SA Firefighter

Congratulations Captain Cam!

It's great to see a young & enthusiastic person willing & keen to take on the job of captain.

Good luck Cam!



(And good luck to any people taking on new appointments this year!!)

There are some new (to me!) pagers floating about our group comms department.

Are the grn pagers changing?
They may be the orange pagers referred to in other threads (Link brand, I think).

Or is there more and more criticism on this forum lately?

People read posts with their 'angry eyes' on - comments are construed as negative or critical, often regardless of how they may be intended. Responses are all too often argumentative or taking a superior tone.

The pager threads seem to have turned in to 'post an odd message, and pick the heck out of it'.

People love to analyse a situation based on what seems to be bugger all information. No one gets the benefit of the doubt anymore.
Anyone appearing to do something slightly odd gets essentially ridiculed as incompetent, stupid, or both. Regardless of whether they're a member of this forum or not.

Has my perspective changed of late, or have we all turned in to a pack of whinging, arrogant twits??

Do any of the learned folk who populate this joint know how long it takes Adelaide Fire to get a page out? ie from the moment someone calls 000, to the pager dropping?
(I'm not interested in comparing it to the old SOC, or knocking Adelaide Fire, just a time frame please!)

A local industrial joint wants to do an exercise and time how long it takes to get a crew to their facility. Their idea was to call 000, hit to stop watch and wait for us to rock up.

Nice though it is to inject a bit of reality to training, I'm pretty sure that'd be unappreciated by a whole lot of people. Mainly me.

So, if someone could kindly tell me how long it could take from them calling, to my pager dancing across the desk, I'd be grateful.

It is my understanding that Adelaide Fire is not going to act as a group base for R1, or at least monitor & coordinate resources to the extent that CFS SOCC used to.

I am told (and set me right if I've been mislead) that many R1 groups do/did not open a group base for most incidents, however I would assume that if Adelaide Fire is not going to fulfil that role, many groups are now having to establish Comms or Ops/Support brigades to handle the resource tracking & radio traffic plus logisitics etc during an incident.

Is anyone from that part of the world aware of whether or not there are actually going to be any changes to the way your groups operate this fire season?

Has anyone seen footage from California of the aircraft they're using for firebombing?

More helicopters than you can poke a stick at, and some fairly decent fixed wing aircraft too. Including, I believe, a DC-10. A damn big plane to be trying to get as close to the ground as possible!

I'd heard talk of using planes that we'd otherwise associate with commercial airliners for water bombing. First time I've seen footage of one in action.

I'm guessing they must have staged some drops for publicity - the area they were dropping on was in the middle of an area completely blacked out, with no smoke to be seen.

What did seem pretty apparent was that using aircraft of that size in hilly terrain makes it very very hard to drop on the fire.
Both the DC-10 and a large flying boat made runs, and much of their drop was carried off by wind.

Footage of firefighters also showed many of them carry backpacks and have gear hanging off their belts. Poor buggers have to run up and down hills dragging hoses as well as their own gumpf. I wonder what they're carrying about!

Does anyone think the new layout to pager messages makes them a waste of time as a source of meaningful information?

I'm waiting for a law to be passed preventing the use of mobile phones & pagers while driving a vehicle.

We may as well revert to 'respond to station'. Pager acknowledgments have become a matter of calling Adelaide fire and asking 'who have you paged, and where are they going?'

I've heard a rumour that such a process exists. Am I the only one who's not been through it?

Do all (other) brigades go through it? If so, is there a manual of some sort - obtainable from group or region? Is it a worthwhile process, or full of more bureaucratic bs?

Is it standard for SES units travelling to an incident to give detailed progress reports?

ie, units seem to be calling base as they pass through each town on the way to and from incidents.

The base quotes the time whenever someone calls it too. Handy I spose if you don't have a clock in the vehicle, but what's the practical reason for doing so?

Does your brigade actually hold them?
If so, how often? And is it a full brigade meeting, or the management group (if indeed such a thing is utilised in your brigade)?

I had a flick through the act the other day and read all these exciting (??) things about the management group etc, and having had a yarn to the odd other volly, have come to the conclusion that meeting regularity & existence of a management group is pretty directly related to the size of the brigade & the number of jobs attended (not really rocket science, I 'spose).

We run monthly brigade meetings, but only a handful of people turn up. Mind you, the meetings used to run for 3 hours! Now they're ususally ~ 40mins, and it's much easier to get through things when there aren't many people on deck!

Having just seen a post on the pager message thread, responding a brigade to clean up at an MVA (page confirmed no entrapments);

I don't recall exactly whose lap that responsibility that falls in to, but I thought it was SAPOL's job to ensure the road was passable. Or am I wrong?

This is of course hypothetical and nit picking. We tend to do most of the cleanup and I'm not about to refuse to go to a job to avoid doing so. Just curious about whether it's technically a CFS task.

Could some knowledgable person tell me; when fire towers are quoting a smoke sighting, do they use magnetic or true bearings?

Thanks!

A minor issue . . . . more a curiosity than anything.

If I open internet explorer, click on the drop-down box for the address bar and select SAFF, 99% of the time ie says the page is unavailable. However once I delete the; http://   then hit enter, everyone's happy.

No other webpages do this to me. Maybe it doesn't like me?!!

Do you think a better job could be done of getting relevant, accurate & timely info to the public regarding fires?

I don't know how this goes in other regions, but in the SE I feel it's a bit sparse.
At last month's Burrungle fire I was getting calls from friends who lived near by wanting to know what was happening, where the front was etc.

Often I'll hear an announcement on the ABC and it'll occur to me that it's quite generic, not nearly what I've been hearing on the grn. Obviously info can't be fully detailed and up to date, but is there room to improve the present system? If so, how?

I don't want this to be a CFS/HQ ear bashing exercise.

However having reviewed our business fire plan and establishing some triggers for when certain actions should be taken, and reconciling this with info broadcast on the ABC, I feel it is going to be up to me to provide (to our business) accurate & timely info. Baring in mind that, once started, it takes a couple of hours to complete and several days to reverse the process.

I haven't called the hotline, so don't know how much use that is, but having paid a bit of attention to info flow through comms I'd be surprised if it was much more helpful. Am I wrong??!

Thoughts . . . ?

The release last year of the SAFF/CFS farm fire unit guidelines were intended (?) to encourage better cooperation between CFS & farm units, and go some way to countering the SHQ order some years ago that there was to be no contact by CFS with these units (or so my GO tells me). Plus covering a few other issues such as safety etc etc.

Has anyone experienced a change in cooperation or tactics etc which work (or not!), or has it been business as usual (a continuation of your brigade/group's previous attitude to this, whatever that was!)?

(and by no means do I want to go down the path of the last private unit thread, so please stay away from that if possible!)

I've just been using the search function a bit, and find that once I enter the info and hit search then follow a link to a possible match, I can't go back.

A page pops up to say whatever I was looking at has expired, so I go back another page & re-enter the search query then go again.

Bit of a pain as I rarely find what I'm after first time, and it's not something I've run in to on other sites.

Just thought I'd mention it. Hopefully this all makes sense!