Firefighters: The Men and Women Who Risk Their Lives to Save Ours

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GARY MCKAY is a professional writer and his books include the bestselling Tracy and In Good Company. At the age of 20, Gary confronted his first bush fire as a recently-drafted Australian Army soldier. He then spent the next 30 years in the Army and served as a platoon commander in South Viet Nam, where he was awarded the Military Cross for gallantry. To research this book, Gary attended a twelve-week firefighting training course and then went on shift with the firies from Brisbane to Cairns and watched first-hand as the firefighters tackled house and car fires and extricated motor vehicle accident victims from wrecked cars. He interviewed over 50 firies for their accounts of the highs and lows of this demanding and dangerous job.

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GARY McKAY THE MEN AND WOMEN WHO RISK THEIR LIVES TO SAVE OURS

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First published in 2002 Copyright © Gary McKay 2002 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act. Allen & Unwin 83 Alexander Street Crows Nest NSW 2065 Australia Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100 Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218 Email: [email protected] Web: www.allenandunwin.com National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry: McKay, Gary. Firefighters: the men and women who risk their lives to save ours. Bibliography. Includes index. ISBN 1 86508 653 3. 1. Fire fighters—Australia. 2. Fire fighters—Australia —Anecdotes. 3. Fire fighters—Australia—History. 4. Fire extinction—Australia. 5. Fire extinction— Australia—Anecdotes. 6. Fire extinction—Australia— History. I. Title. 363.37092294 Set in 11/14 pt Aldine by Midland Typesetters, Maryborough, Vic. Printed by Griffin Press, South Australia 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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Firefighting is a dangerous job. Since 1877 some 38 firefighters from all types of service in the Queensland firefighting community have lost their lives in the course of their duty. This book is dedicated to their memory.

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CONTENTS PREFACE

viii

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

1 12 37 57 71 80 98 117 130 145 155 161

THE FIRIES RECRUIT TRAINING ON THE JOB THE AUXILIARIES THE RURAL FIRE SERVICE FIREFIGHTING RESCUE A DAY IN THE LIFE OF AN URBAN FIREFIGHTER THE REGIONALS CHILDERS OOPS! COURAGE UNDER FIRE

APPENDIX 1: THE ENEMY APPENDIX 2: QFRS REGIONS

175 187

GLOSSARY NOTES AND SOURCES INDEX

188 193 199

PREFACE I have wanted to write this book for many years. I first fought a major fire—a crowning bushfire—in the Hunter Valley in New South Wales in 1968. To a young National Service army lieutenant it was a terrifying time, especially as everyone around me, mostly draftees training for Viet Nam, knew as little as I did about how to tackle the monster that was destroying everything in its path. While we lost a truck in the fire, we saved a winery—but that was due more to good luck than to good management. In order to be able to explain in simple terms what it’s like to be a firefighter, I first attended one of the courses at the former training establishment at Lytton in Brisbane. There I followed the experiences of eleven recruits as they learnt their basic skills and drills. I watched them gain knowledge in the classroom and then put it into practice in ‘dry’ drills and, later, ‘wet’ ones. I accompanied them on to the hot fire training pad and saw them advance into searing flames, confident in their instructors’ guidance. I saw them get singed, steamed, soaked and smoked in the various training environments that were preparing them for the day they would take their place in a fire station. But as I began to learn what the job of being a firefighter is all about I also realised that it isn’t just a matter of ‘putting the wet stuff on the red stuff ’. It is a complicated, diverse and dangerous business. Teamwork is essential for survival on the fire ground and each and every firefighter has to be extremely alert at all times. If not, they will pay a price that can be devastating to them and their fire crew. And it goes beyond this. A large part of a firefighter’s job involves attending road accidents and getting trapped people out of these and other dangerous and nasty situations. It is not a job for the fainthearted. The danger of the job was tragically illustrated when over 300 firefighters in New York City perished after the World Trade Center terrorist attack.

VIII

To gain more knowledge of the work I found that, apart from doing shifts in the Brisbane city fire station at Roma Street, I would need to see what happens outside the greater metropolitan area. Firefighting varies greatly from one region to another across Queensland. The firies (as they call themselves) in Cairns or Charters Towers have a totally different lifestyle, when it comes to firefighting, from that of their southern cousins. The combination of urban permanent firefighters and auxiliary firies in a country town like Ingham calls for an entirely different approach to the job and to combating fire. What I did learn about firefighters and their families is that they are immensely dedicated to their job, are totally professional in everything they do, and are never backward in coming forward with an idea or a solution to a problem. Firies are ‘doers’. They get in and get it done. They react quickly and with judgement on the fire ground, and with compassion and expertise during road accident extrications. There are almost 50 000 firefighters in Queensland and I have met probably 200 of them in the last year or so as I travelled from Coolangatta to Cairns researching this book. Each firie has their own story and I could not possibly hope to capture the experiences of all of them. But I believe that the people I have worked with and interviewed represent a cross-section of the men and women who proudly wear the uniform of the QFRS. I would like to thank all the firefighters who so freely gave of their time during our interviews. I am indebted both to ‘B’ Shift at Roma Street, for their patience, understanding and fine sense of humour, and to all the men and women I rode with on fire trucks across the State. I am indebted to Wayne Hartley, the outgoing Chief Commissioner, for his support throughout the project. I also thank Michelle Bailey at the Brisbane Courier-Mail for her patience and assistance in searching for photographs that appear in this book; David Cromb, my liaison officer, and Rob Simpson at Kedron Park who helped steer the project through in its entirety; and my publisher Ian Bowring, who again has provided me with great support as I pursue my career as a writer. And I thank my wife Gay, who often just looked on in amazement as I rambled on about my ‘second life’ as a wannabe firie. Gary McKay November 2001

PREFACE IX

CHAPTER 1

THE FIRIES A big red truck thundering down a road with lights flashing and sirens wailing is what most people imagine when they think of firefighters. But a lot has happened behind the scenes in the past twenty years or so. Vehicles, protective clothing and firefighting appliances and equipment have improved enormously. Even work roles have changed dramatically in the last decade, with more and more rescues now being undertaken by firefighters rather than by tow-truck drivers or ambulance personnel. In the old days, though, firemen attended fires—full stop. Russell Mayne, a veteran of those days, says: ‘You never went out of the station unless you had a fire call.’ And Toowoomba’s Vince Hinder, a firie for 25 years, recalls the times when he first rode on the trucks: Years ago we wore a blue woollen coat, blue drill trousers, elasticsided boots and a helmet—and that was it. It used to be bad in the old days when we could go as fast as we wanted, and on the old

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Bedfords we’d be hanging off the back of the open wheelers, trying to crank up the Coventry Climax auxiliary engine for the water pump. We’d be hanging on to the grab rails rocketing around the place. Workplace Health and Safety would have had a fit if they’d seen what we were doing! These days we have to abide by the speed limits and stop at red lights. Today the firefighters are dressed in two layers of clothing and sometimes three. They have special protective coats, helmets with a visor and flash hood, and gloves and boots that can withstand enormous heat. While there are not so many big fires these days, the nature of fires has changed greatly with the heavy use of plastics in our everyday lives. The fire ground is now more toxic. As Senior Firefighter Hinder puts it: ‘In the old days we only put BA [breathing apparatus] sets on if the station officer thought it was bad enough. We would be spitting black stuff up out of our lungs for weeks after a fire. These days as soon as there is smoke the BA set goes on.’ And although firefighters have to abide by the road rules and this might slow them down to a certain degree on the way to a fire, it protects them and the public. Several people have lost their lives in Queensland when 10-tonne fire trucks and cars have collided. Vince Hinder reckons that the scariest part of his job is ‘some of the drivers we have got on shift!’. Nonetheless, for Station Officer Pat Hopper, who joined the fire brigade in Cairns in 1973, going off to a fire ‘was exciting, something I had never done—riding fire engines with big bells, on open-wheelers, and wearing nice tailor-made clothes’. But what sort of people should wear those clothes? Station Officer Tom Franks, an instructor on the recruit course I attended, says: I want a bloke with discipline, someone that will do as he is told and also be respectful. He has to be loyal, have a bit of intestinal fortitude and be reliable. If I am off somewhere trying to get information about whether there is a rescue requirement, I want to know that they are ready to go while I’m away. A firefighter has got to have initiative, be a team player and be decisive. Throughout my travels in Queensland, I asked the same question of people who have been firefighters for over twenty years and would have

2 THE FIRIES

seen many firies come and go during that time. The responses were varied but followed a common thread. Area Director Ray Eustace in Maryborough thinks it’s important that a firie ‘be personable and get on with people, get his work done, not be lazy . . . the better ones are tradespeople, especially when using rescue tools’. He also prefers people with ‘some life skills and who are stable’. Many people told me that younger firies seem to be less suitable in terms of fitting in with crews. It was important to have ‘someone who can get along; a team player with a sense of humour’. High academic achievement was not seen as important. Vince Hinder says: ‘One bloke doesn’t know everything, but between us we know a lot. I want a bloke you can trust, a team man, who won’t turn tail and leave you.’ Fred Heiniger joined the fire brigade in 1973. He recalls that the chief officer would ‘know the recruits’ character’, as most applicants were locals. But he adds: You need a bloke who is mature, who has been around a bit. Today there is a lot of study involved and it requires dedication. You need ‘hands on’ guys, teamwork is important and an individualist is not going to get on. If you are not a team player then you’re not worth two bob. If you can’t cop a kick in the guts occasionally, then you are not worth two bob either, because you’re going to get them from the job you go to—or just from things that happen. You need a sense of humour. A lot of the more senior officers and firefighters worry about the current selection process. The waiting list to become a firefighter is huge and in 1999 only about 200 were selected out of 5000 or so who applied. Many who came in were academically bright, but that does not necessarily translate into being a good firefighter on the fire ground. Dick Gledhill, who served in two armies and is a senior firefighter in Townsville, was critical of the apparent emphasis in the selection process: ‘Too many academics in the officers lacked CDF [common sense] and ended up hopeless on the fire ground.’ Station Officer Jack Wensley of Toowoomba agrees: ‘We have gone too far and overstepped the mark with academic requirements.’ Graham Cooke, an area director at Dalby, says that it’s fine to have firies with a good academic record,

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‘but also common sense and a level of practical quality is required’. Barry Salway at Nambour station comments: ‘The academics aren’t that good, but we still need some to move through and become officers.’ What was unsaid was that the men in uniform want more of their own officers in positions of management in their corporate head office at Kedron Park. Much of the criticism of the promotion process, which is now based on qualifications rather than length of experience, is centred on the fact that ‘in five years a bloke can be an officer in charge of a crew at a major incident and that is not good. Many of the younger officers lack respect for the older firies and their knowledge’.1 In a fire crew of an officer and three firefighters (‘one and three’) there can sometimes be more than 50 or 60 years of experience travelling in the front of the truck. No two incidents are ever the same and the vast experience base, I was told, should be used to advantage instead of relying solely on learning from books. Station Officer Pat Hopper of Cairns was outspoken on the issue of officers rising through the ranks too quickly. ‘These days we are getting intellectuals who don’t want to get their hands dirty, but want to be an officer tomorrow. It’s a mistake and I don’t like it.’ Senior Firefighter Russell Mayne adds: I have worked with blokes over the years who couldn’t string a sentence together but made the best firemen and were just unbelievable blokes. Other guys, who have got up to be officers with all the knowledge in the world, you wouldn’t want them to blow out a match! But, in the main, aspiring firefighters have their wings clipped by the older, wiser and highly experienced firefighters as they move through the ranks. Most appreciate the experience around them and the wise officer will always look to his team for advice and opinion before making a decision in a tricky situation. As one 30-year man, Station Officer Trevor Kidd of Rockhampton, explains, ‘It is a four-man crew’—and someone in the team will have the right answer. The firies on shift are a close-knit bunch. No one is allowed to get a big head or to rise too far above the rest of the crew in terms of recognition. Consequently any praise is usually faint, and criticism is

4 THE FIRIES

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prolonged and loud if anyone makes a slight error in judgement. It’s all in good fun and chiacking is prevalent on shift. Russell Mayne explains: You have to have a thick skin because there are certainly a lot of blokes gibing each other around the station and I have seen guys just fall apart under that. It is just part of the fire service. I don’t think we are supposed to do it because we have to be politically correct and all that, but it is still there. Teamwork is essential in firefighting because very few jobs can be done single-handed—safely. Russell adds: ‘You have got to be a team player, you’re a part of a team. If you want to be a one-off man then you shouldn’t be here.’ Few firefighters think that a firie has to be a particularly courageous person. The courage a fire crew show comes from the teamwork they display and their willingness to take calculated risks without endangering themselves or their mates. Senior Firefighter Wayne McLennan of Townsville prefers someone who is prepared to listen, to take things on board. He says that a firie does not especially have to be ‘super-physical’, because a mix of ‘sizes’ is good for various jobs. He adds: ‘You don’t have to be courageous. It’s better not to be foolhardy and risk making mistakes.’ In other words, don’t rush in. Look, assess and then decide on a course of action. Many firies want someone alongside them who is observant, switched on and, in Station Officer Kevin Neilsen’s words, ‘someone with honesty, physical ability, integrity and a stand-out personality’. He has to be able to think for himself and show some initiative. Barry Salway sums things up: A firefighter has to be community-minded because the community are our employers and they are paying a fire levy. I believe it is a young person’s job, and you have to be physically active. Age 55 is the time to retire. Late inductees are no use because you don’t get the benefit out of them. It’s a big investment to train people because you don’t stop training. You learn something every day, you’re always learning. Every job you go to is different, every incident is different, every person you talk to is different and everyone

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has different ideas. It is a constant learning curve from day one until retirement.7

The QFRS The Queensland Fire and Rescue Service is a State Government body and part of Queensland’s Department of Emergency Services structure. The Service is responsible for the protection of people, property and the environment from fire and chemical incidents, and (in conjunction with other agencies like the State Emergency Service) for the rescue of people trapped in vehicles or buildings or caught up in other emergencies. More than 2200 full-time or permanent firefighters, 1800 part-time auxiliaries and staff, and about 45 000 Rural Fire Service volunteers make up the operational staff of the Service. They protect a population of over 3.5 million Queenslanders living in urban, semirural and rural communities. QFRS firefighters in the financial year 1999–2000 responded to 50 425 callouts—a record. This meant that across the State a fire truck went out through a station house door once every five minutes of every day. But almost half (23 700) of the callouts were false alarms or unfounded incidents, the majority of which were due to avoidable inappropriate workplace practices or to faulty equipment. During the same period fire crews responded to 14 233 fires and 6426 rescues and other medical emergencies.2 The management and administration of the Service works through a system of devolved control in eight regions. The regions are shown in Appendix 2. Far Northern Region extends from Cairns through to the tip of Cape York. Northern Region extends from Townsville to the Northern Territory border. Central Region is vast and runs from Rockhampton to the southwestern border with NSW and the NT. North Coast Region covers the Bundaberg, Maryborough and coastal districts as far south as Caloundra on the Sunshine Coast. Southwestern Region is based in Toowoomba and extends to the NSW border past Dalby, Roma and Charleville. Brisbane North Region is small but covers the densely populated areas of the Brisbane CBD and northern suburbs to Caboolture. Brisbane South Region extends from the CBD and south

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side of the Brisbane River down to the Logan River. Southeastern Region is based in Beenleigh and covers the area from Ipswich South to the Gold Coast down to the Tweed River and NSW border. The QFRS is the largest fire authority in the nation. It came into existence after all the independent and local Fire Brigade Boards, numbering some 81, were amalgamated into the Queensland Fire Service in 1990. Until then the fighting of fires was a local issue. Firies were recruited by the local chief fire officer, who normally had a deputy. The firefighters were the chief ’s total responsibility—for wages, promotion, training and welfare. The Fire Brigade Boards were run along municipal lines and the revenue to pay firefighters and maintain their equipment came from insurance companies (five-sevenths), from local government (one-seventh) and from State Government (oneseventh) until 1984/85 when the urban fire levy system was introduced. In the Brigade Board days, would-be firefighters were usually well known to the chief or his deputy and often family ties provided more of a leg in to the service than the quality of applicant. The standard of firefighting expertise varied greatly from one area to another and promotion was slow—if not stagnant—especially in smaller regions. There was little exchange of information on techniques unless a firefighter moved from one area to another and was able to join another brigade. Pay was minimal; discipline was autocratic and extremely strict, with junior firies ‘not saying shit for sixpence’, as one retired firefighter recalls. The fire stations had to maintain their own buildings and equipment before the amalgamation and, in many locations, had to build their own fire appliances, such as pumper trucks, and keep them serviceable. Consequently most firefighters were tradespeople, especially plumbers, fitters, carpenters and welders. In Toowoomba, Bob Buckley remembers that the Toowoomba Fire Brigade Board ‘built their own fire engines for years’ and the chief officer liked to recruit ex-service personnel as they were used to discipline and doing ‘what they were told’. The firefighters have a union to look after their concerns in the workplace and one of the things that the firies like about it is that the station officers are part of the same union. At one time, officers were in a different union from those they led at the fire ground, and animosity developed in some areas, as Russell Mayne of Noosa station explains:

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There used to be a terrible . . . call it discrimination, I suppose: sort of a ‘them and us’. Before, we had the United Firefighters Union for the firemen. Then there was the Fire Officers Association and the Metropolitan Fire Officers Association and the senior officers had their own thing. The senior officers have still got their own association, but the officers are now with us. Up to the rank of station officer we are all in the United Firefighters Union. It’s good to have the officers in the same union. There are about seven unions in the QFRS altogether. The other unions include those for clerks, metalworkers, bootmakers and so on, and might only have a few members from the Service. They are mostly ancillary people who work in the QFRS Stores Section and maintenance and support areas. But the three main unions are the United Firefighters Union (UFU), the Senior Officers Association (SOA) and the Queensland Public Services Union. Neil Smith is a station officer who has become active in the UFU because of his time as a junior firefighter. He feels that before amalgamation of the Boards the ‘playing field’ was a little bit more than uneven. He says: ‘I have always fought for fairness and equity and as long as it is fair for everybody, and nobody gets hard done by in any way shape or form, then I am happy.’ For Neil, along with a fellow station officer of Roma Street, Alan Beauchamp, it is about looking at working conditions and pay. But Neil adds: We also look at workplace health and safety. I try to get involved in grievances and if there’s a problem I aim to get involved in it early with the big boss. We have a good rapport and I try to get in early and talk it out—get through the process earlier before getting to a written grievance. The UFU is not what could be termed ‘a militant union’. Its leaders had been through a pretty hard Enterprise Partnership Agreement in 2000 and were just signing off on it when this book was being researched. The QFRS has had some fairly tough times recently, mainly with its budget. Neil Smith says: ‘Everybody in the organisation has constraints on them and, although the unions would like certain things

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done, they also understand that our bosses are constrained by money. So in the union we try to fight for the best we can get for the dollar we have got.’ He goes on: Our area director here [Caloundra] Bob Kettle, is an excellent manager and does all our budgeting. We always have input into the budgeting. That has always been a standard thing in the Fire Service: put it down to the boys first and let them work out what they want, get prices for it, put it together and then submit it to the area director. He will then look at it and if he feels it’s a really worthwhile cause they will go to bat for it. And normally we’ll get it—under capital. A lot of things we don’t get because some of them are a bit airy-fairy. But the Fire Service generally has a good system that way. Many people in organisations disike change, but senior officer Peter Beauchamp of Cairns (brother of Alan, and an SOA delegate) says: The best thing that happened was the amalgamation of all the Fire Brigade Boards into one structure. The New Zealand Fire Service took ten years to get over their change and we thought we would be through it in five years. But we’re only in our teens—we amalgamated on 1 July 1990. It brought a wide range of experience and firefighting communities into one. The amalgamation did bring some heartache. Several firefighters who had held a position in local brigades were made redundant or were underqualified for what the new organisation needed. Moreover, according to Peter Beauchamp, ‘after the spill in the organisation, with [its original] 81 boards, there were not enough jobs to go around’. As a result, chief officers were put in position as regional commanders in major brigades and deputy chiefs were given jobs as district officers, and so on. ‘There were very few that missed out and they put people in jobs, overranked, and it wasn’t done smart.’ Without decrying their valuable service, many splendid fire officers, unfortunately, were poor managers with little business acumen. ‘They didn’t know how to administer because the Boards used to do it.’ So some tough decisions had to be

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made when the Queensland Fire Service changed to the corporate structure of the QFRA in 1996–97, when area directors and even station officers found they were managing their own budget and a greater number of assets. Unfortunately, many firefighters believe that because the reorganisation wasn’t handled properly in 1990, and then in 1996 created uncertainty for people as to their future, the system lost a lot of corporate knowledge with enforced and voluntary retirements. Peter Beauchamp believes the QFRS is learning from those turbulent times, but admits: ‘We didn’t manage the change process all that well. True merit process was not applied. There was too much suffering on the human resources side of the equation.’ Peter is State president of the Senior Officers Association and says frankly: ‘It wears you down, listening to the gripes. We still haven’t got it right.’ But the Service is working hard to make sure that the people who staff the organisation are treated well, are looked after in all aspects of their work and remuneration and get a ‘fair deal’, not least in terms of career structure. Starting at the bottom of the ladder, the recruits, after graduating from a twelve-week course, become probationary firefighters until, after twelve months, they are granted the status of firefighter. They then work their way through a series of external examinations under a system known as Q-Step, which is a process that gradually takes firefighters through five levels to a position where they are granted the diploma status of Fire Protection Officer Level 1 (FPO1). After being a senior firefighter, with various pay point accreditations (which signify where they are in their progression through the qualifications) they can apply—after a mandatory period gaining experience and doing ‘time on the floor’—to become an officer. The officer examinations are yet another set of rungs on the ladder to be climbed and each rung comes with oral, written and practical examinations that are extremely tough and test the diverse knowledge required if you’re to be an officer in charge of a fire incident. Station officers are identified by two pips on the shoulder epaulette or two red bands on the fire helmet. There are several pay points at each of the three levels for station officers. If individuals wish to move beyond being a station officer, a variety of appointments can be filled by firies with the ‘right stuff ’.

