SA Firefighter

So,  what is your legal authority to extinguish those types of burns?

Pip

I seem to remember reading something like
"...a person shall be in attendance at all times whilst the fire is alight, with
the capability & equipment to extinguish it should need arise." 

Might have been in an Act or Regulation or some other trivial bumph.   
Would that be adequate authority ?
cheers

We had our first call in almost two months on the weekend.... and we have had less than two thirds of our average annual call rate ... 
Pip

G'day Pip
We're tracking about average - high twenties.
Given that during the last really hot season 10 or so years ago we had over 70 calls, I would have expected it to have been a few more.
About 30 calls that year were arson in one form or another.
I guess SAPol are having some successes.
And maybe the idiot factor took a brief holiday...
cheers

until the new one is online. It is the CFS remember. Usually someone drives the new one in and the old one straight out the door. Or of you are Mt Barker they drive in a type 2 and take your rescue and 24P.

Eden dug their heels in about that when the Louisville was replaced with the Type 2. It spent several weeks in a spare bay at another brigade before Eden "released" it back to SAFECom.  The massive inertia of beaurocracy can be resisted/deflected/delayed if determined enough, & willing to reciprocate the paperwork bombardment.

cheers

Sudden burst of nostalgia... that'd be the old Franklin Telephone Exchange building.  Used to work on the third floor, back when 'lectrickery was a new-fangled thing & computers would never "catch on" with the great unwashed.

At home I have Vista on a new cheapo Compaq laptop & XP on an old lower specced desktop.
Had to increase the RAM in the laptop for Vista to run acceptably. The desktop is still quicker despite having half the RAM & 2/3 the processor speed.
At work I have XP on a new desktop - really fast & is stable as a rock.

Some things Vista are very good.  Plug in a new piece of hardware to the vista machine & it automatically finds & instals drivers & etc for it. XP doesn't do this.

Other things...
Vista is far less stable than XP.  The Vista machine crashed more times in the first  weeks than the XP box has in two years. Twice weekly defrag seems to have helped.
Vista's version of Windows Explorer (File Manager) is a Bad Thing - no tree display. Which makes drag-&-drop, and file & folder sharing harder.

Documentation of incompatibilities is poor. Couldn't network them initially. Turns out Vista uses a different neighbour discovery protocol & a patch has to be added to XP for it to be visible to a Vista PC.

Overall I like XP better but, for me, the grief of hunting up XP drivers for the laptop far outweighs Vista's diappointments.

cheers

I stumbled across some un-edited film crew footage of the fire, Some great shots. Once I can be bothered I will host some up on youtube.

Please do
I think most of us there in the first few hours were too busy to even think about cameras.

I have used both and prefer the TFT. It produces a better stream across the range, and produce an awesome fog pattern, and works better with lower flows and pressures, still providing a decent stream de to the automatic apeture. They are also low maintenance and seem a higher quality. we use both the 10-125 and the 50-350 and both sizes work very well.

Disagree on some points.  When a TFT has enough pressure, it is certainly a simpler branch to use - volume & pattern controls only.  However a manual branch eg Akron can often be persuaded to work at very low pressures when TFT simply can't produce more than a trickle.  Like at the end of 16 lengths of 25mm up a hill off a GAAM-300, or direct off a hydrant that someone else is using further down hill.

At "normal" pressures, the flow around the TFT's bullet valve is technically superior to the Akron's ball valve. The control-freak in me likes to to tell the branch what I want it to do rather than the other way around...  So my preference is manual.  Akron, Protek, Fogmaster.  Allasame me. Squirtim plenty good water.

cheers

I got litle understanding of CFS/MFS/SES responses, but why isnt there a system set up like SAAS. Where each truck is a specific crew and a specific crew gets paged for a job/case, and if the incident is big enough (or requires it) additional crews get responded. Surley you don't need an MFS truck and 2 CFS trucks at a MVA plus SES. I have seen many incidents where only one fire (or rescue) crew is required and half the service has turned out.

G'day Knackers.

I think most of your suggestions are in use by one or more brigades or SES units.

