SA Firefighter

Seatbelts installed on the crew decks.....since when....not on our 6 month old truck, or the 4 year old truck before that, not since the old single cab 24's.

Damn lucky they didn't roll it, looking at the pictures. Common sense says don't take the truck off road when the off road looks like that....

Its a pity that it only has 2 in 2 out, I would hope that if CFS went down this path they changed it to 4 in 4 out, then it would be a very good appliance.

What are we looking at baggy arse ?

They are turning us into a bunch of pansies. Either your qualified for BA or your not. They have enough trouble trying to fit people on BA courses as it is, let alone trying to run another one.

The BFF1 is a good length to cover the basic information that a recruit fire fighter needs. It is the absolute minimum training that you can do to ride the truck. You can't have a standard of training to change just because one thinks the course is too long or short. Every town has a house, traffic that goes through and has accidents that could potentially happen, so therefore you need the same course for everyone. this gives you the basic knowledge to deal with anything that could arise. If anything the courses are getting shorter and not putting in nearly enough but that is what learning on the job is for.

I have a 3 year old and I cant always get to training, however my priority is to go to as many as i can when i can. That is all the brigade ask for. I attend as many calls as i can but my daughter is always my first priority.

Training is always important. You can never know everything and sometimes its the simplest tasks that we might forget. Whether you have training once week/ fortnight or monthly is a brigade discretion and if it works then so be it.
but brigade members need to be up to date and familiar with their equipment. nothing worse than responding to a call and not knowing where equipment is or not knowing how to use it.

the fire was 29/12/05

We get paid a retainer as well as hourly rate when we attend jobs. It is a minimum call in period of 1 hour even if the job only takes 20 minutes.
Even though we do 500 calls a year (Mt Gambier) pretty much everyone has another job to survive on. As most jobs are only the hour so you cant really survive on say $10k a year.