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Each of the eight QFRS regions is broken up into areas and each of these has an area director. This rank, the lowest in the senior officer category, is signified by three pips on the shoulder. The duties are explained in more detail in Chapter 3. Above the area directors are the assistant commissioners, and above them the commissioner. Just as this book was going to print in late 2001, the Queensland Fire and Rescue Authority (QFRA) changed its title to the Queensland Fire and Rescue Service (QFRS).

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CHAPTER 2

RECRUIT TRAINING On the recruit course we just plant the seed of knowledge—or, as we say, they walk out of here with a toolbox of knowledge, of all the different ‘tools’. And when they go to a job, they’ve got to pick which ‘tool’ to work with at that job. Station Officer Richard Gorey, Instructor, Recruit Course

John Watson is an area director in Bundaberg and has been a firefighter for nineteen years. He was introduced to the then Maryborough Fire Brigade Board by a mate who was a firie. About to get married, John was a butcher who had just gone bust in another business and was looking for a job with permanency and career opportunities. His father was a train driver, so he knew what shift work was about. Another firie, Bob Buckley, is a station officer in Toowoomba with 30 years under his belt. He was an Army reservist and used to walk past the fire station and notice that it was neat and tidy, had an air of

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discipline, and ‘looked good from the management side’. He threw in his job as a stonemason’s labourer and, despite the fact that he took a drop in pay for a while, he felt he had potential to advance. His induction was not without a bit of drama. He had to sit an entrance examination run by the then chief officer, and Bob recalls: ‘There were about six or eight blokes sitting the exam. When the chief left the room, one guy got up and said, “I’m outta here”, and left through the window!’ At the same station at Kitchener Street in Toowoomba, a local farmer who needed some extra income applied for a job as a gardener at the station and was drawn into the service when he saw what varied work was on offer. Today that farmer is the area director in Dalby and Graham Cooke holds no regrets about leaving the land. Similarly, Vince Hinder was actually working for the Fire Brigade Board as a mechanic, keeping the fire trucks on the road. In his mid-30s at the time, he had been a mechanic since he was seventeen. But, ‘after eighteen months of fixing engines and pumps and looking after seven country stations I wanted a change’. Vince had seen how firefighting operated and wanted to give it a go. The backgrounds of firefighters are as varied as Queensland itself. Jack Wensley was doing his accountancy with a firm in Toowoomba but had had enough. ‘I saw the chief officer one day and asked how I could get in.’ He did his entrance exam and then a series of physical tests, like a fireman’s lift, and was accepted. Some firies have come from other fire services, like Wayne McLennan in Townsville. He started his career doing Country Fire Authority volunteer work in rural Victoria to earn merit points for his Queen’s Scout’s badge. He was transferred by his company to Tasmania and then a series of chance events changed his life. I worked for Gestetner as a photocopier technician and they transferred me to Tasmania, but I wanted to leave. So instead they transferred me to Townsville. One day I went to Proserpine and forgot to take my shoes. While waiting for the shops to open so I could buy some shoes, I bought the paper and saw an ad for auxiliary firefighters in Townsville. I became an auxiliary, did that for about eight months and then asked to become a permanent. I got the job seventeen years ago, in 1984.

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Richard Gorey works at Annerley as a station officer. He was originally an airport firefighter but saw an ad in the paper and thought he would go along and get some information. Before he knew it, he was swept up in the selection process. He explained his change in job this way: ‘My big impetus was sitting in the airport fire control centre looking out over Brisbane and seeing a very large glow in the sky from a woolstore fire and thinking that something was missing in my job. I had to be involved in this.’ There weren’t many airport fires where Richard was working, although the firies did get a lot of training. Pat Hopper and Pat Scanlan in Cairns were both looking for a change in lifestyle when they applied only months apart in 1973. And Kevin Neilsen was just out of the RAAF in 1970 and lingering on the Gold Coast near his beloved Kirra Surf Life Saving Club when he applied. I didn’t feel like signing back on again and didn’t really want to go back to Viet Nam. I was down at the old Broadbeach pub in early 1971 and ran into two old mates of mine and they told me they were firies. They asked me to join the fire brigade and I said I didn’t want to climb out of one uniform straight into another one. But I met a young lady not long after that and we moved in together and I thought I’d better get a real job. I went across to Davenport Street—that was the HQ of the old fire brigade in those days—and applied for a job. I did the entrance examination straight away and I flew through it because it wasn’t that difficult at the time. I went back home—I think it was a Friday—and on the Monday the deputy chief officer was knocking on the door at 7.30 a.m. and asking me to start ASAP. He insisted, and I was in. I spent the next ten weeks being kitted out and on a recruit course, but I was the only guy on it! Ray Eustace admits: ‘Ever since I was a little kid I wanted to be a firie, I even joined as an auxiliary at seventeen by lying about my age.’ Ray has now completed 36 years as a firie. He joined the auxiliary brigade at Redbank, close to Ipswich. Redbank was a small industrial town and an ex-army camp and rifle range. Ray served as an auxiliary for two years before joining the permanents in 1964. He had a rapid indoctrination. His first fire, about a week after he started, resulted from a boiler room

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explosion at the woollen mill. But he adds: ‘It wasn’t just the big red truck, it was the action—every day being different, and the excitement.’ In similar vein, Russell Mayne says: ‘It will probably sound silly, but ever since I was a kid I loved fire engines and I always wanted to be a fireman. I always wanted to do it.’ Russell’s test was not like some others when he applied to join the Brisbane Metropolitan Fire Brigade. ‘It wasn’t like it is now. You had to do a maths test, an English test, a physical test. And one of the questions was whether you could ride a bike! Because we used to go out “plugging” on pushbikes, checking the fire hydrants.’ Neil Smith has been a firefighter for twenty years and joined because ‘as a kid I always wanted to be riding around on a big red engine’. He also had some close relatives who were firies. ‘It’s just a thing you’re brought up with as a kid—that firefighters are good sorts of blokes.’ Ray Moore was accepted readily into the Townsville Fire Brigade in 1964 because he was a carpenter, and tradesmen were always sought after to help maintain the stations. When he was on the trucks as a junior firefighter he turned up at a job, a house on fire, with a manning of one and one. ‘I manned the pump and the officer took the hose in. They were very exciting days!’

Recruit course 45/00 The twelve-week recruit course I attended was conducted at the training facility at Lytton, beside the Brisbane River, in the period February–April 2000. That establishment has now been replaced by a world-class training facility at Whyte Island at the Port of Brisbane, not far from Lytton. On the course were eleven men who had made it through a most demanding selection process. Some had waited more than three years since applying. One of the recruits was German-born Sven Diga. His story is typical of the men who were on the course. But first he had to attend a driving school and gain a heavy vehicle licence at his own expense just so that he could meet the selection criteria. In 1997 I saw the ad in the paper, got my certificates [First Aid Certificate and Resuscitation Certificate] together, and so on. The

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day I turned up to apply there were about 400 applicants present. It was daunting because I knew they needed only 200 out of five or six thousand overall. I was nervous, but I kept my head. I sweated for a week and about 80 per cent of the original applicants were culled on the initial test. It took me something like eight months to write my selection criteria response, with help from quite a few people. On the physical side I had trained for it but I failed the hose drag and dummy tests on a trial [practice] test and so I had to work up to it. The physical aptitude entrance examination is a series of tests. Failure on any test at any time implies instant removal from the examination. There are four disciplines to be completed in twelve minutes. Applicants wear a breathing apparatus on their back throughout. They have to erect and dismantle a ladder, run to an appliance (truck), take a fully charged hose with 1000 KPA pressure and hold it for a minute. Then the water is turned off and with the hose still charged (full of water) they have to drag it alone over a set distance for 60 seconds. Then the hose is cranked up again and has to be held for another 60 seconds directed at a target. Then the applicants have to run fifteen metres (three levels) up a hose tower and lift a 15-litre drum of water up the tower without the rope or the drum touching the tower or the handrail. After going back down the tower they have to drag a 70-kilogram dummy backwards around a 60-metre marked course—still with the BA set on their backs. All this has to be completed in twelve minutes. Sven Diga continues: I did my first practice in 13 minutes 30 seconds . . . and was I panicking! The following week I tied a rope to my Corolla car and practised dragging the car up and down my driveway. Every morning and afternoon, before and after work. On the next test I did it in 9.58 seconds. During the final physical tests, the applicants wore a wristband, and if they failed a test at any time, the wristband was cut off and they were escorted off the premises and not allowed to watch the remainder of the examination. Thirty applicants were physically tested at a time. On

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Sven’s day at Lytton, three or four candidates failed the initial running test and were removed. By the time Sven got to the hose drag only twothirds of the candidates remained. Overall the physical testing lasted 60–90 minutes and was followed by tests of dexterity and other physical attributes. There were also medical checks. Finally there was an interview with several senior fire officers plus a non-uniform staff member from the Human Resources Division. Sven says: ‘We were culled down even further after the selection criteria and referees’ reports. During the interview we were asked about various aspects of the job and our reactions to certain situations and we had to know five of the sections in the AntiDiscrimination Act.’ Sven finished with an order-of-ranking of 155, and then had to wait almost three years before he got on to his recruit course. The recruits I was with were a fairly typical group of trainees, according to the recruit training manager and highly experienced firefighter Station Officer Geoff Hastie. Sitting at morning tea and asking the men what drove them to become a firefighter, I heard responses ranging from wanting a job with security to wanting one with a challenge. Some said it was the fulfilment of a lifelong dream and that ever since they were little kids they’d wanted to be firemen. An ex-soldier and youth worker said that he wanted a job where he could do something for the community, because this was a large part of job satisfaction for him. Others who had worked in occupations requiring teamwork and team spirit to achieve the task said that that was their main motivation for joining the Fire and Rescue Service. All of the men were fit and one recruit, who was closing on 40 years of age, was a good deal fitter than most of his contemporaries in Civvy Street. The age range of these recruits was 22–37, with an average of 28.6 years, and put them in the category of ‘mature-age students’. The first impression I gained when watching the men was their common focus on the training being delivered. They were highly motivated. Their previous occupations were listed as storeman, house painter, hire car manager, mechanic, ski instructor, lifeguard, plumber, policeman, ex-soldier and youth worker, bank clerk and teacher. The eleven starters were all male. There are only eight full-time female firefighters actively serving on the trucks at the time of writing.

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There are many more female firefighters in the auxiliary brigades and among rural fire service volunteers. As well, many women wearing the QFRS uniform are employed in areas other than firefighting, especially in communications at the various fire communication (Firecom) centres around the State. Most recruits resided at home during their training, but if they lived more than 75 kilometres from Lytton they were domiciled at a local motel, the Koala Inn, somewhat irreverently called ‘Kamp Krusty’ by the inmates. During the course the trainees were allowed free travel home twice, usually at the four and eight week mark. Apart from the Lytton complex, facilities included the BA and Hazmat training centre at Roma Street station in the CBD and drivertraining facilities at Mt Cotton, south of Brisbane. The Lytton mess (or as some older men called it, the ‘crib room’), where the trainees had lunch, was decorated with dozens of plaques and graduation photographs of past courses. Some were humorous reminders that instructors are also human, but all demonstrated the obvious pride of recruits in their achievement in passing the course.

The training The aim of the twelve-week course is to produce a basic firefighter. It prepares recruits to the point at which they are able to take their place on an appliance at a station as a number three crewmember. The course covers a wide range of topics: Fire theory, including the nature and behaviour of fire Organisation and structure of the QFRS Firefighting drills Equipment, appliances, pumps etc. Compressed air breathing apparatus (BA) Methods of entry

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Urban search and rescue techniques (USAR) Road accident rescue (RAR) Communications Live or hot fire training, including flashover and backdraught phenomena Gas and compartmental fire training

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Hazardous materials (Hazmat) Defensive driving techniques Bushfires

Every day the recruits assemble on the parade ground at 8.00 a.m. An inspection parade follows a brief rollcall, and one of the instructors will detail any special administration arrangements for the day. The day is usually broken up into morning lectures covering the theory of various subjects and then practical handling and exposure to the material, and finally practice and drills in the afternoons. The day is non-stop apart from a break for morning tea and for lunch. Each recruit has been fitted out with the basic firefighting clothing of dungarees, overtrousers, turnout coat and boots, gloves and helmet. They each have their name on the back of their helmet. Training finishes for the day around 4.20 p.m. Most recruits find their evenings are pretty full studying what they have covered during the day and this places a strain on the livingout students who go home to a wife and kids all demanding their attention. Some men admitted studying for up to four hours per night, finishing at 11 p.m., and then getting up again at 5 a.m. to get to Lytton on time to start another day. The subject matter is detailed and complex, but the course is dynamic, constantly changing to ensure that the latest techniques and procedures are taught to the trainees. The material is usually delivered in modules, with examinations after each module. If the recruits bomb out in a certain subject area they face a retest and can seek assistance from their mentor/instructor to ensure that they fully understand where they have made a mistake. The instructors on this course are drawn from stations around Brisbane and are volunteers. They must be a qualified station officer to be an instructor. The student/instructor ratio is three to one and each instructor is appointed as a mentor to at least three recruits, whom he will guide and advise throughout the course. Most of the lecture material is delivered by the senior instructor and the station officer course instructors. For some modules such as RAR, hot fire training and defensive driving, visiting specialists in those fields will deliver the training. When the recruits tackle BA training at Roma Street station, the instructors are full-time specialists in operating the various smoke chambers in the complex.

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Many of the station officers who have instructed on the recruit course do it because they have a flair for delivering training and like to be involved in starting someone else’s career. Station Officer Richard Gorey is 35, single and one of the instructors. He has been an officer for almost a year and with the QFRS for eight years. Prior to that he spent three and a half years as an airport firefighter. Richard says: The thing that I have got out of this recruit course is that I have increased my own knowledge base, I have revised all of my previous knowledge. I have learnt a lot of new skills that I wasn’t taught when I was a probationary firefighter, like with the hot fire training. I also get the chance to develop my instructional technique and also on a personal basis there is a certain amount of satisfaction in that I helped start somebody else’s career. I have enjoyed interacting with the guys. I like having a laugh with them, I like having a joke with them and trying to show them, as much as I can from my experience, what the fire service has been. The instructors mix and match the recruits into various teams of three and four so that they can man the training vehicles (old model fire trucks) parked out in the yard. That is a deliberate action to make sure that the recruits get used to working with everybody else on the course and to know their strengths and weaknesses. It all comes down to teamwork, even in recruit training. Richard Gorey told me about the qualities he looks for in a firefighter and their impact on a team. If we all had exactly the same qualities the team would not flourish. We need guys who may be a little bit brash, a little bit upfront, a little bit outspoken. We also need guys who will sit back and have a look and say: ‘Yeah, he’s doing that right. I’ll watch this and maybe go and stand over there and make this a little bit safer for him.’ And then there are other guys that might be the technical boffins. So you need a mix. Teamwork and discipline are essential when the crews are doing wet drills in the yard, but the instructors don’t want blind obedience because each fire situation is different and they want to see the men using their own initiative, as it is the key to success. The instructors

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work very hard in trying to inculcate initiative and flexibility in the recruits, who are taught to be observant and proactive on the job— ‘seeing something that is serious enough to alert somebody . . . knowing when to instigate something and when not to’. After Week 6, the pressure is built up and callout drills are held irregularly throughout the day regardless of what else is occurring. The recruits must don their helmet, gloves, overtrousers, top boots and jacket, report to their crew station on their appliance and be ready to move—all within 60 seconds. At first it takes several minutes for the recruits to get their act together and to note from the callout over the PA system exactly where it is that their callout is to take them. One day the trainees were sitting in the firies mess having lunch and talking casually with me when the PA system announced a callout. Sandwiches were dropped half-eaten; one trainee desperately tried to gulp down the remaining contents of his Coke bottle as he hastily departed the room. Within two minutes the men had their turnout gear on (or most of it) and headed off to their allocated fire appliance. After several minutes, and once their trucks were rolling, they were recalled to the lecture room. Each practice turnout drill is followed by a debriefing, which is conducted in no uncertain terms. Then the recruits have to conduct a critical self-examination of what went right and wrong. In this case almost every crew got the address for the fire call wrong, as they failed to stop and listen to the PA system and then double check the address given. In their haste they had created waste—and if it had been for real, it might have been waste of life or property. The recruits listened soberly to their after-action report, and when they were called out later that same day they turned out just as fast but they all had the ‘address’ correct. It was a valuable lesson and it wasn’t lost on the trainees, who were reminded that ‘getting there’ quickly is good but going to the right place is even better. The turnout times dropped rapidly after the first couple of days and everyone was going in the right direction. Situational drills emphasising getting water onto the fire, urgency, correct procedures, safety, teamwork, hazards in the job, crew positions and efficiency are repeated almost ad nauseum. The trainees are debriefed in detail by the instructors, but by Week 6 the recruits were conducting their own self-critique before they had lined up to be debriefed by their own instructor. To experience the realities of the job

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outside the training yard, the recruits embark on street drills. This entails driving around the quieter streets of the adjoining suburbs and going into action using street and footpath hydrants to douse down a park or vacant block of land. Watching the roads for markers showing where the water hydrants are located is no easy task. But the recruits have eyes like eagles and when the instructor yells out to them to stop and go into action, they have to make a quick judgement on which way to run the hoses to the nearest water supply in order to supplement the pumper tank.