The busy brigades do tend to roster their crews, partly to be sure of getting out the door, but also to manage fatigue & enforce stand-down times.  Other less busy brigades are merely grateful for every warm body that turns up, & hopefully can scrape up a single crew during b/h or long weekends.

Paging the DO that you are coming is something we implemented at Western Adelaide SES a long time ago. One of the first to do so IIRC.  It works well when your members are widely dispersed & 10-15mins+ is "acceptable" 1st response. That isn't a criticism by the way.... that's a fact of life that metro SES units have to live with & manage due to their demographics. Been there, done that.  Paging your atendance & travel time worked well with commercial paging networks - dial the pager number, instant machine answer, hit 4 buttons on keypad (person ID & ETT in minutes) hang-up & Go. 10, 15, 20 people could do so simultaneously.  It's a waste of valuable oxygen trying that with some Link operators...   

Not really an option when your goal is out the door in 4-6 minutes from page. The time taken to lodge a page message chews up too much of that. If you don't have a crew inside 6 minutes, the call defaults (or should, depending upon where the brigade is). Many groups dual or even treble respond brigades to most jobs simply to be sure of a timely response by at least one.

Whatever system used, the response will only be as good as the information provided by the caller.  Fact is callers sometimes lie to ensure that their info is "taken seriously".  By way of example, we have more than once been responded to a local home when the resident has seen smoke some distance away behind some hills - >25km away on one occasion.
Q="where is the fire" A="just across the paddocks"
Q="how far away is it?" A="pretty close"
Q="can you see flames" A="yes, it's pretty big & getting bigger"

The other point is, you have to respond to the risk if the caller/alarm worst case is correct, not to the probability that they are crying "Wolf".  First arriving responder stop-calls the rest if they are not required. Works well provided interservice politics isn't a factor. (I am Stop Call King because I live six (legal) minutes from my brigade.. )

hope the above makes sense. It's late & I'm tired.
cheers

More to the point, the loss of a turbine means reduction in generating capacity. Is there enough capacity in the interconnectors to make up the shortfall...

in short a rural CFS ruck carries a no frills first aid kit and that is the limit of items specifically for first aid.

That's about right.
Plus an oversized sharps container & a bio-waste bag. 
Standard Stowage says "that's all folks".

Some brigades have oxy-vivas dating back to before standard stowage became enforced.
My reading of the standard stowage rools is that, at end-of-life, permission to replace them will be automatically denied for most brigades. (Has yet to be tested in the real world?)

We carry some "vet rope", laughably listed on the stowage check-lists as 'rescue rope'.  I suppose it could be used to un-bog more than one sort of filly. About 20mm double core braid. Soft on the hands. Fits no known rescue or climbing devices. Very cheap. Better than the manilla it replaced, but Bluewater/Edelrid it is -not- !!

cheers

Not all brigades have "More crew required" on their alpha decoder.....

Pip

Not all brigades have an alpha decoder...

AJ

"Backwater" is a highly emotive term used by person/s with an "agenda" - usually to spend other people's money on benefitting themselves.

SA is different to the more populous states.  It has different climate, different geography, different ways of doing things, different population pressures, different building materials. Most importantly, it is located at a different place on the planet & some things must necessarily happen differently.

However....Adelaide has the same lack of water (& breast-beating about lack of fore-thought on water infrastructure), the same pressure groups crying for preservation of some old stuff, or changing of other old stuff.  The whingers use exactly the same phrases to compare Melb/Syd/Bris/Perth with each other & overseas capitals.

The whole argument is therefore built on the falsehood that city "A" should somehow being bigger (more expensive) stuff than city "B".  I think it is a load of bollocks.  If someone really thinks Sydney / Melbourne / Brisbane / etc does things so much better, they should put their feet where their mouth is & move there.

And quit their belly-aching.

cheers
AJ
(former resident of Qld, Vic & Tas)

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

Is your name Kevin Foley too ?   

It was like this in the beginning. If anything, it was worse then than now. I stopped reading it about a month after the SAFF was opened due to the poor standard of thought & thin skins. Now.... it has its good days & its bad days. The good days mostly outweigh the bad.