT important, meaning that there may have been higher priority things to do at the time. As has been pointed out there is a lot of "waffle" not every thing gets logged down on paper. But as I pointed if it was Sturt group it may have been voice recorded.

You claim to be so "experienced" but that was one big Rookie call !!

That or just experienced that some things are more important than other things and logging isn't the highest priority. As I pointed out to PumpRescue logging makes very little difference to the final outcome. You could have every word said by every person logged on a 200 track recorder and it would make next to no difference to the outcome. If you don't think that then you to need to get some experience in real operations. There is no time to go back listening to, or reading pages, of logs for that bit of info you needed. You write down what you need and what you can to get the job done. Rookies get over loaded on info and doing things that don't aid the outcome. It sounds like your one of those.

I will go with the safety of a COMCEN over a duty officer sitting in their Subaru / toyota anytime !! Only so much one person with a couple radios, mobile phone and a pen and pad can do!

If you can give me "reasonable" examples of what a single person in a command car can do versus that of a fully operational comcen, then I will be happy to take your views onboard.

Explain to me why is a comcen any safer? That is why is someone sitting in Adelaide, with all sorts of other things going on, going to make things more safe than an experienced local that knows the location, the crews, the people, and the resources?

Good thing we haven't had one person in a station taking care of jobs for the last ummm well forever. As I pointed out the fact it's being done in a car makes no difference to the service. Its all about function. One person in a car can do as much as one person in a station, but the one person in the car can do it sooner than it takes for the person to get to the station. Oh and I'd put money on the fact that a very experienced officer in a command car can do more than the majority of fire fighters in a station. Also remember that in most cases the duty officer in the command car is only undertaking the function till a station opens up.

Let me say it again as none of you seem to realise stations and bases still exist. The duty officer is covering until such time as a station can open. One person in a command car can do more to assist in the early stages of an incident than a comcen can do. Your not seeing this as your looking at it with a group / single incident perspective. You need to scale it up to state size.

Think one duty officer looking after one group. That is 50 something duty officers state wide looking after 1 service. Think one comcen, 5 people looking after 3 services answering 100's of 000 calls a hours.
The group based system scales up a whole lot better. This is why centralisation cant and wont work unless there is massive resources thrown at it. Centralisation also isn't as robust. The best thing going is what we currently have, one comcen assisting groups/duty officers that help themselves.

I think you need to think a little realistically about this. The "she'll be right" attitude is way too complacent for my liking. I have listened to jobs where Duty Officers have had comms, a handful of requests were made of them and they physically couldnt do it. (2 arms and 1 mouth only go so far!)

And I've heard stations get snowed under. Stations whose operators cant use the station interface (one button press). I've heard Regional HQ's get snowed under. I've even heard state SOCC get snowed under. I don't see your point. I say it again one experienced person in a command car can do as much as one person in a station and that's been quite acceptable for everyone for a long time. I'll also once again say its about prioritising. Everywhere does it, even MFSHQ, being some things take precedence over others. Its unreasonable to think that everything will happen instantly, but not all those things are as time critical as others.

Contacting multiple services for support, maintaining comms and incident awareness, scribing the things such as addresses and locations, incident specifics and everything associated with one, responding and directing other appliances, these things just don't happen when its one person sitting in their 4x4!

Once again your fixated on the fact its done from a car. That fact is its irrelevant to the amount of work that can be done. If you haven't seen DIV commands at large jobs then you don't know what can be done out of a command car.
I'm not saying that one person can do everything. But what I will say is that one duty officer in every group in a command car will be able to do more then 5 MFS officers in Adelaide on a bad day and that sounds like the option your putting forward.

From my point of view both of you are making arguments against something that you don't understand in preference for something that doesn't exist.

PS RescueHazmat, don't forget there's also the delica...

hicks

As yet the policy for all this is still up in the air. I don't think the actual decision is made till early next month.

Pumprescue your outburst in regards to duty officers is puzzling. If a group wants to do it that way then why shouldn't they? Indeed you are able to see it running "heaps well" as both the Sturt Group and the Kyeema Group do it.

The groups that do this are hardly stuck back in the 60's. Indeed its modern technology of GRNs, mobile phones etc that allow them to have a moving group base. In fact a command car has more radios than either a station or a group base in it.