Breathing apparatus training The smoke produced in a house fire is deadly if it is thick enough. It can prevent a reasonable supply of fresh air—more importantly oxygen— from reaching the firefighters. But added to general smoke from burning wood and other materials is another toxic enemy. The advent of synthetic materials in the construction and covering of modern furniture, and the use of a wide range of plastics and polyurethane in building materials and elsewhere in the home, has made for an increased danger to firefighters. The risk of being exposed to toxic chemical fumes has grown markedly—if not literally exploded. Lethal fumes can mix with normal house fire smoke and unless firefighters are protected they can quickly be overcome. If the exposure is severe or long enough they will be asphyxiated and die. Most people who perish in house fires have usually died from the effects of smoke or toxic fumes before they have been burnt. (For a general account of the nature and behaviour of fire see Appendix 1.) Compressed air breathing apparatus (BA) was once only used when the smoke was deemed impenetrable. Today the automatic reaction, when a crew turns up at a fire that is ‘going’, is to have the two men on the hose get into their BA sets as soon as possible. This protects them as they advance into a burning dwelling from being overcome by smoke and fumes. The breathing apparatus in use today has evolved over a long period of time into what is now regarded worldwide as first-class firefighting equipment. The ‘Sabre’ BA sets are carried on every firefighting appliance and the firefighters, if warned in time, can emerge from their

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vehicle fully suited and ready to go. The BA set consists of a cylinder wrapped in a very strong kevlar padding that sits on a protective backplate made of glass and carbon-filled nylon and attached to a harness. The adjustable shoulder straps and waist belt ensure a snug fit for firefighters as they move, crawl, climb and go about their business. The entire BA set weighs approximately 17.5 kilograms but is ergonomically designed to place the weight on the lower back and is reasonably comfortable to wear. The only restriction when wearing the mask and helmet is in trying to look straight up—the rear of the helmet hits the top of the BA backplate or cylinder, but it is not a real problem and is easily coped with. The air is drawn to the user through a positive pressure system, which allows the firefighter to suck air in through the full-face mask and expel breath and carbon monoxide out through a ventilation device at the lower front of the mask. Visibility out of the mask is good, with about 150 degrees of frontal visibility. The result is that the firefighter can very confidently enter a burning or smoke-filled building and be fully protected from noxious and toxic fumes. The user can speak through the mask—although a roomful of recruits preparing to undergo BA training is somewhat reminiscent of a cluster of Darth Vader figures as they expel their used air and the mask adds a deep nasal quality to their voices. Roma Street station in the Brisbane CBD is the main facility for BA training. During their course the recruits spend a day on the theory behind the use and characteristics of the equipment and then, over the next four days, undergo graduated exposure to its use. By Day 5 of this training module, they are confident and competent in the use of BA gear and can take their place alongside more senior firefighters. But using BA equipment is not just a matter of throwing on a harness, cylinder and mask and diving into a smoke-filled house. The air cylinder is capable of holding 1800 litres of compressed air (which equates to 200 times the normal pressure). Use of the air is strictly regulated, and an average use of about 35 ‘safe minutes’ with a full cylinder (ten minutes always being held in emergency reserve) must be recorded by the crew’s number two (the pump operator) on the appliance. If the firefighters are at a large job and many BA units are in use, a ‘fresh air station’ or ‘base’ is established and a BA controller is appointed whose

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sole job is to monitor the firefighters and their use of the air. Each firefighter has a gauge which indicates how much air is left in the cylinder, and if they forget to check, a warning whistle sounds which gives the firie about ten minutes to retreat from the fire and obtain more air. A long-duration cylinder, which greatly increases the capacity of the wearer, is sometimes used when situations demand. However, the physical fatigue of operating in full level protective clothing with a mask in intense heat must be taken into account and consequently the shorter duration cylinder is the more commonly used. Each firefighter is logged in and out as they depart or return to the fresh air station where reserve cylinders are held. The BA controller keeps track of when firefighters should be returning and, if they have not returned when their air is due to run out, alerts them through the station officer or the section commander. The danger in a smoke-filled environment is very real and if someone has not returned to replenish the air then an immediate search is launched to determine the firie’s whereabouts. The recruits on Course 45/00 were being instructed by Don McKay (no relation to the author). A 31-year veteran who has been a qualified station officer for some 24 years, Don is based at Roma Street and imparts training to the recruits through a series of lessons, lectures and practical exercises. The Roma Street facility has been in existence since 1970 and is world-class. From the street it would not even be noticed, but behind the four-storey brick facade is a complex combination of training rooms that replicate a ship’s interior from the bilges to the weather deck and incorporating an engine room. The mockup includes two holds and ladders and gangways that would be found on almost any reasonably sized vessel entering Brisbane Port. Alongside this training block is a set of rooms and adjustable partitions that can be used to replicate a dwelling, a set of offices, a boarding house or whatever takes Don’s fancy. Another room contains a series of tunnels that are used to expose firefighters to crawling with equipment on and manoeuvring through confined spaces with a BA set on their backs. A further room contains chemical containers and is used for chemical hazard training. The entire training complex can be climatically adjusted for smoke (non-toxic), heat and light. The system is controlled through a

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centralised computer and smoke and heat are ducted (as in an airconditioning system) into the replica sites. Light can be adjusted from ‘good’ to absolutely pitch black and, as the recruits continue through the week, it gets seriously dark at the bottom of the training areas. By week’s end the recruits are climbing up and down ladders and searching rooms for dummies, in temperatures over 40 degrees Celsius. The smoke is so dense that you can only just see your hand in front of your face. This is definitely not the place for anyone with claustrophobia. Before they are split into teams for their next exercise, the recruits are given a refresher on room and building search techniques. Don McKay runs through the use of their 6-metre personal safety lines to ensure that the recruits understand the practicality of using lines to find their way back out of a situation if their torch fails or their radios are rendered unserviceable. They run through the line signals that have to be committed to memory in case they get into trouble or are being recalled to assist others. The recruits are given their objective and then use their training, initiative, personal skills and common sense to achieve their goal. The training of these mature-age students is often one of ‘do it the best way you can with the equipment and training that you have’ rather than a set ‘you must do it this way’ approach. Flexibility and initiative are the key words. The recruits draw their BA sets, which have been replenished during the morning tea break, and with quiet efficiency set about testing them—pulling them on, attaining a good seal of the mask on the face and checking the air level. The relative quiet of the room is punctuated by shriek whistles of the sets indicating, when the air is connected, that a positive flow is established to the mask. Mask harnesses are drawn and adjusted over the recruits’ heads and helmets shoved on top. Gloves are the last item put on. After checking in their BA set identification tags, the recruits move out for the exercise. They enter the replica ship through a basement-level watertight door and crawl through a very narrow opening where they have to take off their BA set but still wear their mask and maintain their air flow and then emerge on the other side and put their set back on. It is tough work crawling along with full kit and BA set, mask and helmet in the very hot, humid and smoky conditions. It calls for close teamwork and

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cooperation and the trainees work quickly in pairs to ensure that they get through the obstacle quickly and safely. After 35 minutes of intense physical work that sees them hauling cargo nets full of sandbags from a ‘ship’s hold’ and transferring it down into another, they depart through the tunnels and emerge back into the gallery. The recruits have their name and cylinder ID tags checked off by the BA controller, who is a station officer instructor assisting Don McKay. The recruits return to the lecture room for debriefing. During their exercises in the BA chamber they are monitored by their normal instructors, who lead the debriefing. The trainees are literally soaked from the waist up from working in the close, hot environment of the BA chamber. Their cotton drill shirts are plastered to their bodies as if they had been in a shower. Their hair is matted and the air is thick with sweat. The recruits draw long and deep on their water bottles as they rehydrate before the next training exercise. Four times this day they will suit up, don their BA sets and launch into the chamber: searching for ‘bodies’, clearing rooms, climbing through tunnels and familiarising themselves with the BA equipment. It is hot, hard and physically demanding work, but the recruits are doing well. Their instructors have been with them the whole way and emerge just as wet and sweaty as their charges—a case of ‘do as I do’, not ‘do as I say’, and the leadership displayed is not lost on the trainees. Their air-litreage use, which is recorded as they enter and depart the BA chamber, indicates to Don McKay on Day 2 of this training module that all of the recruits are now through the ‘anxious’ phase of wearing the equipment. In the words of one recruit, Glen McKissack, they are ‘totally confident’ in their equipment. They would have to be, as the smoke inside the chamber could easily induce a serious coughing fit within a minute unless one was wearing a BA set. From now on their training will often include the use of these sets.

Live (hot) fire training At the time I was there the Lytton facility housed the QFRS Live Fire Training Unit. The Live Fire Training Unit is now at Whyte Island. The unit conducts live fire exercises for station shifts and supplements

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the training conducted by Geoff Hastie and his fellow instructors. On Day 2 of hot fire training a team of specialists move in to assist the normal instructors with the latest knowledge of firefighting adopted from overseas and Australian experience. Peter Mountains, Ross Ginns and Barry Salway provide slick lectures using the latest audiovisual aids and quickly take the recruits through a morning devoted to fire characteristics. When the QFRS wanted people to introduce the concepts of flashover and backdraught to the stations, so they could train the firefighters in real firefighting, Barry Salway, a 26-year veteran, volunteered for the job because: ‘I have seen the need for real hands-on hot fire training in the stations. I did the training at Lytton and then kept in contact and eventually became an instructor.’ The recruits are constantly questioned after each module and asked again and again what different properties there are in a fire and what the terminology they are attempting to take on board means in real terms out on the fire ground. In their mess they are given an emphatic demonstration using a portable, gas-fired simulator (called a boom box), which shows quite remarkably the effects of flashover and backdraught. This is then followed up with another small-scale demonstration using a mockup of a basic building (called the doll’s house), to show the smoke effects and the warning signs of an explosion. There is heavy emphasis on the indicators of an impending explosion. Barry Salway explains the boom box and doll’s house training aid: The boom box is used to demonstrate a backdraught scenario. It also demonstrates the lower and upper flammability ranges . . . we add LPG or propane gas to the boom box and what you need is a mix of propane gas and air before it will actually ignite. What the boom box shows you is the minimum amount of propane gas and air where you will actually get an ignition. It will also show you the upper flammability range where it can be too rich to burn. But when more air is let in (to represent a window being broken, for example) it can bring it back to [the point at which it] can actually backdraught. The ignition for that is a battery pack in the boom box handle and a pilot arc in the corner of the boom box. The bigger the bang the bigger the ideal mix of the gases.

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By mid-afternoon the recruits are in their turnout gear and BA sets and about to enter a blackened container. A fire has been set using six sheets of chipboard in a corner of the room. They carry their hoses in with them so they can watch the effect of fog spray on the gases accumulating menacingly above their helmeted heads. The temperature high up inside the container rises to about 1000 degrees Celsius within twenty minutes and thick toxic smoke begins to fill the top third of the container. Each recruit is taken right up to the flames and shown in meticulous detail how to cool the gases and reduce the chance of flashover, smoke gas explosion and backdraught. They emerge after 25 minutes on BA and are hot and visibly affected by the high temperatures inside the room. Even though one end of the container was left open for safety reasons, just pushing a hand up into the smoke was enough to convince the recruits that low down on the floor was the place to be. At one time firefighters went by the adage that ‘a fire is not out until there’s water running out the front door’. With the characteristics of fires changing with the advent of synthetic materials, firies can no longer just charge in and hose something down until a flood appears. The smoke and unlit gases hovering overhead are as much a danger as the burning item to be extinguished. By cooling the gases the firefighters are able to reduce the thermal environment to a manageable state and then safely bring the fire to an end. It is hot, sweaty, hands-on stuff, but the training lessons are brought home in no uncertain manner. After retreating from the container, the recruits sit with their hot fire instructors and are debriefed about what they have seen and felt. It is up close and very personal and the practical demonstration hammers home the theory to the recruits. They sit like sponges around the streams of information flowing out of the instructors and don’t hesitate to ask questions if they’re unsure. They have been encouraged to ask questions because their lives and the lives of their workmates could depend on how well they know their subject matter. Week 8 of the course sees the recruits putting many of their newfound skills into practice and they spend days going through drills and techniques for extinguishing fires where propane or LPG gas containers are on fire. One of the most dangerous situations a firefighter can confront is a boiling liquid expanding vapour explosion (BLEVE) fire.

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It is dangerous because it is difficult to determine just how much of the liquid, such as LPG, has been vented from the fire scene and what stage of meltdown or disintegration the containers might be at when the firies arrive. Prior to the live fire training, the recruits are given theory lessons and watch a video of horrific fires that have occurred in Mexico and North America. A fire in Mexico City at an LPG plant, where 300 people were killed and 7000 injured, is included, as is a graphic incident in which a firefighter in the US was literally blown off his turntable ladder and killed. Despite the fact that the drills are a training situation, the heat is intense and one recruit has his overtrousers scorched slightly as a reminder that the fire is indeed very real. The instructors advance toward the flames with their team, using a spray nozzle to protect the team as they close to within half a metre of the roaring gas flames and cut off the supply of gas to the fire. It is impossible to stand unprotected within 25 metres of the fire that Geoff Hastie is controlling from the operator’s position only 30 metres distant. Each recruit is placed in the position of branchman as the recruits put out fires in a vehicle, a set of large LPG vertical tanks and a very large LPG industrial container. It is hot, wet and dangerous but the recruits move in quite calmly, thanks to their training and equipment. It is hard to believe that eight weeks earlier their reaction on seeing an out of control BLEVE fire would have been to depart as quickly as possible. Instead, now they are advancing, step by step, into the inferno. While the recruits are learning how to put BLEVE fires out, a shift team from Kemp Place station in the Brisbane CBD arrive with three appliances and are put through another phase of training by the Live Fire Training Unit. The fire simulation in this case is done in 12-metre steel containers especially prepared for the purpose. The training is conducted under the watchful eye of the senior instructor, Grahame Ray. Grahame is a station officer seconded for the last two years from Brisbane South Region. His task is to pass on the latest techniques in backdraught and flashover recognition and fighting. Backdraught occurs when a fire is starved of oxygen and at some stage the air it needs to continue burning is inadvertently fed in through either a door being opened or, perhaps, a window finally breaking in the heat of the fire. The sudden inrush of air causes the fire to burn back

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through highly charged smoke and the fire can entrap and severely injure even fully protected firefighters in its path. Flashover occurs when the pyrolysis gases ignite because the air mixture becomes super hot. Grahame amplifies the importance of recognising the indicators for these two very hazardous situations by showing a helmet whose visor had melted when its owner and another firefighter were caught in a backdraught in a Brisbane fire eighteen months previously. What is scary is that this nearly fatal event occurred from a simple fire in a pile of mattresses. But incorrect application of water to the fire caused a spontaneous combustion reaction in the heavily charged smoke (which is unlit fuel) above and behind the firefighters. Training in coping with high-risk combustion is vital and Grahame spends the morning showing the men from Kemp Place how backdraught and flashover occur and what signs to look for. The training must be conducted in full kit and with BA gear as even though the smoke is non-toxic it could still injure the firefighters. Grahame demonstrates to the men how the Swedish Fire Service has perfected a system of reducing the danger by applying water in a different manner to the unlit gases above a fire. Backdraught can also occur outside a building and Grahame moves on to explain the problem of gases and smoke igniting and creating danger not only to firefighters but to casual observers in the street. While waiting for the containers to be prepared the three Kemp Place crews are put through their training on the gas pad at Lytton and from the outset it is obvious that the men have worked closely together, as they efficiently attack their targets. It is hard to hear the commands of their station officers over the roar of the escaping ignited gas as the firies move steadily across the concrete pad, supported by their safety-line men and hosing down the target area to avoid an explosion. Even after the fire has been extinguished the crews retire in step, with their spray nozzles providing a protective curtain in case the fire re-ignites without warning. Just 50 metres from the target the air temperature is above 50 degrees Celsius. The emphasis for these trained firefighters is on crew work, teamwork positioning and branch and hose work. Each man is an integral part of the group that has just advanced into the searing flames coming from the gas cylinders. The recruits, not surprisingly, look on with great interest.

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Road accident rescue About half of a firefighter’s ‘real jobs’, in the sense of physically attending incidents, are road accidents. Not all car crash victims are entangled in the wreckage, but if they are then it is the job of the firies to extricate them in concert with the ambulance officers attending the scene. In some places the State Emergency Service crews also perform these rescues. The instructor brought in to conduct the road accident rescue (RAR) training was Station Officer Ian Ames. Firefighters often attend more rescues than fires if they work at a station near a major arterial road. An example is Mt Gravatt in Brisbane South Region, which is close to the Southeast Freeway. Ian was seconded to instructional duties from Mt Gravatt, where he normally manned an emergency tender, an appliance that carries every conceivable piece of kit required for RAR. On the day I first met Ian he was still pumped up from his team’s winning the Queensland RAR championship held at Southport. His team of five (four firefighters and an ambulance officer) managed to beat off seven other regional teams to take the trophy. It is a coveted prize and Ian was obviously proud of his team’s efforts. During the five days of RAR training, the recruits are given the theory behind what has to be done on arriving at a road accident: the correct procedure to reduce the likelihood of further damage and additional accidents, plus the tools, the other procedures and the dangers. Graphic still and video footage provided by commercial television stations allows the recruits to see what carnage they may be faced with and the best way to deal with certain situations. Ian’s extensive experience allows the trainees’ questions to be fielded easily and competently. Time is spent on trauma and critical incident stress management as Ian explains the downside of attending RAR turnouts and how best to deal with the problem. There is no false machismo present as Ian explains just what happens in the ‘real world’ of RAR. He runs through the extensive stress counselling system from debriefs, to peer support, to trauma counsellors and the need for such counselling after a severely traumatising event. Out of the classroom, the recruits are faced with coming to terms with the tools of RAR. Portable hydraulic equipment such as the ‘jaws’,

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a powerful yet highly manoeuvrable tool, is used for cutting off roofs and doors of motor vehicles. I was handed the tool and with very little effort—apart from holding the device the correct way—took the roof pillar off a Toyota Corona in less than twenty seconds. Another device called a ‘ram’ allows firefighters to spread or push crushed car components away from trapped victims to allow immediate first aid and disentanglement to proceed. Cars provided from Brisbane City Council’s dumped-car lot are used to allow the recruits the necessary practice to quickly and safely remove trapped road accident victims. It is not just a matter of walking up to a vehicle and cutting a door off a car, as there are many things to consider, like a safe working area, vehicle stability, first aid, flammable hazards and site management.

