WITH two recent house fires in town, the CFA’s training unit will be delivering critical safety messages and dramatic fiery demonstrations at this year’s Swan Hill show.
The CFA mobile training prop gives firefighters a chance to work together in a controlled environment to extinguish a complex structure fire with electrical and gas works, and a vehicle fire.
They can deal with those individually or face a full-on attack all at once.
CFA Region 18 commander Dean Simmons says the unit will be in Swan Hill for a month of brigade training.
“The mobile training props are an important resource for volunteer firefighters across the state to use as part of their progression and development,” Dean said.
“The firefighters run through the drills that they’re taught, and then work together within the outlined safety procedures to either extinguish or contain the fire.
“A trained facilitator controls the behaviour of the fire inside the mobile props, challenging the firefighters to apply what they have learned during theory training.
“CFA ensures we are providing skills maintenance sessions quite regularly.
“These training props enhance the delivery of our training to our firefighters and give them a real sense of the variety of fires they’re going to encounter when responding to incidents.
“As well as the public seeing what we do in these circumstances, their visit to demonstrations will also be an excellent chance for them to get information about fire safety in and around their own homes.
“During full-on training we practice point of entry training to get into a closed environment on fire and how to deal with that effectively and safely.
“But for the six demonstrations we will be staging at the show, three on each day, we will be keeping the unit wide open so people can see what is going on – the electrical fire is a TV based scenario, there is a gas stove and to compound it we can have the car, which in a real-life setting would also have a tank of petrol.”
Dean said the mobile unit is used extensively in regional areas as a key training resource, so members don’t have to travel to distant centralised operations.
“It ensures members, both experienced and new, are able to maintain their skills in these specialised challenges,” he said.