Why would you have an individual respond all the way to the station to take comms when you can do as much, if not more, sooner, from a command car and from sitting in their own driveway? I think your the one thinking back in the 60's man.

You say that they would struggle for 100 calls. As an example, Sturt Group which has been doing this for the past 4+ years has clocked up well over 300 calls for each of those years. Probably in total over 1000 calls done this way. In fact the number of calls (higher than it was in the 60's) is one of reasons for going for a duty officer.
You then proceed to say that the CFSHQ should tell them how it is and yet in the next post you say that "If my station isn't open I'll continue to do comms though Adelaide Fire". NO, you should take your own medicine and do it exactly how CFSHQ tell you to do it. Trust me they aren't going to be telling you to do comms on 111 because if you get anymore than a handful of brigades doing it and the whole thing will fall apart STATE WIDE for everyone...Well it'll fall apart for everyone in the state except those whose duty officer has notified MFS by phone and are working independently on their own group TG.

Oh and let me point out that when CFSHQ "told how it is" with the move to Adelaide Fire they said NOTHING WILL CHANGE. Now you are "told how it is" GOING TO CHANGE. I wouldn't trust a thing they told me.

With regards to your comment on duty officers been heaps reliable, yes they are. You then say "If my station isn't open"... oh dear, not even your station sounds that reliable. You should look into that before having a go at the idea of having a duty officer.

"Aren't these guys due to retire" Well if they retire from work they'll have more time to be duty officers wont they, or are you talking about retiring from the CFS? In either case aren't you going to retire one day?

It takes decades of dedication to become a Group Officer. I think most GO's have more experience than the CFS staff members. The loss of such experience from any group is a loss for the CFS.

PS I think you'll find that the GO's of one of the groups you may be referring to have many years left in them both with the CFS and MFS. They also have strong backing from their group for their position on this.

Hicks

unfortunately there is no similar map for CFS stations located on the internet that i could find, but a lot of those gaps between SAAS stations are full of CFS stations.

http://www.atlas.sa.gov.au
click on social environment then emergency services then select the cfs stations overlay.

Just because the CFS is backing up the minister doesn't mean that what she says isn't just political spin. There are some at the top of the CFS that may want to go higher up in the system since everything is converging. For this reason they may be willing to follow the party line rather than what is best for the public and the service they lead. However I think you'll find that the staff are just as unhappy but aren't out there saying it as they don't want to bite the hand that feeds them.

It was rumoured at the start of the year that this would happen, but the rumours were downplayed with assurances that the combination would only take place once the database (SACAD) was all sorted out and put to bed, which sort of meant some time between a year and two years. It wasn't till mid March that there were suggestions that it could happen and shortly thereafter the MFS agreed to take it on in some form. Of course this then led to the mad rush to make it happen.
As for summer, there is yet to be any thought about what will happen with regards to staffing levels or if the regions will take the Regional talkgroups during the day.

So yes it IS all being done on the fly. That said however its been getting more then its fair share of criticism here on SAFF. Obviously the general public doesn't give a monkeys as they think the fire service involves fire appliances and water and nothing more.

More often than not there is a bit more behind the stories than what you can read off the paging site. There are a lot of instances where people have taken stuff out of context and posted it here as a screw up when it was not. The limitation on accuracy comes from the person making the 000 call. You can have the best CAD system in the world but crud in equals crud out.

So YES the system is mucked up and both the Government and SAFECOM are responsible. It needs to be fixed. But its not as bad as what is portrayed here. Volys have the right to feel let down and the Minister should acknowledge this rather than saying everything is fine when it isn't. To say things are fine just makes people more annoyed as it makes it obvious she either doesn't care or she thinks she can just spin it away in the media.

Hicks

Yes I do know that GOs don't get elected directly by FFs. Different brigades run different policies on this. Some put it to the members for a vote on who the brigade will vote for, other leave it to the management committee to nominate. In others just the captain picks. Either way, a FF can usually have his or her influence on the decision. If it was viewed that a group officer wasn't doing the right thing then pressure can be brought to bear through brigade and group politics. There's no such influence with the computer system.