Graduation Day, 19 April 2000 During the three-month course there was a metamorphic change as the recruits adjusted to being pushed and driven from point A to point B and back again as drills and techniques were hammered into them so that they became instinctive. The trainees were yelled at and given difficult and demanding tasks, and if they screwed up were yelled at some more and made to do it again. The emphasis was on doing it right the first time and only practice and perfect practice would make the instructors happy. Richard Gorey, commenting on the recruits’ change in attitude as they neared the end of the course, said: When they first came here they were probably like people that arrive in a different country that don’t speak the language. They were coming into an organisation which the majority of them knew very little about—if anything. They knew what firemen were, they knew what firemen did to a certain extent, but they didn’t know much else about the fire service. I think they now have confidence because of the training they’ve received. They are getting to that point where they’re starting to be eager to test themselves and they’re enjoying their training and want more of it. They want to be pushed to their limit and I think they want to know their limit. They are starting to develop their personalities as firefighters.

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The big day finally arrived and a graduation ceremony was conducted at Lytton. The recruits’ families, numbering about 70 people in all, had travelled from near and far to witness a graduation parade that would involve the presentation of prizes for top student and for various modules in the course. The recruits were piped on parade by the QFRS Pipes and Drums band led by pipe major and station officer Malcolm Ketchion. A simple ceremony followed addresses by senior officers in the QFRS and an address by Commissioner Mike Hall. After a parade inspection the firefighters marched off and after a short break, when they changed into their turnout gear, they put on a spectacular display of firefighting and RAR work. The firefighters then changed into dress uniform and returned to the parade square. After a reading of the Code of Ethics by Glen McKissack the graduates were presented with their Certificates of Graduation and individual awards. Finally letters of appreciation were presented to the instructors who had taught on the course. The traditional hat tossing to bring to an end the first day of the rest of their lives followed the march off. While chatting later with families and friends the recruits were asked what they thought was the most challenging or difficult part of the course. Scott Dewar thought it was ‘trying to remember everything, because so much has been put on to us . . . just trying to keep it all in your head and remember it all’. Greg Forrestall, who had managed an Avis hire car business, thought the hardest part was ‘getting back into study mode after ten years out of school; also the physical side of things—it was a lot harder than I would have thought’. Warren Hosking found the physical side tough but his instructors said he never shirked a task. Ex-schoolteacher Glen McKissack found taking orders difficult at first but said: ‘Now that I’m institutionalised it’s okay.’ Blair Parker thought that the theory side was the hardest and added: ‘After running around the yard all day you’ve got to go and do a bit of study at night and you really don’t feel like doing it.’ Marcus Maffey, a confirmed bachelor, said he thought ironing his own uniforms was the hardest part of the course! Since Day 1 on the course the eleven men had been drawn very close together—in Blair Parkers’ words, ‘a tighter knit group, definitely: we are all there to help each other out, and if anyone’s got a question about

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anything, we just throw it around and argue about it and in the end work it all out’. John Ryan is married with two children. He found that coming home at night was tough. ‘I needed to put a fair few hours in and balancing that with family life was pretty hard.’ Luke Smith lived in at ‘Kamp Krusty’ and said that living away from his family for twelve weeks wasn’t easy. Glen Urquhart had previously been working in a bank and found the transition to daily physical work difficult at first. ‘But once I got used to it I was fine.’ Sven Diga chuckled when I asked him to recall a memorable moment during the course. He had been having some trouble adjusting to their being barked at every time the men made a mistake in the yard. His mentor was Richard Gorey, who has a military style of instruction and is very precise. Sven recalled: I got off on a bad foot when I tried to run him [Gorey] over with a fire truck in Week 1. I stopped a foot in front of him and he just looked at me and asked if I really wanted to run him over. He then actually asked who in the class thought he was an arsehole, and Parker and I put our hands up. He said: ‘Well, at least there are two honest blokes in the room.’ When I look back now, I can understand where he was coming from. It wasn’t until the fourth or fifth week that he started to ease up on us and by Week 8 we were playing volleyball together and the pressure was coming slowly off. By Week 12, we were the best of mates. ( Just for the record, Richard Gorey is not an ‘arsehole’ and has great rapport with the men he instructed. He maintains contact with many of the probationary firefighters.)

New boys on the block Kevin Besgrove is a firefighter in Townsville and graduated about a year before the 45/00 recruit course men. He recalls the time when he arrived brand new and dripping behind the ears at Townsville South station. The probationary firefighters were worried that they would screw up or say something inappropriate in front of their fellow fire-

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fighters, some of whom had been on the trucks for over twenty years. But: ‘The blokes were pretty good, I was made welcome, and everyone helped us out. The first three months is a big learning curve and it’s a matter of getting into a routine. My mate Ben drew the heat—away from me. The firies wet his shirts and put them in the freezer.’ Marcus Maffey drove up to Ingham straight after graduation. It was raining. I met the guys at the station. I found accommodation and settled in and began my station induction. It’s a real friendly station and in my first week we had a lunchtime barbecue with the ambos. On Friday afternoons we often gather for drinks and it’s quite sociable. In Innisfail, John Ryan marched in and within a month had seen some action—a small grass fire and a motor vehicle accident. It was a two-vehicle MVA and it was the first real job I had, and it was good that it all worked out well. Everyone got out okay and everyone worked promptly and quickly and effectively . . . It was a good feeling to have an MVA where nobody died and everything went well and you felt like a bit of a hero at the end of it.

Looking back After graduating and spending almost five months on the job the recruits were asked what they thought of their course and, if they could change any part of it, what would it be. Among a wide range of responses given by the men, Luke Smith would like to have seen ‘more hot fire training and less EEO [equal employment opportunity] stuff ’ on the course itself. After graduation the probationary firefighters do a series of self-paced examinations called ‘Q-Step’ that will eventually lead to their becoming senior firefighters. Many of the graduates believe that ‘much of the human resources stuff ’ could be left to Q-Step learning and that more time should be spent on practical aspects and pump work.

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Warren Hosking thinks that the course was a good building block and ‘prepared us to be firefighters’. But in firefighting ‘the spectrum is so broad that the course couldn’t teach everything for the regions’. In Charters Towers one of Warren’s first local courses was how to catch snakes, which proliferate and invade the town during every wet season. His fellow firie, Scott Dewar, says: ‘We were told the course was just a stepping stone and we would get a lot of on-the-job training (OJT) and the real training would then begin. It was a good overview and gave us a broad range of skills. The stations get into the nitty gritty for what the regions want.’ One of the most difficult things to come to grips with in firefighting is automatic fire alarm control panels. No two are ever the same and even alarm panels made by the same fire company can be different. Warren says: ‘They should cover alarm panels in the course. Even in a small town like Charters Towers they are all different and we didn’t know what to do.’ Arriving as a probationary in Townsville, Kevin Besgrove thought the course had been good and had given him a solid grounding. But he soon realised that it had one major shortcoming. He still recalls the look of anguish on his station officer’s face. The officer had asked him to do something. Kevin laughs and says: ‘We should have been taught how to make a pot of tea!’

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CHAPTER 3

ON THE JOB On most occasions when a big red fire truck goes tearing down the road, four firefighters will be inside it. The station officer will be in the left front seat and is the person in charge. The driver is also the pump operator and is called the number two. The crew member who will hold the fire hose is called the branchman and is also known as the number one. The remaining firefighter is the number three—the gopher (‘go for this and go for that’) and ‘water boy’. Each time the firies go out they know exactly what job they are doing as it is laid down at the beginning of a shift. Some fire crews do four shifts as a ‘tour’ and have the same jobs throughout the tour. Other crews like to change their jobs every shift and a firie could be driver and pump operator one day and branchman the next. Each job is as important as the next and there is no pecking order in the cab to differentiate between positions. Occasionally a firie might have a slight injury and will be driver and pump operator until recovering and going back on the branch again.

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The shift times in urban stations are 8.00 a.m. to 6.00 p.m. on day one (ten hours), the same for day two, and then 6.00 p.m. to 8.00 a.m. on the third shift and again on the final shift. The shift crew then have four days off. (This is a point of contention because the crew have really worked eight hours on their first day off.) In regional areas the shifts worked depend on how the station is manned. This is looked at in Chapter 9. Firefighters in large stations are broken up into four shifts— A through D. Regardless of where you are in the State, the shifts always take post on the same day. For example, in 2000, ‘A’ Shift started on Tuesday 1 February and came off on Saturday morning, 5 February. Across the State every A Shift started on that Tuesday. The system makes contacting the firefighters at work easier and everyone knows at least a year in advance what days they are rostered on duty. Some shifts have been together for several years. Russell Mayne works at Noosa station on the Sunshine Coast. He has been on C Shift for about four years. It is your second home. You probably spend more time here than you do at home. You get to know the blokes and their problems and what’s happening in their lives, so it is a pretty close-knit sort of group. Even if you don’t get on with a bloke from the station, when the bells go and you’re out there at a fire, he could be your worst enemy but now he’s your best mate.

Working on shift One of the first matters that has to be confronted by a firefighter on joining a station is the adjustment to working on shift. John Watson of Bundaberg didn’t see it as a problem: ‘I saw shift work as being good; my wife thought it was fantastic. I had contact time around the house and more time to do “home” things.’ It has to be said, however, that not all wives enjoy their partners being away from home at night. And John admits: ‘The romance of the job does drift away . . . sleeping in cold dormitories, and being hosed down (sometimes deliberately) at a house fire at 3 a.m.’

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Many long-time firefighters prefer shift work although, as Barry Salway concedes, ‘it eats into your private life and there are nights when you would like to be home with your wife and children but you’re not, you’re on shift’. But he has done shift work for 27 years and it is one of the things that he enjoys. Barry says that he and his wife Berys have ‘had a good relationship the whole time’. Greg Scarlett thinks shift work does affect the family, because of the kids playing sport on weekends. He adds: ‘So you miss that and it affects you more than things socially.’ Jack Wensley makes the observation that even though it affects family life, ‘it is not detrimental and has to be worked around and adjusted to by the whole family’. Thankfully, the times when Pat Scanlan and Pat Hopper were junior firies on shift have gone, when days on duty could not be switched to accommodate personal events. Jack Wensley recalls one old chief fire officer who would not let a firefighter attend his own daughter’s wedding because of a shift clash! And Ray Moore remembers the old shift system which left people ‘buggered’: In 1964 it was 3 p.m. to 11 p.m. Monday; 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. Tuesday through to Thursday. Then 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. Friday until Sunday morning. Then it all started again on Tuesday. It rotated like that, and every seventh or eighth week we got one shift off a week to bring us back to a 40-hour week. That was for the firies. The officers worked 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday and Tuesday, then 6 p.m. to 8 a.m. Wednesday and Thursday. They would then have two days off and start again on Sunday. That was called an eight-hour shift. It was awful. I didn’t like going home at 11 p.m. and starting again at 7 the next morning. It was a bit ugly. Kathy Eustace, who has been married to her Ray for 32 years, says the impact was worse in ‘the old days and it was bad’. She remembers when Ray was a station officer unable to get off shift and he turned up at a christening for one of their children. ‘He turned up from a grass fire . . . he was black, loaded with smoke and stank.’ The friends made on shift naturally become close acquaintances, but most firies say they have a wide circle of friends because of the people they meet in their job and the ability to do things on their days off. It is harder for sporting contacts, because on shift a firefighter will only get two weekends out of

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eight free. Graham Cooke thinks the positives outweigh the negatives with shift work because he has had a lot of good time with his kids. Russell Mayne is philosophical and applies Murphy’s Law to his shift times: ‘You can bet that, if there’s something on, you’ll be working.’ The attitude of officers to firies in the old days led to some serious pranks and hi-jinks to alleviate the oppressive working conditions and the strict discipline that was enforced then. Ray Eustace recalls an occasion when an older firie, Henry Ellis, was on duty in the watch room, where he had the job of answering telephone calls. Another firie, John Barnes, was up to no good: John caught two birds and chucked them into the comms room with Henry, who was reading the paper. The pigeons flew around and all the shutters on the telephone console fell down and the bells went off—you had to have the shutters up to turn off the bells. Here were three bells ringing away, Henry trying to shut the bells off, and pigeons flapping around. There were lots of practical jokes. Like catching people who always fly out of bed like a rocket—the lads would fill their boots with water and then ring the bells. On other occasions the men would fill someone’s boots with paper and then fall around laughing as they watched their mate trying to get his boots on. As Ray admits: ‘You didn’t take sick leave because you didn’t want to miss out on what was happening!’

Answering a call The job of a firefighter on shift is a busy one. The belief that firefighters sit around all day in red braces, playing cards and waiting for alarms to go off, is a myth. From the time they come on shift until they knock off they’re involved in a variety of jobs, as later chapters show. When they turn out to a fire, having been prompted by a 000 call which has been tasked through Firecom, or responding to an automatic alarm, each individual has a specific job to do. As the truck races to the scene the crew will be talking about where they think the fire exactly is

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and what specific points of interest should be known. In case the driver isn’t familiar with the best way to get to the location (and that would be very rare), the number three has a set of ‘which way’ cards that have every major building and road listed and shows the route from the station to a particular spot. In twelve months of riding trucks, I didn’t see the ‘which way’ cards used as there was always enough local knowledge among the crew to get them to the scene quickly. Men like Senior Firefighter Vince Hinder have worked out of one of two stations in Toowoomba all their life. Vince says: ‘I know the place like the back of my hand—like a fireman should.’ If the fire call has been vague, or the crew are having difficulty locating a fire, Dick Gledhill says, ‘a good comms officer will lead the truck in over the radio’. If it is an obscure street, or a case of misinformation (usually not deliberate) from the public, then the Firecom operator will confirm events as the crew travel to the call. Vince Hinder told me that the important things when he got to a fire were the station officer doing a quick recce (reconnaissance) and getting a feel for the size of the fire and where any occupants were. While he was doing that the firefighters were checking on water availability, as the trucks normally only carry about 1500 litres of water when they arrive. The pump operator was getting his pump ready and establishing a BA control if required for the number one and number three who would go into the dwelling as a team. Russell Mayne says of firefighters: Common sense is a huge factor—absolutely huge. Being able to think for yourself . . . because an officer at an incident has got enough work on his plate [and can’t be] running around making sure that you’re doing your job. Even though he’s got a crew and they know what they are doing—if he can get on with his job it makes it so much easier. Initially, saving life comes first, so if a bystander says there is someone inside the burning structure, the crew will attend to that first. The station officer has a totally different job from the firies and what they have to do. One of the biggest things on everybody’s mind is getting water. That is a huge priority. While that is happening, the driver (pump

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operator) is going up and down the street looking for water—looking for those black and white signs that say HP (hydrant, footpath) or HR (hydrant, road). When the crew get the water on they have a guaranteed supply to attack the fire with. The fire trucks have high pressure hoses on reels and the truck’s own water supply will provide a good firefighting capability for about six minutes on one hose. The one thing certain about a firefighter’s job is the uncertainty. Although it is often cited as a major attraction of the job, Neil Smith of Caloundra station reckons that the hardest part about being a firie is that ‘when you’re on shift, the bells go and you have no idea of what you’ve got—once you’ve gone out through the doors, with lights and sirens on, you have absolutely no idea’. Many firies admit to getting an adrenalin rush, ‘but once you have got over the excitement, you tend to live with the adrenalin—then it becomes a worry of what you have actually got and how you are going to do it when you get there’.1 Jack Wensley of Toowoomba agrees: ‘You can plan a bit when you get the call, but it isn’t really until you get there that you can [decide the] attack.’ Greg Scarlett, says of his position as a senior firefighter: I think [the hardest part of the job is] staying professional and not goofing up and getting someone killed—which is easy, given some of the things we have to do. If you went out to a traffic accident and you did something the wrong way and someone got killed, or you went to a fire and made a wrong decision and one of your mates got killed, I think that’s the scariest part—how you can affect others. I think it’s about letting someone down. When you’re in a small team and one person made a mistake it would be pretty hard to live with. It’s about staying on the ball, handling the pressure. When you knock off and go home you can feel the pressure—it’s definitely there.

Senior firefighters Senior firefighters have taken on a much larger role on the station house floor in the last few years. Neil Smith explains:

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A senior firefighter usually has the run of the station, and what I mean by that is he will be running around with his crew doing whatever he has to do—maintaining his truck and maintaining his station. He is still responsible to the station officer. At the same time, most stations have specific duties for senior firefighters, who now take more of a ‘leading hand’ role in a fire crew. They conduct a lot of the training and even take the firies out and do certain inspections, while the officer gets on with the paperwork (of which there is no shortage). Outside the Brisbane area, if the crew are out on an inspection with the senior firefighter and the bells go, the officer will just jump in the station ute and join them at the fire ground. Neil Smith compares the two positions: ‘The station officer . . . is more of a manager and the senior firefighter more of a leading hand.’ That sort of division is a matter of being flexible under the Enterprise Partnership Agreement arrangements.

Station officers Barry Salway is a senior firefighter who often acts as a station officer as he has all the qualifications to be an incident commander. When interviewed, he was acting station officer at Nambour because the incumbent, Gary Burnett, was doing area support duties at Maroochydore. Barry thinks that the hardest part of a station officer’s job is the responsibility. I notice the difference coming ‘off the floor’ where you are one of the team and do whatever has got to be done. Once you move up from firefighter to acting station officer there is a lot more responsibility. You are the guy that calls the shots, and if things go wrong the buck stops with you. The safety of the crew is first up and you have to make sure that they’re not going to get injured. They are my primary responsibility and my bum is on the line if something happens to them. Then comes the public at large and then property after that.

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The station officers have an acronym for their responsibility at a fire—RECEO. It stands for responsibility to the public (rescue), exposure, containment, extinguishment, and then the fire scene overall. But the safety of the firies is important because if the crew are unable to do their job because they have been injured, or unable to move because it is unsafe, they are no use to anyone. Pat Hopper has been a station officer for fifteen years and his time is taken up organising the shift, completing stacks of computer work, overseeing training of the crew, overseeing tasks like building inspections, running exercises and providing budget input. The training Pat mentions is a requirement for all firefighters: to complete at least 40 hours a month of core skill training. This is in all aspects of their job from BA to RAR, to pump and hose drills, vertical rescue techniques, first aid, resuscitation and so on. Hopper’s close mate Pat Scanlan, who has done almost the same amount of service as a station officer, reckons that the hardest part of the job is keeping the shift happy and keeping them together. ‘It depends on the guys you have, and some need more attention than others.’ They are not the only ones. At an incident, Scanlan says, an important task, after the crew have tackled the job, ‘is to try to comfort the people whose building’s on fire’. But making the right technical decisions is vital, of course: the officer in charge must deploy the firies in the right positions and and aim to ensure their safety at all times. ‘Fight the fire at close range, do it quickly and safely, and save as much property as possible,’ Scanlan says. Trevor Kidd has been a station officer in Rockhampton for about 24 years. He enjoys the challenge of solving a problem. ‘There are lots of facets to the task, and I like working with the crew and being in charge.’ Important things are: ‘Professionalism, the well-being of the crew, recognising that we have a job to do, and not getting complacent.’ Trevor explains why it is important for a station officer to listen to his fire crew: You have to be approachable. The team must have input and I take a team approach to the task. I use the experience of our team because some men have vast experience in certain areas. For example, some have a lot of chemical incident experience. We do vertical rescue, fires, RAR; we do chemical incidents, trench rescue, USAR [urban search and rescue], plus senior first aid,

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advanced CPR [closed pulmonary resuscitation] etc. So we do a wide range of tasks and need a lot of skills and no one person is top in all fields. Therefore the station officer becomes the coordinator, matching people to tasks. Kevin Neilsen has worked for more than two decades on shift and knows that the important thing, after the adrenalin rush of a callout has passed, is to get his thoughts together quickly. He wants to know: ‘Where is it, how do we get there the quickest way? Is the crew tuned in? Where is the hydrant?’ He adds that his head is ‘really swimming’ as he spends the first minute or so at the fire ground just gathering information. He believes that the station officer ‘is really an incident commander or controller’. Given the amount of experience in a fire crew, that is understandable. Everyone knows what their job is and gets on and does it while the station officer makes his assessment of the situation. He knows the crew can handle the initial setting up and preparation. Teamwork is vital because it saves time and energy. Kevin says that he has always got feedback from the team and involved them in a problem. He would ask for opinions—there could easily be 50 years of experience in a crew. He adds: ‘With a senior crew I won’t say too much at all. I will expect certain things to happen. Often I won’t have to tell them anything.’ Some station officers don’t get to spend much time with the one crew, especially in the far-flung corners of the State where there are less officers to go around. Jack Wensley works out of Toowoomba on the Darling Downs but spends much of his time relieving senior officers in different areas like Roma, Charleville and as far out as Goondiwindi. In 2000 he spent nine months on relieving duties. He says: ‘It creates havoc with my own long-term planning as a station officer and as a person. You can plan a bit when you get the call, but it’s not really until you get there that you can attack the job.’ Richard Gorey has been a station officer only a relatively short time compared to some of his colleagues and he finds the responsibility the main element of the job. Now that I’m an officer I don’t have the luxury of waiting for somebody else to make a decision. As a fireman I did have that

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luxury, and I would just do my job. But now, as an officer, I have to make decisions for other people and pertaining to other people.

Support roles In each of the eight regions in the QFRS there are several positions allocated to providing support to the regional areas to ensure that firefighting personnel are trained in the latest techniques of their core business and also for personal development purposes. Certain of the positions are concerned with supervising auxiliary training. All these people are known as support officers, and they have usually been very experienced station officers. Kevin Neilsen, for example, has served almost 28 years as a shift commander or station officer, and came into the firefighting business after a stint in the RAAF and a tour of duty in South Viet Nam. He sees his job as mainly the coordination of training, supporting the area director, ‘being a gopher’, and special projects work. He also looks after recruits going through Q-Step, and acts as mentor or guide to the more junior officers if and when they seek his support. Kevin says: ‘As a support officer I spend a fair bit of my time being a help to firies— utilising my experience, which is valued.’ He also makes sure that firefighters are not disadvantaged in obtaining their qualifications for pay levels that impact directly on superannuation payments on retirement. Neil Smith works at Caloundra station in a field called Community Safety. It’s a job that requires special qualifications apart from being an experienced firefighter and station officer. He had to complete a fourweek course and says: ‘I have just this week finished the practical side of it and I am now a fully fledged Level 3 Community Safety Officer. It was bloody good to get through, actually.’ Part of the job entails devising a regional service delivery plan for every station in the whole of the North Coast Region—some 43 stations in all. The plan covers location of existing stations, what service delivery is required, how the area has grown, where the QFRS might need to put new stations, and provision of the all-important operational communications. Neil came into this line of work because he wanted a break from shift work. He says:

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Your kids start to get a bit older and you realise that you’re starting to miss growing up with them. You’re missing the weekends with them; you’re missing the nights. It was at about the fifteen-year mark that I realised I was neglecting my family and my son. I decided I had had enough of pulling bloody dead bodies out of cars and decided I would get some more skills. I talked my boss Reg Christiansen into sending me away on some computer courses. Now I’ve got some extra skills I can bring to the job . . . And being a builder I’m adept at reading plans and so on. His background is particularly apt. The other part of Neil’s job involves poring over building plans to ensure that all aspects of fire safety are incorporated in buildings and structures in accordance with regulations and Australian codes of practice.

Area directors; strategic development units The number of areas a region has varies. Some regions have small but highly populated areas; in other regions the area directors have huge tracts of Queensland to look after. John Watson is an area director in Bundaberg. He spends much of his time keeping tabs on what is happening in his area and talking with his fellow area directors. He visits all the stations in his area regularly so they can highlight problems or seek assistance with particular issues. He pays close attention to his auxiliary stations at Childers, Gin Gin, Bargara and Wallaville. John says of his job: ‘I spend my time forward planning, forecasting, planning service delivery, constantly reassessing regional and area planning, and keeping the firefighters happy.’ Another director of a large area is Graham Cooke at Dalby. ‘It’s a very active job,’ he says. I have a line of responsibility to the crews and proper service delivery. It’s all about minimising loss of life and property.’ Dalby is a fully auxiliary area and includes towns as far apart as Dalby itself, Cecil Plains, Tara, Jandowae, Chinchilla, Miles and Meendarra. It is no less than four hours’ drive from one end of the area to the other and visits are required for liaison, training and administration. For major incidents it creates enormous challenges, as senior officer support

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is some considerable time away. In the case of a major incident Graham’s role is to ensure that the crews have the necessary resources. ‘Usually I am somewhere else and I will ring them and make sure they have what they want. I don’t automatically take over and I rarely respond “with lights and sirens”. I also have to do fire investigation at some fires.’ Graham reports to Assistant Commissioner Daryll Pepper, who has six areas within his region: Toowoomba, Dalby, Warwick, Goondiwindi, Roma and Charleville. The ‘tyranny of distance’ is worst in the rural areas, of course, as Maryborough Area Director Ray Eustace explains: ‘The hardest part of my job is time management. It’s about long hours. There’s nothing really tough—just meeting challenges and creating priorities. There are always personnel dramas and the balancing of resources.’ Ray spends much of his time (apart from planning and administration) in maintaining morale, visiting all his stations and attending to the requirements of some 60 permanent and 50 auxiliary firefighters in his area. Senior officers are responsible for forward planning and strategic development at the regional level. Peter Beauchamp is the manager for strategic development in Cairns, which is the centre for Far Northern Region. There are almost 400 QFRS personnel to look after and a population of almost a quarter of a million, not counting the enormous influx of tourists into Cairns every year. Peter describes his work in this way: There are eight of us and we sort out the provision of fire services to the public. It’s an evolving job and mostly about strategic service delivery, improving our jobs and the way we do business. It’s not hard but challenging. Trying to impart a realistic objective to the senior management of the QFRS as to where we should be going, and being proactive rather than reactive. Firefighting is reactive but we need to be proactive in our planning. It’s an extreme challenge.

Firecom The whole business of turning out to a fire call starts with the communications centres in the regions. They are known as ‘Firecom’, for

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fire communications. The communications centre for the Brisbane area is located in the inner city suburb of Spring Hill. I sat in one night on shift with console communications operator Dean Baird. Dean is an ex-Army communicator who wants to be a firefighter one day but at the moment is concentrating on tertiary studies to give him an edge when he applies for firefighter training. His supervisor was Neil Beasy and his shift co-worker was Sean Brophy. Co-located with the communications for the Queensland Ambulance Service (QAS), the Emergency Services communications centre consists of a very large room with two-thirds of the space dedicated to the QAS. Operators sit at curved consoles—in chairs reminiscent of the type used by the commander of a warship—facing a battery of screens and monitors. The communication system is high-tech indeed and touch screens ensure rapid response to calls and quick allocation of tasks. In the QFRS section there are several desks. By day, fire call operators man two consoles and a third console is dedicated to an alarm monitor. Each time a call is made to 000 for the QFRS, there is a preconditioned response depending on what information has been passed to the control centre. Standard procedures are in place for allocating the station and number of units to the incident. The staff in the watch room are specifically trained to ensure that the correct number of appliances, or ‘pumps’, are activated for a specific type of incident. For example, for an automatic fire alarm it will be two pumps, and for people trapped upside down in a car it will be three pumps. A ‘pump’ in the firies’ vernacular is a truck capable of pumping water. On night shift, Dean Baird and Sean Brophy work in tandem. They back each other up when one needs a comfort break; both work the monitors when things get busy. During the day, from Monday to Friday, there is an alarm attendant whose primary duty is to maintain the database of some 4000 automatic alarms in the Brisbane Firecom area, as there is constant updating and maintenance by the many fire companies and fire fighting enterprises. When a fire company wants to work on an alarm it rings up Firecom and books the alarm ‘off line’. The alarm is then isolated from the system so that it will not be activated accidentally during testing. The area the Spring Hill Firecom is responsible for is huge. It

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comprises about 15 200 square kilometres of territory that contains 31 permanent stations, 21 auxiliary stations and 108 rural brigades. All of this takes some coordination. Even the Rural Fire Service is complicated, as its brigades are sorted into three categories based on their level of training and resources. Dean Baird stops describing his job and the work of the centre to take a 000 call from a woman on a mobile phone. She’s a little distressed but I’m unable to hear what she says. The following responses are Dean’s. Fire Service, hello. (Woman describes the incident.) Is that a cat stuck up the tree? (Woman says where it is and how high.) What I can do is give you the number for the RSPCA ambulance. (Woman still wants the fire brigade to help her.) Is it your cat, is it? (Woman says whose cat it is.) Is it outside your house? (Woman says she is from out of town and staying at a friend’s place.) Chances are it’s up there by choice. (Woman says the cat looks scared and might die.) It’s not often you see a dead cat up a tree. (Woman agrees.) What I will do is, I will give you the [RSPCA] ambulance phone number. (Woman goes off to get a pen.) It is not the job of firefighters to rescue cats from trees unless there is a risk that the cat in question could start a fire or some other dangerous event. Animals in peril lie in the domain of the RSPCA, but many people see firefighters on television rescuing cats and dogs and automatically think of the fire brigade and call 000. Crank and nuisance calls are also part of a day’s work but the monitoring capability that Firecom now has makes bogus calls a costly business for the perpetrators, as they are often caught. The Telstra system is described by Dean Baird: Telstra runs a caller locator index (CLI), and quite often people don’t realise that if they ring 000 their details will be given to Emergency Services. This is explained in the front of all telephone books. It’s a great thing, because if you’re in a house on fire and you can’t speak we will still know where you are. So before I answered that phone call [about the cat up the tree] I knew that

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the woman was on a mobile phone and that the caller was actually from Mt Isa. To gain an idea of just how busy a Firecom can get I visited Southport Firecom, which looks after Southeastern Region and is the second largest Firecom in Queensland. The region extends from the Tweed River up to Beenleigh, across to Woodridge and then southwest to the border ranges. In the region there are some 650 QFRS personnel with fifteen permanent stations and seventeen auxiliary stations. Julie Bennett is the Firecom supervisor and has three console positions to supervise. Julie was previously an Australian Federal Police officer and then a hotel manager. Two consoles are normally operated, but during the bushfire season and the Indy Grand Prix race, extra staff man the third console because it is so busy. In the 2000 bushfire season, the Southport Firecom had 240 calls on one memorable day. The console operators are women—one is a former trucking company radio dispatcher and another was a ‘home duties engineer’. Julie also liaises with the neighbouring NSW Fire Brigade to make sure that they exchange information and assist each other where necessary. In her region there are four areas: three have permanently manned stations; one area is totally auxiliary. The information flowing in allows Julie to assist area directors in allocating resources to major incidents. It is an important job but largely unseen by the general public. The rapidly expanding use of mobile phones has placed an additional strain on Firecom across the State, as the public now have quicker access to communications in times of emergency. However, it is not always helpful when people ring up and say they are ten minutes outside Beaudesert and there is a fire on the side of the hill, but are unable to expand on that information. The real skill of good Firecom operators then comes to the fore as they extract all relevant information to determine as closely as possible where the fire has occurred. Barry Salway has spent 27 years on the pumps and has seen the changes in response times to accidents and incidents. ‘It allows almost immediate response if people are on the road. People are getting to phones quicker, but the problem with people using phones along the roads is still getting the exact location. Pinpoint accuracy is difficult and sometimes they have no idea which side of a turnoff they’re at.’

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The problems for the firies at a bad crash site are multiplied when people passing the scene ring the victims’ relatives about the accident. Barry says: Then they turn up and add to the drama. I have seen it several times when the parents have arrived and just collapsed in a screaming heap on the side of the road. Then you have to get a firefighter or someone to look after them. Our role as carers as firefighters then really comes to the fore. I think we do that well. Trevor Kidd, a station officer in Rockhampton, knows the situation only too well and adds: I try and console them as much as I can. We see it every day, whether it be at a house fire or at a car accident. The person that owned the house, or Mum and Dad who have turned up at an MVA where their kid is—they’re the people you have to deal with and you really have to look after them. We believe we do that very well. I still have to do my job and look after the team, but we also have to look after them. If I can’t do it myself, I will certainly make sure that someone else there will look after them.

Frustrations on the job No occupation is perfect in every way and there are usually things that frustrate people. Bob Buckley of Toowoomba admits to being frustrated at times ‘with certain departments like Human Resources in head office’. He says: ‘Grievances take forever and don’t seem to get anywhere. The QFRS has taken a “soft glove” approach to most things.’ He thinks it’s like a ‘uniformed system without a uniformed approach [to discipline]’. Many firies don’t like the way ‘problem firemen’ can take forever to straighten out. Bob remarks: ‘There are thousands out there who want to be firies, and it’s the wrong approach.’ Dick Gledhill of Townsville also has concerns about public servants in the QFRS. He dislikes the constant changes coming from head office and says: ‘I get frustrated when we have change for no apparent reason.’ But he adds

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that his greatest frustration comes when he attends a fire and there is no smoke alarm, or when speeding is the cause of a bad car crash. On the latter he says: ‘Human nature is hard to control. It’s usually young blokes getting pissed and showing off. I think the majority of fatal MVAs are young blokes who are pissed.’

Public awareness and safety programs The QFRS maintains a series of public education initiatives. The programs are conducted by the firefighters themselves—often on their days off, as in some areas the firies are so busy maintaining their equipment and attending to fire calls. In such cases they do the extra work unpaid as there is no provision for overtime for delivering the programs. The Fire Education program for children at school in Grade 1 is designed to educate youngsters in the dangers of fire and of playing with matches, and what to do in case of fire. Each station is required to conduct fire education classes with state and private schools. It’s a yearround activity as each shift is allocated a group of primary schools for initial training and then, usually two weeks later, a follow-up confirmation of what has been taught. The firefighters go to the schools as a shift and take their gear and their truck with them in case they are called to a fire or emergency. The education kits they use are professionally prepared and it has been found that children pass the message along to family and friends. I attended a Fire Ed program in the regional town of Goondi, outside Innisfail. Six-year-old Lauren Baxter had her hand shooting up with every question the firefighter asked. After the session I asked her some basic questions. Lauren, you seem to know all the answers. Why is that? Yes, because my brother told me some of the answers. And how old is your brother? Eight, turning nine in September. So you know what to do when a fire breaks out? Yes. What do you do? If there is smoke, you get down low and go, go, go.

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Okay, and what is important once you get outside? Go to a meeting place. Yes, and not go back . . .? Inside. Okay, and what do you do if your clothes are on fire? You stop, drop and roll, and you cover your face with your hands. The ‘osmosis’ between Lauren Baxter and her elder brother is a common story, being evident in almost every school across the State. Dick Gledhill in Townsville agrees, adding: ‘It works, they love it and parents tell us about it. Some kids have saved their own families.’ Barry Salway describes the program this way: What we are trying to do is twofold. In Queensland we are targeting the Grade 1 kids but we also want them to take the message home to Mum and Dad as well. Those young kids have a lot of influence on Mum and Dad, so we are actually reaching two areas. It’s certainly getting the message across to kids and they’re going to be the next generation with the information that they have to have a smoke alarm and so on. The Road Awareness and Accident Prevention program is designed to prevent road accident injuries and fatalities by giving Year 12 students a hard-hitting look at the realities of road accident trauma. The firies visit students, aged 15 to 18, in high schools. If available, a smashed car will be used to show the effects of a collision or rollover. The rescue tools are demonstrated to show just what is required to extricate casualties. Russell Mayne has been delivering the program for a while and notices the impact of the lecture and slide show. They get in there like typical Grade 12s. We show some video footage which is pretty graphic and it sort of slows them down a bit. They think they know everything but by the end of it they admit that we’ve made them aware of just what is going on. We had an RAAP program last year at Noosa District High and about a week later we went a to car prang at Tewantin—a rollover—and there were four young girls in a Volkswagen. A couple of them were pretty bad . . . One of the others came up to me afterwards

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and she said she was sorry that she had let me down. I asked her how she worked that out, and she replied that we had done the RAAP program at their school in the last week and that she was driving the car. I told her she hadn’t let me down but she had let herself down. It was probably a hard way to learn a lesson, especially as it was her dad’s car and he had just had it restored! You win some and you lose some—it’s like anything. Another firefighter, Neil Smith, has witnessed the same effect. ‘I have seen school kids start by being rowdy but at the end every one of them is so attentive that you wouldn’t think they were the same kids.’ He adds: ‘The teachers are standing there with their mouths open, thinking: what’s wrong with these kids? But it’s because the firies have had the experience. They’re practical blokes and they care— firefighters care.’ Greg Scarlett has received feedback from his own kids who attended the RAAP program and from their friends. ‘I think it’s a good program and has a really good impact on the kids. We have questionnaires for evaluation, and while some say it’s not graphic enough others disagree.’ Bob Buckley describes another project, the Safehome program, as involving ‘an invitation by members of the public for the QFRS to inspect their homes and advise on safety around the house—the scrub or garden, electrical equipment, smoke alarms, switchboards, power points, working areas and so on.’ Bob remarks: ‘We also cover evacuation plans—a two or three storey house is often a death trap for many people. Fire escapes, ladders etc. may be needed.’ Neil Smith has done quite a few Safehome visits and says: We call around and do an audit.; we normally spend about 45 minutes on it. We’re lucky that we have the instigator of the program at Caloundra station—a bloke called Lindsay Elliott. He actually got it up and running and it’s going Statewide now. This has been a North Coast Region initiative and it goes Statewide from the first of July [2000]. Several other schemes are run as required including a Fight FireFascination program designed to curtail the incidence of deliberate fires

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started by juveniles. This is an important program as it is estimated that juvenile fire-setting is one of the top five causes of structural fires in Queensland and one of the major causes of bush and grass fires. Another scheme being trialled is the Juvenile Arson Offenders program, which aims to stop repeat offences by giving young adults the opportunity to see what the effects and consequences of a fire are at the actual fire ground.