Ps closest brigade doesn't always mean the quickest to get there. Is the computer system aware that brigade A has to go through 3 sets of locked gates and down a fire track to get to the incident, whereas brigade B may have further in distance to come, but has a quicker run with no gates to open and sealed road to travel on? No, it simply looks at distance.

People always think they are closer when their not turned out. Once again I'd rather have a GO take responsibility than blame the outcome on a computer glitch.

*Yawn* Its been discussed already. Learn to read, when you get to high school study physics, then come back to the forum with anything you don’t understand.

And how is that amusing Mack?

Might pay to not have too much speculation yet, all shall be revealed (hopefully) at the transition meetings planned.

Your still running the "all will be revealed line". Are you trying to buy CFSHQ some time to allow them to work out what they are going to do?
Trying to make it sound like its been all thought out and well planned? We all know how well CFS organise and plan ahead...

Moving operations to MFS has been planned for a long time at ministerial level, but after that the CFS has been making it up as they go.
 
I remember not too long ago you were saying that all will be revealed and the SOCC isn't going to MFS, also that MFS couldn't do all the things that the SOCC does so it will never happen. So I ask you, were you just playing dumb or are you, as I suspect, in the dark yourself and just trying to sound in the know by stating all will be revealed.

You know as little as, or less, than everyone else.

An appliance is what it is, and simply classifying it to an arbitrary light medium or heavy appliance is pointless. Its all about the total fit out not the numerical value of the pump. From memory Burnside pumper has either a JMP400 or JMP450 pump. After a search of google I couldn't find much on either of these pumps but as someone pointed out it was top stuff about 25 years ago. From memory Burnside Pumper was made by mills-tui, about the same time Belair had their pumper built at Carey Gully. They are (were) similar appliances so I don't know who ripped off who or if they somehow came to a very similar design independently...

As for boosting into the bronto it depends how they set it up. With the variable flow control branch on the platform they can adjust it to give the water pattern required with a particular flow rate. So with a low flow rate setting on an appliance like Burnside Pumper, it would be just enough, but for the full surround and drown option on the nozzle you require at least two pumps of slightly greater capacity than what they could deliver.
I would imagine that Burnside are talking about assisting boosting into the bronto, as I don't see the MFS leaving the bronto without a MFS tender as primary boost. I recall seeing a photo in the paper that showed Burnside or Belair boosing into the bronto at the Mitcham Shopping Centre fire.

As pumprescue points out a two stage PTO with two 90m hose lines is great for long driveways in hilly areas. You just don't get the same performance from a single stage or pump packs. What the CFS/CFA's obsession with pump packs is, I'll never know. They'd say because its a unit it can be unbolted and a new one put on, but thats still one big job with all the fittings to disconnect and reconnect. With a PTO your only stuffing around one big engine (that you would have been anyway) and maybe one very small one for pump and roll. Whereas with the pump pack your carrying and maintaining 2 engines. Seems to me to be a duplication with no extra increase in capability, unlike the PTO with auxiliary for pump and roll. As pip point out, and Ive previously ranted about, there are lots of pump variables and pump performance issues involved. Its just a matter of getting the pump that matches the the task. The little 8Hp pumps (or what ever they were) on the old 14's around 20 years ago use to make for some lively HP work. They were no good for anything else but for the type of volumes you run 2 HP lines at, but they cranked up some good presssure. I don't know about the modern 14s. Anyway for the type of work the CFS does massive pump volumes aren't required. You exhaust the water supply rate usually with the pumps we have. No point getting larger volume pumps when the problem is the water volume from the main or where ever you get it from. I assume the only time massive volume capability may come in handy is when your trying to pump out flooded areas like they were out north a year and a half ago.

As for burnsides game plan and how this fits into their future Im not sure. Under SACAD they may not run up the freeway as often, therefore reducing their call rates. Their main game will be thrashing their trucks running around on the hills face, strike teams and hazmats. In the last lot of COQ they didn't even leave their station. I suspect in the last couple of years that they have done more EMA with their tanker then with their pumper.

I'm led to believe there is a disparity between what they want, what they need and what they may get. But Burnside are smart operators and know what their on about so I wish them well and they don't need to justify their actions to anyone here.

May i ask what your problem is?  All you ever do is bag the filtered out of us South Easters....

im regionist