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CHAPTER 4

THE AUXILIARIES I walked into the office of the chief fire officer in 1979 to talk about becoming an auxiliary firefighter. He told me to go and get my medical, which I did, and when I came back and sat down he said that I’d be getting $8.62 an hour. I asked what for, because I didn’t realise we got paid for the job. I thought that was better still and I was very happy with that! I’d thought it was a free service and something you just did—all I was interested in was doing something for the community. I already had another job. Station Officer Neil Smith, Caloundra

Throughout Queensland there are about 2000 auxiliary firefighters. The auxiliaries are part-time firefighters who have been trained to a high degree of efficiency and capability and can, for all intents and purposes, do exactly the same sort of job that a permanent firefighter does—as long as they have the resources. In many larger rural

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communities there would be no skilled fire prevention and firefighting if it weren’t for auxiliary crews. There are 32 ‘mixed’ stations across Queensland. In these, permanents man the station during normal business hours and are supplemented by auxiliaries after hours and on weekends. The permanent firefighters at mixed stations are the core of the fire station and the auxiliaries provide the manpower for back-up crews. The auxiliaries in a mixed station fluctuate between being available for callout and acting as ‘temporary’ firefighters on an almost semi-permanent basis. Many permanent firefighters of the last ten years have come from auxiliary ranks. Station Officer Fred Heiniger of Nambour told me about the auxiliaries at his mixed station. We have eight at present, but we really should have ten. It’s hard here for auxiliaries to work with permanents because when the auxiliaries get turned out they’re our back-up (unless it’s a big one). And often they just man the station and that’s it. So it is hard to get them motivated. But in towns where there are no permanents, they have a real job and are good at it because they are ‘first response’. It’s hard on the auxiliaries where there are permanents. At each of the 155 auxiliary stations where there are no permanent firefighters, the whole show is run on a part-time basis. The officer in charge is called a captain and he may have two lieutenants and about nine firefighters on call (depending on the approved establishment, or manning level, of the station). Everybody is on call through a system of pagers and they turn out when the regional Firecom activates their alarm. The Pico pager system is unique and was pioneered in Queensland specifically to mobilise auxiliary firefighters when commercial paging networks could not guarantee minimum response times.1 Some stations without pagers are still turned out using the town’s siren. The auxiliary firefighters are paid an hourly rate on turnout and for training, which is usually held for two hours every week. It is obvious, after talking to the auxiliaries across the State, that they are not in it for the money. This is just as well because, unbelievably, their earnings from this voluntary, dangerous community work are taxed! Army

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Reserve soldiers don’t pay tax on their earnings and yet the chance of being killed while providing life-saving skills seems to be just as great, if not more so, for an auxiliary firefighter. I believe it is an issue that should be addressed and quickly at a federal level in order to restore some equity in what is community work and without which many Queenslanders would be in peril. As one auxiliary captain comments: ‘When one considers the devotion of those who put in, they get little in return.’ The weekly training period depends on the local station and what is best for all the crew. The captain is responsible for the training of the firefighters and for the standards they maintain. Some permanent firefighters would prefer that they had the responsibility for training, but it would not be feasible in many parts of the State without a large budget blowout in overtime and travel expenses. After visiting Caloundra and Nambour, I went to other parts of Queensland to gain further insight into what the auxiliaries do and how they go about their business. I began with Coolum Beach.

Coolum Beach, Sunshine Coast The station is situated at the back of the main business district in this beachside town. The captain, 47-year-old Mark Clyne, is a ceramic tiler by trade and is heavily involved in the surf lifesaving movement, organising major events. For this reason he had been called on to help organise the now defunct World Firefighter Games in 2002 in Brisbane. Mark joined the fire brigade fifteen years ago. In those days the town’s siren would go off to call out the firies (there were no pagers then). He decided that he might as well join the brigade because he was being woken up anyhow! There have been huge changes for auxiliaries since their amalgamation into the QFRS. At Coolum the training is standard and is arranged so that Mark’s crews can do it in acceptable chunks of their spare time. The equipment is better than before—both the big red trucks (they have an Isuzu composite pumper) and the personal protective clothing, which is the same as permanent fire crews wear. On turnout Mark acts as a station officer would at a fire, by doing a recce, assessing

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and allocating resources and managing the fire ground. His lieutenants usually look after the pump and BA sets, but act in his stead if he is unable to turn out. If an auxiliary firefighter is at work and his pager carries a message that he has a fire call, he usually drops what he’s doing and heads off to the station. This can create a dilemma for auxiliaries if they are not selfemployed and have difficulty getting time off. But across the State I found very few organisations that do not release their auxiliary firefighters from work. To be eligible to be an auxiliary firefighter you must live within five minutes of your station. That takes care of things at night, but if you work away from Coolum during the day it can be a problem. Mark Clyne’s constant battle, like many of his peers, is to have a crew available for daytime turnout at the station. Sometimes his numbers have dropped to as low as one officer and two firefighters to man a pump. Another problem for some of the fire crew is that during the bushfire season taking time off from employment can hurt financially. In the previous season Mark didn’t lay a tile for about eight weeks, as his station had a record number of fire calls in October/November and turned out almost every day. There were 75 fires in eight weeks and most of them had been deliberately lit. Juveniles were thought responsible and devices were discovered that had started the fires.2 The firefighters at Coolum station come from a variety of backgrounds. Let’s take a few at random. Chad McAllister, 25, is a recent police graduate from Oxley. He has been an auxiliary for twelve months and is a ‘day work’ member. Tamara Sandford, 24, transferred from Stanthorpe. She had been an auxiliary there for two years and is fully qualified, having completed her BA, Hazmat, RAR, first aid, advanced resuscitation and incident management courses. Tim McDermott, 27, is a greenkeeper at the Headland golf course in Buderim. He has been an auxiliary for a year and is ‘interested in serving the community’. He is also a member of the SES and hopes ‘maybe one day to go full-time’. Jason Hanrahan, 32, an optical mechanic and spectacle maker by trade, has been an auxiliary for over three years. He works at Mooloolaba, which is fifteen minutes away by car and so he is a night-time turnout member most of the week. During last year’s bushfire season Jason was ‘slowly getting knackered’ spending eight hours at work and then eight hours at night fighting grassfires in the State forest area around Noosa

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and north of Coolum. Darren Tinker, 32, has been in seven years, is one of the lieutenants, lives in Coolum and is a baker and pastrycook. He is usually up at 11.00 p.m. to start his work and tends to be a guaranteed member for a day turnout. Darren joined from a background of family service in the local community. The Coolum area of operations (there are no specific boundaries, as response times are the criteria) is not all that large but there are pockets of scrub everywhere that, according to Mark, ‘are poorly maintained and managed’. They also have two major arterials, one of which is a high-speed road, cane farms dot the area, and there is a large residential precinct with a foreshore of national park. The greatest challenge in the Coolum district is accessibility. Mark says: ‘We have a lot of inaccessible areas like swamp, so we wait for the fire to come out and we spend a lot of effort trying to reduce the fire load.’ The grass and bush fires are time consuming—the crews can spend days chasing a grassfire if the winds are up. As Mark observes: ‘You could win a prize at the Show with your blisters.’ Coolum averages around 200 calls per annum; about 40 per cent are automatic fire alarm calls, usually from the nursing homes and hotels. The salt corrosion associated with the prevailing sea breeze adds to the number of automatic alarm calls. If a major fire erupted, Mark Clyne would hand over to the nearest permanent station officer or incident commander for the area. For people wanting to become a firefighter there is a 40-hour recruit course and a BA course (another 40 hours) as the absolute minimum. However, as the budget was strained badly in late 2000 as a result of heavy bushfires, there have been financial constraints on recruits attending courses or members upgrading their skills. Understandably, Mark was a bit peeved, saying: ‘I will have blokes on the backburner for the next six months before they can attend a course.’ Inexplicably, there is no extra funding to cater for a bad bushfire season, but if the captain of a station found he had no money and desperately needed new crew he would go to his area director, because the provision of a fire service is a top priority. Somehow people would be found or sent out of the area to train. Mark sees his greatest challenge as ‘trying to keep local training interesting and exciting and not in a rut’. The station runs a skills

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maintenance program, and they also get outside to do RAR on dumped cars, reconnaissance on new buildings in town, and wet drills in a creek with the pump. Mark delegates the training as much as he can to his lieutenants, who are qualified workplace trainers (another course available to firefighters). The local community supports the firefighters well, although many people are blissfully unaware that they are not permanents. They see the big red truck zooming along the road and assume that that’s all these community-minded individuals do all day. Mark recalls a big grassfire when they were short-handed: It was a deliberately lit fire, but we had lots of community help. The hoses were all joined up to reach the head of the fire and there were about 150 people moving the hose . . . The Energex chopper dumped water from the lake at the Hyatt hotel, picking up about 360 litres in a scoop bag. The people from the community were on sacks and using branches as beaters . . . It was great. The Coolum station also has its share of MVAs and most of the crew have attended accidents requiring extrication. They can be out of the station in five to six minutes from the time their pagers are activated. The area is growing quickly and Captain Clyne believes that within five years the Coolum station will probably have to go mixed or even have permanent staff on shift.

Dalby In the Southwestern Region, Area Director Graham Cooke has seven stations to look after. He has a significant challenge in his rural area. As he puts it: ‘The country area is not as stable now because of the state of the rural economy and the population drift to the eastern seaboard. The challenge is getting people to enlist.’ But women are coming to the fore and about 60 per cent of his stations have female firefighters, usually making up about a fifth of the crewmembers. Graham had 92 auxiliaries on the books in December 2000, which matched his authorised establishment, but the numbers fluctuate.

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Auxiliaries are supposed to live within five minutes of the station but, as in most auxiliary stations, a balance needs to be struck—it’s essential that stations have people for day turnout. This is a problem everywhere in Queensland. Toowoomba is the main city in the region and the locals are justly proud of their auxiliaries, who have been very successful at regional auxiliary championships. The championship events test the crews in drills on pumps, ladder drills, wet drills and safety. The district’s champion station, Clifton, often has permanent firies like Bob Buckley attend training sessions on their days off to assist the auxiliary team to prepare for such meets.

Killarney To the south of Toowoomba, near the border with New South Wales, is the small rural community of Killarney, famous for its meat industry which supplies the Brisbane region. The major fire risks are two sawmills, an abattoir, potato and onion growers and packers, the Killarney Co-op store, the Killarney hospital and a nursing home. There’s also a hotel and about 200 houses. Robert Schulze, a plumber, is the Killarney captain. He joined in 1965, ‘when we got the water supply through town and the Warwick Fire Brigade Board decided they would start a brigade in Killarney’. He was only sixteen and had to be eighteen to join the crew, but his father had a word with the chief officer during the recruiting. As it turned out, father and son were the first people to show interest, and in the end Robert was taken in under age because they were short of the six required to start the brigade. So began a 40-year association for Robert, whose father was captain before him. The Killarney station now has three officers and eight firefighters, with a good mix of youth and experience—the three officers have 100 years’ service between them. The incidence of fires fell in 2000, but MVAs increased. The brigade turned out to eight car accidents, one vehicle fire, six AFAs, two structural fires, a chimney fire in a house, two special service calls, one false alarm (malicious) and six grassfires. They also had to deal with a concrete truck that had broken down with three metres of cement

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slurry stuck in the back. Rob remarks: ‘We hosed it out.’ The grassfires are mainly looked after by the RFS brigade who share the area allocated for the QFRS and have an adjoining shed on the property. Rob says: ‘If life or property are at risk we get turned out straight away and the Rurals back us up. But for grassfires they go first response and we back up.’ While the number of turnouts might seem small, they are virtually all ‘real’ calls. The town is a long way from Toowoomba and without these auxiliaries things would be pretty serious if a house caught on fire, especially at night and in the fog that occurs frequently in the high country. Admittedly the number of house fires has fallen since a tornado in 1969 tore the town apart, including the old fire station building—whose truck ended up across the road in a corn paddock. Some 32 houses were destroyed and their replacements, with new wiring, have seemed to be less prone to fire. Rob adds: ‘And public safety awareness has reduced the chances of a fire. Fire Ed has helped as well.’ In the past there were quite a few pub fires, which Rob thinks might have been related to poor performance on the balance sheet rather than some other cause of fire. But life in the country was tough for these firies who existed on hand-me-downs and less than adequate equipment for decades until the QFRS came into being. Before they acquired a pump vehicle the brigade had to tow their trailer pump behind a private car. One recollection of past equipment has a bit of humour to it. Killarney’s first appliance was a short-wheelbase Landrover—a 1958 model. It carried 40 gallons (180 litres) of water and to say that it was underpowered would be to praise it! Rob explains: We turned out to a fire at the Emu Vale hotel about fifteen kilometres away, and it’s hilly on the road out there. We were doing 70 downhill but only 30 uphill. Eventually we got there and the pub was almost gone, but we thought we’d better do something. We ran a line down to the creek but we were one length of hose too short! We just had to let the place burn. That Landrover only had two seats and everyone else turned out in their own cars. The Killarney brigade now have a state-of-the-art vehicle and their equipment is good. They still have hand-operated RAR kit but that will be upgraded soon, given their proximity to a major arterial and, as Rob

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Schulze notes, an area growing with tourism. ‘Since a new food distribution centre was built nearby and eco-tourism has grown—both requiring our attendance at MVAs—the priorities have changed.’ The station is a simple and utilitarian brick building with a spandeck roof, an open floor plan, and shower room and toilet. There is a hose area, a turnout gear area and a rudimentary office. Killarney has always had 4WD trucks, needed for wet, boggy roads. New blood in the brigade has generated fresh interest in competing and they came second in the State in recent championships. The commitment needed to be a member of the Killarney brigade is laid out as soon as someone applies to join the crew. Captain Rob Schulze runs a weekend roster for turnouts and members know a year in advance what their obligations are. He explains: We always roster three people on but we always get more that turn up. It is one weekend a month, one on, two off, and then one on, three off, and so on. If they accept that then it is a good indicator. They just have to be in town, and with pagers it is a piece of cake. They must watch their response time. And they can get a replacement if they have to go out of town for an hour. When Rob is out on his job as a plumber and his pager goes off, the people understand if he has to go. ‘They appreciate the problem and everyone knows, if they see me take off, that something is up.’ They don’t always sound the siren in Killarney, as many locals don’t like the whine of it. However, Rob says: We’re in two minds about the siren going off because six of the crew work at the abattoir two kilometres out of town. If the siren goes, then the locals know the members are coming and give them right of way on the road into town. I prefer the pagers, but there can be times when the siren is handy. In a small country town there is a good chance that, if a local is involved in a fatal MVA, they will be known to most or all of the fire crew, and that makes it doubly tough. The saddest incident for the Killarney brigade, though, was a farm accident. The victim was the

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niece of one of the officers. She had been playing around in a silo and had got sucked down and suffocated in the grain. The demands of the job are fairly heavy. Rob remarks: ‘It impacts on your family and private life, but it’s all about community service. The satisfaction you get from the job is worth it. It becomes part of your life and you get more out of it than you put in. The camaraderie is terrific and the brigade is like a second family.’ On training nights it is evident that the crew enjoy what they are doing, even when it is freezing cold and Rob has them out doing wet drills. He says: ‘Come 9.00 p.m. we sit around and play darts, have a beer, and nobody rushes off.’ One requirement on joining the QFRS as a firefighter, apart from having a certificate in first aid and resuscitation, is to have a C Class or heavy vehicle driving licence, so as to be able to drive the fire pump. There is no training facility in Killarney and the firies have to travel into Warwick or Toowoomba to attend training and be tested, which is expensive. Rob says: ‘Sometimes the cost can be as much as $600, and there is no help from the QFRS in that regard. It’s a big hit in the wallet, seeing that the blokes have no other requirement for it.’ The Killarney brigade is involved in Fire Ed and other programs, but there’s another initiative in country areas, called ‘Giddy Goanna’. It’s a farm safety awareness program designed for rural youngsters. Rob attended a session with his crew just before I interviewed him for this book. That was a hectic day! Five or six schools, and the Grade 3s and 5s like to get involved—the older ones try to be aloof. There were police, ambos, electricians and farmers, plus silos and equipment like tractors, farm machinery, hand tools and so on. Each group had twenty minutes to get their message across; it was run on a bullring system using the pumper siren. It was a full-on day, with about 220 kids.

Mt Morgan Southwest of Rockhampton is the mining town of Mt Morgan, a small country town with a population of about 3000 and situated at the top of

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a mountain range. It is a very old settlement going back to the late nineteenth century when gold was the incentive to live in this hot, arid landscape. Consequently the buildings are mostly old, wooden and ready to burn. When they do go up they go very quickly, and saving a wooden cottage in Mt Morgan is a rarity, especially if it has had five or six minutes’ start on the firies. The fire station itself is a very old building that was used in the days when it belonged to a Fire Brigade Board. The former chief officer’s residence upstairs has now been turned into an instructional area, but the old red fire pole for rapid descent is still there—though not in use. I visited the auxiliaries in the company of Acting Area Director Laurie Thornton on a Monday night, which is their training night. They were in high spirits because the night before they had saved an old miner’s cottage in James Street. I was debriefed by Arthur Read, the 57-year-old captain of the brigade who has been in it since 1968, on what had been an impressive effort. A fire had started in the ceiling of the cottage when an offset chimney flue heated the battens in the roof. The ceiling was basic, being only tongue and groove boards with masonite on battens. Between it and the corrugated iron roof there was very little air space. So the fire, which had started sometime during the day, took a long time to combust fully and it wasn’t until it slowly moved into a hip area of the roof that it found more oxygen and took off. When it did, it was fortunate that a neighbour saw smoke pouring out of the roof. Firecom in Rockhampton activated the 000 call at 7.07 p.m. The station crew advised that they had turned out at 7.09 and they gave a Code 2 at 7.11 that they were in location and that smoke was visible. A second unit arrived from the station at 7.13. By 7.24 they reported that all persons had been accounted for and by 7.42 the fire was out and the site under control. The blaze had been contained within an area about 3 metres by 10 metres in the roof and all that was needed after the fire was extinguished was a tarpaulin to keep out the elements. A fire watch was maintained throughout the freezing night by several of the crew. At daybreak a fire investigation officer arrived and took over the scene. In anyone’s terms it was a good save, but especially so given the nature of the fire and the construction of the dwelling. The local police sergeant had dropped by during the training session and I commented on the fast reaction of the Mt Morgan crew on

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turnout, which is consistently one of the best in Queensland stations of any type. He said: ‘When I hear the siren go, I sort of look the other way.’ During the day the station is manned by one of the auxiliaries, David Sealy. Normally a permanent officer would be on duty, but Mt Morgan does not seem to be an attractive position for a station officer. Five of the auxiliaries work in Mt Morgan and the remainder of the complement of three officers and twelve firies work in Rockhampton. The station has only one woman—‘a mum’, as Kellie de Landelles puts it—on the books. Most members work for Queensland Rail, the shire council, local industry or are self-employed. One is an ambulance officer and another is the local undertaker. The crews’ ages range from 27 to 57 and the least experienced crewmember has three years’ service. The average time in service is thirteen years. After training, the crew retire to a most salubrious social club, which has a memorial garden named in honour of one of their number, Lyle Curtis, who died while attending a fire in November 1997. Lyle was 39 years of age and apparently suffered a major heart attack. The social club goes a long way toward maintaining the very strong spirit of this hearty crew. It’s a spirit I noted immediately on meeting them after the James Street save.

Sarina When I was planning this book I asked then Chief Commissioner Wayne Hartley (himself a Mt Morgan man) whom I should interview as auxiliary station representatives. Captain Barry Mooney and his crew at Sarina headed the list as a ‘role model’ for auxiliaries around the State. Sarina is a sugar-milling town with a population of about 4000 and is near Mackay, roughly halfway between Rockhampton and Townsville. Barry Mooney at the time was president of the Auxiliary Firefighters Association. He works for Queensland Rail and has been in the brigade for just over 30 years. He became a firefighter in response to a request for crew. Barry says: ‘It was just a small town, community-minded thing. I didn’t know you got paid, and they needed volunteers.’ Two days after he joined, down in Gin Gin, he was at a house fire—with almost no training!

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Sarina is a very busy, fully auxiliary station; unfortunately the bulk of the work is cutting people out of wrecked cars. In 1999 the station responded to 153 calls, 70 per cent of which were MVAs. Yet Barry notes: ‘Normally it’s around 80 per cent but strangely it has dropped since a 110 kilometre per hour trial (up from 100 kilometres per hour) on a section of the highway began. Sarina is acknowledged as ‘the RAR capital of Queensland’. The traffic accidents seem to be due to a mix of distance travelled, fatigue and speed. Most of the callouts to MVAs are in midafternoon and into the early evening. Semi-trailers and trucks feature in just over half of the accidents and these, according to Barry, are ‘fairly gruesome’. I remarked on a ‘thank you’ card on the notice board and Barry explained that it was from a truck driver who had lost his young son in an accident. The card, which thanked the firies for their efforts, had a photo of the boy inside it. The distances the Sarina crew might have to travel to respond to an incident are huge. They can sometimes go up to 150 kilometres in response to a callout from their Firecom in Rockhampton. The station has two composite appliances each with over 2000 litres water capacity. One is kitted mostly for MVAs and the other primarily for fires. Like most auxiliary stations, Sarina has a system on callout in which Firecom automatically rings ten homes (pagers). If the pagers fail, which is rarely, the station siren is activated. Sarina has had several fires of note in the past, one of the most memorable being a fire in a warehouse full of ammunition that began exploding as the firies were battling the blaze. Barry says he had been assured that the ammunition would not do any damage, but when bullet holes started appearing in the roof he quickly altered his attack plan. Sarina has an establishment of three officers and twelve firefighters, but the crew turnover is high owing to the nature of the sugar industry and fluctuating economic conditions in remote rural areas. Barry says: I was down to seven or eight firies last year. We were training some recruits and they got instant on-the-job training. In the past, recruitment was usually by word of mouth and I had a waiting list. Nowadays it’s not so—there’s a distinct lack of young people with community spirit or drive. Also, economic times are tough and

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some employers are reluctant to release workers, but the local sugar mill is okay. Barry always confronts a potential recruit with the money question. ‘I make sure they know there’s no money in it. They do get paid but it’s not huge. In Sarina they might get $5000 per annum, because of our high turnout rate.’ I visited Sarina on a Wednesday night. It was bucketing rain and the training for the crews was a Case 4 drill. A large 100–150-mm hose is used for drawing or inducing water through a filter (attached to the end of the hose). This drill is used to supplement a water supply from a dam or river in the case of larger fires or where the water mains supply may be threatened or where reticulated water is not available. Barry had scheduled the training after some confusion with a new pump the other night while drawing water from a creek for a house fire. The crew returned soaked from ‘playing in the rain’ but were adamant that they had the right answers for the next time they faced a Case 4 situation. Despite looking like drowned rats, they were beaming. The crew profile for Sarina is dramatically different from Mt Morgan and Killarney, with the average period of service in the brigade being only eight years and over half of the crew having less than three years’ active service. The movement of people in and out of Sarina is a huge challenge for Barry Mooney in maintaining fire service delivery. Luckily he gets great support from the local newspaper and media whenever he runs a recruiting drive, but it is always a problem finding people who are willing to give up their spare time. The Sarina crew are a mature bunch, with the youngest being 26 (a local schoolteacher) and Barry the oldest at 55. Many of the crew work locally at the local sugar mill or distillery, for the railways, the shire council or in local businesses. There are two women in the crew. One is a mother who ‘wanted a challenge and wanted to give something to the community and the people; maybe even save lives and property’.3 Most of the crew are married and have children of their own. All are dedicated to their community and take pride in their service to it.

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CHAPTER 5

THE RURAL FIRE SERVICE You can hear some fires coming—they roar. The wind is the biggest factor and can trap you real quick. A fire in the open grass, and a brush or scrub fire in the bush, are the most dangerous. We never attack a fire front on, but always attack from the flanks and pinch it in until it can be knocked down from the front. The hardest part of fighting bushfires is to stop people panicking. And with volunteers it’s quite different from the permanents. People have to be ‘asked’ to go and do a job. One thing, though: I never ask someone to do something that I won’t do. Roy Moss, Yuleba Rural Fire Brigade

The Rural Fire Service (RFS) is an enormous organisation that covers the length and breadth of Queensland. The 45 000 volunteers are organised into 1628 rural fire brigades. These brigades are supported by 250 chief fire wardens, who act in much the same way as area directors with the permanent firefighters. The wardens report to fifteen district inspectors.

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Because the rural brigades are volunteers and unpaid, there is no set organisation in any one area. It is more a case of ‘when there is a fire we need all the help we can get’. Equipment varies from a homemade water tank and pump on the tray of a 4WD ute to a state-of-the-art, QFRSdesigned 4WD light attack unit with all manner of equipment including a device to produce foam. The appliances are often what the RFS has been able to beg, borrow or steal or what the QFRS has handed over after use in the permanent and auxiliary units. The RFS plays a very important part in managing the fire hazard across the State. In rural areas it responds to bush and grass fires as ‘first response’ and the volunteers are called out either by pager or by telephone depending on what communications exist in the district. If life or property is threatened, the auxiliaries will respond (or permanent firefighters will if they’re in the area). The RFS will back up auxiliaries, and vice versa, as needs dictate. Northwest of Toowoomba is a tiny country town called Yuleba, with a population of about 200. The area is pastoral and the Yuleba brigade looks after an area about 70 kilometres long by 20 kilometres wide. Roy Moss is a grazier and the second officer of the Yuleba Rural Fire Brigade, and has been a volunteer for over 40 years. He was awarded the Australian Fire Service Medal for his long and dedicated service to the RFS. The main occupation in the area is grazing, mostly cattle, a few sheep. Roy says of the surrounding countryside: ‘It’s heavily scrubbed, there is a lot of pull cultivation—in one case some 7000 acres under wheat on one property. In the bush it’s virgin country, with wattle, pine and ironbark.’ Some areas, like the State forests, are very heavily timbered. Roy says: ‘There are gorges there that kept us busy for a week one time. You can’t go in after the fire or you’ll get cut off.’ Roy joined the RFS to help his neighbours in times of fire. He laughs: ‘We had a few pubs burn down and we needed a fire brigade.’ But it is easy to understand that, in remote rural localities where neighbours can be tens of kilometres apart, a system has to be in place to combat a fast-moving grassfire. Roy felt that joining a brigade was essential to your own livelihood; you had to be organised on the ground or people would get hurt. Some 70 men and women members are on the Yuleba brigade’s books. There is a big representation from the town and from outlying

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areas up to 30 kilometres away. Roy remarks: ‘They join and stay until they either die or move away.’ Apart from the 70 who engage in fighting fires, there are many ‘support troops’. These people are the great unsung heroes in any firefighting, providing the personnel for rest areas where the firefighters can clean up and get a drink and a feed after hours of ‘chasing flames and eating smoke’ all day. The brigade has three appliances: a new Canter 4WD, a hand-me-down International pumper unit, and a 1952 Landrover with a small 455-litre tank on back, with a highpressure pump. The Landrover is what the RFS refers to as a ‘light attack’ unit and allows movement in difficult terrain to quickly quell any small outbreaks. The experienced second officer and captain, who are also qualified workplace instructors, provide most of the firefighting training. They are supplemented by training officers from elsewhere. (There are about 60 full-time staff whose job it is to support the RFS brigades throughout the State.) Regular training at Yuleba takes place on a Tuesday night or a Saturday afternoon. One thing that is stressed is that brigade members must always work in teams and always be in personal or radio contact. No one must be left alone. RFS members wear fire-retardant yellow overalls and smocks. Their helmets are being fitted with flaps, because they need high collars at the back of the neck to protect them from the heat. They have found that gloves are vital but, as Roy observes, ‘they make it hard to use an axe’. The Yuleba brigade people don’t use beater poles to deal with fires on the ground, preferring to use branches ‘because they are lighter and it is easier to get a circular motion going than trying to lift a six-foot-long beater pole’. Other hand-operated equipment includes axes, shovels, rakes and hoes; and flame-drippers (drip torches) for back-burning. Roy says with a laugh: ‘They used flame-throwers in the old days, using an old knapsack spray. They threw out a 15-foot burst of flame, but we gave them away when they started leaking!’ Ever since he was old enough, Roy Moss has been chasing fires. In his part of Queensland the wind is one of the greatest dangers in fighting grass and bush fires. The speed with which a driven fire can move is alarming to any firefighter. Vince Hinder was out in the Toowoomba ranges one day when a big fire started coming up the steep escarpment toward the town.

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Scrub fires are bad if they get big—they are dangerous. I went to one on the escarpment and we were spraying water down on it when it just roared up the hill. It threw all the burning stuff through the air and started fires 200 yards behind us. Attack strategies for fires depend on (a) the fuel load on the ground or in the bush, (b) the wind and (c) the terrain. Most times the only way to stop a grassfire is to create a firebreak. Most dozer-generated firebreaks are three to four metres wide, and the firefighters can then back-burn from that space. Roy says: ‘The rule of thumb for a decent firebreak is 40 metres, but that is hard to achieve in most places.’ The first port of call in any fire is the property owner, who can advise the brigade on the quickest way and best location to establish a firebreak. The local shire council and the RFS members then set to, often using their own equipment such as tractors and graders. Roy goes on: ‘We try to use natural obstacles, like roads or creeks, and add the break to them. Sometimes we need to go a long way ahead of the fire front to avoid spot fires, which can be 200 yards out, depending on the wind.’ He remembers that the longest spell he had making firebreaks was eight days. He was driving a bulldozer by day, sleeping at night and getting back into it at first light the next morning. He remarks: ‘That fire burnt 300 000 acres.’ One of the more dangerous bushfires a firefighter can face is when the flames are up in the tops of the trees. These are called crown fires. Roy has a lot of respect for them. The eucalyptus in the leaves is the main fuel for those fires. Once they start they just go, and then they roar. A crown fire can sometimes be half a mile ahead of the ground fire. It burns like a petrol fire and can go faster than you can run. As it goes along it’s dropping burning material like leaves, bark and small branches and they start more fires . . . you can be trapped underneath. The scariest part of firefighting for me is a crown fire. It can go through so quickly, and if you don’t notice it and need to get out, then it can be tricky. Sometimes you have to take cover and look for burnt ground. The credo is: don’t go in where you can’t get back out. It’s only bush—the grass will grow again but a dead man won’t.

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Certain species of trees can provide other dangers, like the Wulga trees that abound in Roy’s area. The trees contain a natural reservoir of oils and they can actually ‘cook’. The trees will reach a certain limit and then unexpectedly explode, sending burning hot debris shooting up into the air. Firefighters often think back on their tougher experiences. Roy’s most memorable fire was near Rolleston, ‘up at the Bluff ’, many years ago. The men had five vehicles and found they had to get out, and quickly. Roy was driving an old Ford and had it flat to the boards to escape the roaring flames. He recalls: We were hurtling down a two-wheel track at 40 miles an hour [65 km/h] and we couldn’t get away from it! We just made it to the creek in time. It was the worst fire experience I’ve had. The fire was 15 feet from us and twice that in height. In that fire 30 cattle and 24 horses were lost and some other cattle never grew their hair back. Sadly, even the horses couldn’t beat the fire. The loss of stock and property was terrible. But I think the worst was seeing animals burnt—you knew they’d died in agony. Goannas and stuff were okay, but for koalas and possums that couldn’t get out of the way it was pretty bad. Graham Cooke, the area director at Dalby, has seen huge fires. ‘We had some in 1996–97 in the State forest and up to 100 000 hectares were burnt. And I’ve seen other individual fires covering 40 000 hectares.’ When they’re that big everyone gets involved and it’s hard, hot work, as Kevin Neilsen of Southport, who has attended many fires in the Gold Coast hinterland recalls: You would walk fifteen or more kilometres a day, just chasing flames and eating smoke—thick, white, green-grey smoke. The whole process just eats you out. Pine forests that are spotting [burning material blowing ahead and starting new fires] with turpentine . . . the stuff will go a mile and then start again. There’s lots of walking—drinking a lot of water—and you’re totally buggered at the end of a shift. On my first day off after a grassfire I couldn’t move.

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At the fire On the outbreak of a fire the Yuleba brigade usually gets a call from Firecom by pager. Whoever is in charge on turnout will dispatch a recce vehicle to check the situation; normally it’s the first officer who goes. A siren in town is also activated. Roy says: ‘Usually 30 people will turn up, with a minimum of 20. The word gets around very quickly.’ The brigade officers evaluate the situation on the ground with the help of the property owner, develop a plan of attack, establish radio contact with other brigades, and then deploy the firefighters. Brigade members drive in their own cars to the assembly area set up. The brigade is broken up into various crews depending on the members’ level of expertise and experience. The safety of the crews is paramount. Thongs, shorts and T-shirts are not allowed to be worn on the job, and many members keep their kit in their car. There are ‘on ground’ crews and ‘truck-mounted’ crews. The crews don’t just rush off and start attacking the fire. They are organised into teams and there is always a reserve in hand to spell the first ‘attack’ team. The teams are formed with a blend of experience to help break new people in. In a team of four, one person takes the lead and knocks the fire down, the next does some more and then the third. The last person mops up. Then a second team come along and their job is to bury smoking bits of wood and the like—especially cow manure. Cow pats can burn unnoticed for days and unless buried—or fully burnt up—can restart a fire in a freshening wind. As the team work their way along the flank of the fire, the lead person is relieved and goes back to number four. This rotation system is designed to take the ‘point’ firefighter away from the heat for a time. Once the fire is beaten, the crews keep patrolling to make sure it is well and truly out. At a fire ground the firefighters often use auxiliary pumps to draw water from dams into council tankers with 8000-litre capacity. The tankers provide a mobile water-replenishment system and each one takes only about five minutes to fill, reducing the turn-around time for the pumpers—the attack vehicles. But finding a reliable water supply is the biggest challenge and often the greatest frustration for a rural brigade. If they’re a long way from a supply there’s the risk of ‘down time’ with no water, during which a fire

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can quickly re-establish itself. Roy Moss says the feeling of frustration can be all-consuming ‘after working your guts out and fighting against Mother Nature—and just when you have the fire beaten you run out of water’. After a fire the brigade returns to its base in town, where informal debriefings are held. Roy explains: It’s not a formal event but more about what lessons were learned. No two bushfires are the same and I have been to hundreds. We talk about dramas and mistakes that were made and what we will do to correct them. It is all just based on common sense. We also bring out the good points. Then we refurbish and replenish the trucks and check all the equipment. We must always be ready to go.

Community scene The Yuleba brigade exists on donations from the community. It often receives contributions from landowners for reducing fuel loads and other fire hazards on properties. Roy insists that these are donations, not charges. The brigade sometimes run raffles, but as Roy notes, it gets a bit hard on a small community: ‘You can only bite people so many times.’ In fact people actually pay to join the brigade! It costs $10 for property owners and $5 for those who rent local houses. It’s a way of establishing a working fund for the brigade and smacks of amateur rugby players paying for the privilege of playing in a competition. The Yuleba brigade members have to buy their own equipment, unlike the QFRS permanents and auxiliaries who are issued with their gear. There is a certain deal of frustration with the Government for not fully supporting rural fire brigades, although they do get a 50 per cent subsidy on any equipment. But as Roy says: ‘We still have to raise the initial money.’ Some of the equipment that is ‘new’ to the Yuleba brigade is in fact almost 30 years old and only through the generosity of some local mechanics and a good deal of self-help does some of it stay on the road. Roy recalls that one of the brigade’s vehicles was taken back by the old Queensland Fire Service because it was wanted for a museum—the Yuleba crew were still using the truck at fires!

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The brigade has at times turned out to structural fires, because of the lack of an auxiliary brigade in town. Roy says proudly that they have only lost one house in the town in 40 years. One of the fastest turnouts occurred when a hotel caught fire in 1971. Roy laughs: ‘From the start of siren until the truck arrived was just three minutes. They really wanted to save the pub!’ Road accident rescue falls in the bailiwick of the local SES, which has a good deal of extrication and cutting equipment. Many members of the fire brigade are also members of the SES—a feature that is widespread across the State. On the wider scene, there is a move afoot in many communities to stop back-burning as a strategy of hazard management. In some areas of Queensland back-burning has ended and elsewhere there has been a hold on fuel load reduction—all in the cause of ‘clean air’. As a result, in October/November 2000 there were 3000 reported fires in the State in a period of just over two weeks. In the North Coast Region alone, 200 fires were reported in a 30-day period in the preceding two months. Fred Heiniger of Nambour has some strong feelings on the subject: I think it is only touching the sides. If we didn’t have a total fire ban we would be in trouble. People are stopped from burning off, because others complain of their dramas with asthma, and the fuel load builds up. As soon as there’s a fire, or someone is given a permit, I can guarantee that our phones will run hot. Like, ‘What are you trying to do, kill me?’—that type of stuff. You are not going to get away from having smoke with a fire, and the growth is still there. If it starts we could easily have something bigger than we can handle. Barry Salway, also of Nambour, agrees and says of the large number of grass and bush fires they had to attend: It wasn’t extraordinary. It comes down to seasonal conditions and in the last two years we’ve had unusually excessive rain compared to what we would normally get in southeast Queensland. This produced an excessive amount of fuel undergrowth and grass. And then we had a month of extremely dry weather, which created

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perfect bush and grass fire conditions. It seems that once footage of a grassfire appears on TV it activates the juvenile fire-lighters around the place. Grass doesn’t normally spontaneously combust! So how do the fires start if you haven’t got any lightning?

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CHAPTER 6

FIREFIGHTING It’s all about trying to bring organisation into the chaos that exists at almost every fire incident. Station Officer Tom Franks

When a fire truck turns up at a fire the crew follow an immediate-action drill. A quick look at the fire will show the station officer what is initially required. The officer will call out ‘Case 1’ (a high pressure hose reel) and where it’s to be positioned, and the number one and number three will jump into action. The truck driver (number two) will automatically start looking for the nearest hydrant to begin supplementing the onboard water supply. The station officer determines from the owner or occupier, or from bystanders, if everyone in the building has been accounted for. He then does a quick 360-degree recce around the fire and decides whether or not the crew needs more support. If so, he calls Firecom on his two-way

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radio. Kevin Neilsen, who works on the Gold Coast, says: ‘If you want stress in a job, be the first officer turning out to a high rise in Surfers Paradise. Just try to find the alarm panel!’ Station Officer Tom Franks adds: Arriving at a fire scene? It’s about gaining information so that as soon as the station officer says over his radio that there are ‘persons reported’ in the dwelling, the team can automatically switch to search and rescue as a priority over fighting the fire. Firefighting is about being calm in a crisis, having good immediate-action drills and being able to react to the many variables that impact on a fire situation. There is no set procedure for what to do on arriving at a fire. The officer must do a quick assessment, get the team into action and gain as much information from the owner/occupier as possible. If there is no owner/occupier present, neighbours or observers will be quickly quizzed and the men swing into action. Time is precious. When crews first turn up at a fire that is ‘going’, for a while they don’t know exactly what they’re dealing with—until they actually get into the job. The flames and heat are just one side of the equation, the smoke and gases are another. The fire can reach ‘super-hot’ levels within minutes and the firies must be aware of dangers like flashover and backdraught. Neil Smith comments that the business of fighting fires has evolved to a very scientific level, with techniques evolving all the time. He says: The old days of ‘putting the wet stuff on the red stuff ’ are gone— the days of just rushing in and pulling the odd mattress out and . . . spreading water throughout the place. That is a part of it, but there are new techniques to make sure we don’t underrate the building and cause inner explosions and backdraughts and stuff like that. Not only that, but insurance companies require us to be careful about how much water we use and how much damage we do inside buildings. And our bosses require it as well. So we are very careful. It is now more of a ‘search and destroy’—we get in there,

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search it out and destroy only the fire. And then we get out and leave the place the way it was. This wasn’t exactly the case when Dick Gledhill was a probationary and a very, very ‘green’ firefighter. He turned out to a cafe fire one day and wasn’t used to the power of the hoses. It was my second day on the job. There was a lot of smoke and I think I did more damage than the bloody fire, because I didn’t know what I was doing. I hosed the crockery off the shelves and was breaking glasses and so on. Thankfully, after five minutes I was relieved, and I started learning from there.

Into the breach At one time a BA set was worn only if the smoke was really thick and choking. Peter Beauchamp recalls an incident when he was a very junior member of a crew in Brisbane and was tagging along behind a highly experienced firefighter ‘of the old school’. It was like something out of an American firefighter-training movie made just after World War II, where ‘real men didn’t use BA’. An old brothel up in Paddington was really going and it was built on a slope. The floor that came off the street was the top floor of the brothel. It was an old terrace building that went down three storeys. It was smoke-logged. I grabbed a line and got behind this old firie and in we went underneath—we had no BA then. I was coughing and spewing all over him. Somehow he found some fresh air in a pocket in all this smoke and shit. He told me to take a breath and then back up. I stayed in there for five minutes, not wanting to leave, and then he told me to get out. He was in there for 30 minutes eating that smoke and I just couldn’t believe it. Russell Mayne recalls that, when he first started fighting fires over twenty years ago, ‘we were never encouraged to use a BA initially—it had to be some sort of major incident and then you would have to get

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the officer’s permission’. Today it is almost mandatory to put a BA set on, even for a car fire because there is so much plastic in cars. Russell adds: ‘Once upon a time you would go into a house fire, come out, have a big spew and then go back in again.’ But things have changed a lot at the fire ground because of plastics. ‘They’re a big cause for concern, the foam rubbers, the vinyls and even nylon carpets. We have TVs, computers, bedside clocks, microwaves—everything is on 24 hours a day and it’s all plastic.’ But the firies keep coming back to the unknowns they face on arrival at a fire. Many think that this is the scariest part of the job. As Neil Smith explains: ‘You don’t know whether you’re going to fall down through a building. You never know if oxygen or acetylene is going to go off in your face when you walk into the place.’ Neil Lesmond had just such a time when he went into a burning campervan and a young firie yelled at him to get out. ‘When I asked why, he said there were two gas cylinders venting below me! I looked out of the vehicle window and sure enough there they were—two cylinders just going whooosh!’ The crews survive in these situations because they work as a team. As Station Officer Neil Lesmond remarks: ‘The eyes of everybody with you on the fire ground are watching and listening. Everybody is looking out for everybody else, and you know that someone is watching you when you’re in doing your job.’ Few people realise just how dangerous a job it is. Kevin Neilsen comments: ‘It’s like a war zone. It’s a very dangerous job. You never ever know what will happen next.’ The firies can always tell you about their first fire; it is etched forever into their memories. Peter Beauchamp vividly recalls his first fire, almost 28 years ago: I was still a probationary and had just gone on shift. It was next to the old Gordon & Gotch building in Boundary Street in Fortitude Valley . . . a house next to it was going like a bomb. We pulled up and I had eyes like saucers. The officer was Alec Anderson . . . He told me to run a line up between the house and the Gordon & Gotch building and try to protect that exposure. An old and great firie called Tom Murphy grabbed me and said, ‘Come on, Beach, you’re with me’, and off we went. I thought: ‘What the hell am I doing up here?’ I had flames ripping around my ears. In those days

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our gear was primitive—denims, ankle boots, and a woollen turnout coat that only went to the waist. We had no gloves and we wore a polycarbonate helmet that offered almost no protection. I had my eyebrows singed, my hair singed, my arms singed—and it was a great experience. As soon as the station officer or one of the crew is made aware that there are ‘persons reported missing’, the action on the fire ground changes drastically from one of fighting a fire to one of search and rescue. If there is smoke, wearing a BA set is mandatory and the number one and number three will check out through the pump operator, who acts as a BA station controller and monitors their air time on a special board at the back of the pump. The station officer will normally designate their area of search and they may take a charged line in with them. Their aim is to quickly search for the missing people, hoping they’ll find them before the people are overcome by smoke—the biggest killer in fires. These search and rescue tasks can be very dangerous. Pat Hopper recalls an incident of a murder/suicide at a house in Cairns: There was a fellow in the backyard with his throat cut, and gas cylinders were going off and hissing away in the house. He had set it on fire. Then there was a call that there was a bomb in the house. Then we were told that the fellow’s wife was inside—and we had to go in, with venting cylinders in the house! Sometimes the searches result from false or misleading information, but it is not the time to try and check. Brian Edmonds of Rockhampton says: ‘I went to the old Mac’s Brewery fire and that was huge. The walls were starting to collapse and we were told that there were deros [vagrants] inside. But in fact they were mannequins made for some publicity job.’ Most firefighters can recall a ‘good save’, especially when it involves life or death. Neil Smith remembers one on the Sunshine Coast: Out at Wurtulla the boss I have now, Ian Shepherd, and I and two others went to a house fire. We got a call about what we thought was a ‘dead lady’ in this house. Actually it was a ‘deaf lady’—it got

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garbled over the radio. What had happened was, the front of her house was on fire and she had slipped over trying to get out and hit her head on a brick wall. She went down in the hallway. We got her out. She wasn’t breathing, but the boys did CPR [resuscitation] and got her going again. That was good. A save like that makes the firies feel good. Smith adds: ‘Bloody fantastic, when you know that she’s still alive today and working for the Deaf Foundation and doing a marvellous job. Apart from that we saved the house too.’ Bob Buckley of Toowoomba had a somewhat unusual save when he turned out to a fire in a men’s outfitters store in town one night. We called it the ‘Roberts fire’. We arrived, did a search, and I found a man down and carried him out. The ambos were there and they revived him. It turned out he was a Bailey Henderson [psychiatric] patient and he’d torched the store—I had saved the bloody arsonist! Pat Hopper once attended a fire in Cairns; a fire in a flat above a shop. His mate Pat Scanlan was up on a ladder, while Hopper had gone up the back stairs. Scanlan looked through a bedroom window and said he could see someone inside. He yelled out to Hopper, and after putting their BA sets on, the pair burst into the bedroom and frantically searched it, but couldn’t find anyone. They ventilated the room and then, on the back of the door they’d entered, they found a life-size photo of a nude woman! Sometimes a structural fire is described as ‘fully involved’, meaning that it’s well under way and smoke and flames are coming out of every opening in the building. The great danger here is that the structure has probably been weakened. When firefighters are inside such a building the ‘pucker factor’ tends to increase and they really have to be on their toes. Neil Lesmond was once at a big job in Townsville, a fire at Hannon’s Hotel, a four-storey brick and wooden structure. It was 2.00 a.m. I was on the branch and the firefighter behind me was Lloyd Sexton. We heard this noise above us like a crashing sound and I

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asked Lloyd if he could hear it, and he said he could. When I asked what it was, he said he didn’t know. No sooner had we finished talking about it than an enormous piece of timber—like a railway sleeper—crashed through the roof and bounced at my feet. Right in front of me! I absolutely shat myself. A barbecue restaurant went up in Surfers Paradise, in Cavill Avenue, in 1973. A huge smoke plume filled the sky, going 1000 metres into the air. As the turntable ladder truck went screaming down the street toward the blaze, there was a bizarre incident. The officer’s helmet strap caught on, and triggered, a 9-kilogram dry powder extinguisher inside the truck cabin, covering the officer and the driver in white powder and sending white smoke streaming out of the windows as they drove along. Kevin Neilsen describes the subsequent battle for the restaurant: It was a multi-unit fire and all units from our area attended; we had two from Southport, Surfers Paradise and Burleigh Heads. But we lost it. It was just a pump operator’s nightmare. The hydrants were across the road diagonally and there were still cars on the road. There was a high fuel load in the mezzanine level from stacks and stacks of old newspapers. One of the barbecue fires in the flue division caught fire and she went off real quick. Access was almost nil: we couldn’t get at it except from the front . . . not even roof access. We saved the adjoining properties. But it was huge. It took about an hour plus to control. We managed to contain it to the kitchen, restaurant and mezzanine level. The owner wasn’t too unhappy and brought a carton of beer down to the station the next day. I guess that means we were valued. No two fires are ever the same. One day the Acacia Ridge crew was turned out to a structural fire in an industrial area on Brisbane’s south side, not far from Archerfield aerodrome. The fire call was to a shed on fire in Beattie Road. As the truck started hurtling toward the fire the crew could see a black plume of smoke about 8 kilometres distant. The crew arrived and people outside the building were madly waving their arms. Russell Mayne was on a branch.

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We went in and it was burning well. We got water on it, but we couldn’t put it out and it was getting bigger by putting water on it. We couldn’t figure it out. As we got in further we saw there was this massive hole in the roof where tin was hanging in. We advanced a bit further and there was an aeroplane motor lying on the floor. A lot of those places worked on plane engines and the station officer said they were probably working on a plane motor and it had blown up. I said: ‘Well, how come all the iron is pointing in—why wouldn’t it be pointing out?’ Anyway, we got a little bit further in and then I saw what I thought was a store dummy lying on the floor. There were five people dead in there. A twinengine aircraft had taken off from Archerfield and had come through the roof. These poor blokes were in the lunchroom and the plane came straight down on top of them. The reason why Russell’s crew could not extinguish the fire is that water and magnesium don’t mix, and the addition of water and oxygen in that form makes magnesium burn more intensely. Ask any firie who has been to a fire involving a Volkswagen and they’ll confirm how well the air-cooled engine reacts to water! Some areas are more fire-prone than others, as Russell discovered when he was stationed at Woodridge many years ago. Surprisingly, they only had one appliance and one and three on duty, although many firies believe it was one of the busiest structural fire stations in Queensland. There were and still are a lot of Housing Commission houses, rentals and a huge industrial area to look after. Russell remembers: ‘When I was there we had 52 schools—that is, primary schools, private schools, high schools—everything. It was an enormous area and we used to look after it with one pump!’ Russell recalls one memorable tour of duty (a tour being two days and two nights on shift). ‘We had eleven major structural fires in one tour. It was incredible . . . and that was without road accidents and whatever else.’ Some jobs are so big and so involved by the time the 000 call is put in that there is nothing the firefighters can do except ‘surround and drown’. Their main priority will be to protect the properties on each side of a building that can’t be saved and stop the fire from spreading. You know you’ve got a ‘biggie’ when something like this happens—as it

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did to the Woodridge crew one Friday night. Firecom had turned them out to the Expo furniture factory in Johnson Road at Browns Plains. About ten past seven we got the call and there was just on two acres under roof. When we pulled up it was totally involved. It was unbelievable. They sent eight pumps and two aerial platforms. Three metres across the laneway was another shed just as big that held all the spray paint and equipment—which we saved in the end. We’d pulled up back a bit [from the fire] and I thought: ‘This is BIG.’ The flames were coming horizontally out of the top of the roof. Straight across the road there was this massive transformer up on a power pole and it started to make noises and I thought: ‘Jesus!’ Then it made a real big noise and we decided to get out of there and started running. We had just left when it blew. This was all before we’d even got a line of water on to the fire! The place was pretty well lit up by the fire but it looked like ten sunsets all at once when the transformer blew. We hit the deck and I thought: ‘Christ, where do we start with this one?’1 If a 000 fire call comes in after midnight and Firecom advise the crew ‘multiple calls, fire and smoke’, it’s usually a good sign that there’ll be a tough battle at a house fire. Kev Anderson explains: ‘In the late evening or early morning you’re normally relying on passing taxis, or someone being awake, to report a fire.’ Such houses are usually well involved by the time the crews get there and then keeping the fire to just two or three rooms is a good save. Michael Quinn, who had been a station officer at Garbutt in Townsville for eleven years, has some thoughts on fires in these circumstances: Smoke alarms are okay but, if there is no alarm, what usually wakes people up—either victims or neighbours—is the breaking and popping of burning glass and other objects inside the house. It usually means that by this stage the fire is already involved, and probably before the 000 call is made. So it could be three to five minutes before we arrive, and the fire has had that amount of time to intensify. It only takes about six minutes for a fire to build up to its fiercest point.

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Even being close to a fire station is no great comfort; it all depends on when the call is made in relation to how long combustion has been in effect. I have taken part in several shifts and responded with fire crews all over the State, and the longest period from the time Firecom activated a turnout to when the truck was moving out of the doors was just over one minute. It didn’t matter whether it was day or night, and whether the firies were in their dormitory or not, the crew were always on the truck and moving in that time frame. Mick Quinn offers an example: One morning in November 1999 we had a call. The sun was just up. It was a bedroom fire less than a kilometre from the South Townsville station. As the crews turned out I saw a large amount of black smoke and so I knew the fire was going. By the time we got there the building was fully involved. Flames were coming out on all sides and so much so that I couldn’t do a proper 360-degree recce around the building. This was all within two minutes of getting the call. The initial call was for a bedroom fire, but by the time we arrived I had to give a Code 99, which meant ‘building well involved with fire’. I had to use the properties next door to complete the recce. Because of the ferocity of the fire we were unable to see two gas cylinders sitting at the side of the building— they would have invoked a quick change in priorities! The house was unable to be saved, so the attack plan now was to protect the adjoining properties and to save the unfortunate owner’s car, which was in the front yard. At times all the hard work can seem in vain, as Kev Anderson and his crew found in a suburb in Townsville. It was early in the morning, at Hermit Park. The fire was contained to a back kitchen and one bedroom but there was a lot of smoke damage—though not a lot of water damage. The crew worked brilliantly, way beyond what was normal. I put two of them through the front door. Wayne Barter and Alan Bell took in a thermal imaging camera so they could go straight to the seat of the fire—that’s why the water damage was minimal. Another two

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went around the back, including Mick McCloskey, and made an external attack. When we’d arrived there was smoke coming out from every eave all the way around the house, but we knocked the fire down in a matter of minutes. We thought we’d done a great job—but a bit later they went and demolished the house! Fate, though, can be fickle. After the Hermit Park fire was out a neighbour telephoned the woman owner, who was out of town. Kev Anderson continues: ‘All she was worried about was her deceased father’s ashes. I took the phone in and went looking for them as she guided me to where they should have been. They were untouched, unburnt and unwet, so it was good.’ Sometimes members of the public just can’t help but get involved, as Ray Eustace found when he was acting station officer at North Ipswich and had a big fire on his hands requiring a lot of hose work. Fire hoses have male/female connections, and if the hoses are rolled out in the wrong order the firie has to double back dragging 30 metres of hose in order to connect up the couplings. It is very heavy work. Ray recalls a frustrating moment in a firie’s life: The Woollen Company was fuelled up with lanolin from end to end. The first crew arrived and were running out hose everywhere, when the drunks from the nearby pub decided to lend a hand and pull all the hoses out for them. But they did it the wrong way! It was a monstrous crowd and there were no police to keep them back. Greg Scarlett knows about getting someone out of a building on fire. A man who had torched an Aboriginal hostel ran back into the smokeclogged building for some reason. He was followed in by a firie called John Cawco, who went in to save him. Greg, who was working inside— and like John was in breathing apparatus—heard some moaning. I was about a metre and half above the floor on a pile of mattresses. I heard this voice and I put my arm out and, sure enough, I grabbed on to this guy. He had fallen over and got wedged between a table—which I couldn’t see in the thick smoke—and the door . . .

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So I grabbed him and somehow dragged him up on top of the mattresses—you do some superhuman things when the adrenaline’s running. I remember really tussling and struggling to get him up and thinking, man, this guy is really stuck. It took a real effort to get him up on the mattresses so I could get him out. What I didn’t know was that, when he ran into the room, John had chased after him and dived in a tackle to stop him going into the fire. Apparently the guy hit his head on something and also got wedged in . . . and I was pulling him up to the top of the mattresses while John was pulling on his foot! So the poor guy was really being stretched . . . In the end I got him out . . . But I found John wandering around looking quite disconsolate with only a gym boot in his hand! I had pulled the guy out of his boot.

Other fires If a fire starts on, say, the tenth floor of a high rise building there isn’t much chance of a ladder or a monitor reaching the blaze. And the firies can’t drag their hose lines up ten flights of stairs. They have to get up to the area and knock the fire down using the hose reel and hydrant system of the building itself. The first action is to check the alarm panel and see where the fire has been detected. The building supervisor or hotel staff should have already evacuated the building. In a high rise the population density can make a firie’s life extremely difficult—just getting through the lobby can be a problem if people are milling around. Then the firies take a lift and go to the floor below. Using lifts is always a risk even if the panel says otherwise, but time is often a factor. They then attack the fire via the stairwell and take it from there. Russell Mayne of Noosa has had plenty of experience in high rise buildings: They’re pretty good now, the way they’re set up with air pressure systems in the stairwells. When the alarms go off [in a lot of buildings] the systems cause the air conditioners to pressurise the stairwells. They have extractor fans too—not like the old days when the stairwells just provided great flues for heat and flame.

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Neil Smith had his first encounter with a high rise fire when he was on an exchange program with the US. The firefighters swap jobs, cars and houses for about a year and gain experience in a different environment. I had a huge one in America—a fourteen-storey old people’s home. The seventh floor was on fire and we had to go up through the stairwells and of course the old people had all the stairwell doors chocked open for easier access. So my job, because I was in BA and also being the youngest, was to go to the top floor and then come back down and shut all the doors to stop the airflow. That was a horrifically hot time. Kevin Neilsen was working out of Queensland’s Southport station when they had a most unusual incident one New Year’s Eve in the Madison Apartments at Broadbeach. The fire was on the eleventh level. The room was on fire and choked with smoke. A rocket from a nearby fireworks display had gone through a window and set fire to a bed. A civvy was using the hotel fire reel and standing on a ledge with no railing trying to get water onto the fire. He was pissed and I had to get him inside. The sprinklers were good and did their job, and all we had to do was damp down with the hose reel. But evacuation was a big problem, with hordes of people everywhere—it took us five minutes just to get up to the fire. Today the public are simply told to get out. Russell Mayne was working in the Brisbane city and had one of those calls that firies dread—a high rise working fire. It was their third call to the Mayfair Crest Hotel that evening, only this time there really was a fire. Russell and his number three broke into a room and found a man lying in his underpants on the bed. There was a bit of smoke in the room and I thought he must have been overcome by it. So I went over to him and shook him and asked if he was alright. We both had breathing apparatus on, and

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he just sort of opened his eyes and let go with a big right hook. We were trying to settle him down and he just wouldn’t. My number three was getting pretty cheesed off with his swinging arms and fists. He just said, ‘Fuck this bloke’, and jobbed him. We carried him out to the stairs and the other firies took him down. We got the fire out and when it was all over this bloke was in the foyer sound asleep on the floor and totally unaware of anything that was happening. He was obviously pissed, but imagine waking up and seeing two Martians looking at you. He must have woken up in the morning with a headache and thought: ‘Gee, I’ve got to stop drinking!’ The firies go to all sorts of fire situations, including vehicle fires. Apart from the obvious danger of a fuel tank exploding, there are other nasties that can cause the firefighters some concern, as Vince Hinder relates: Some truck fires are a problem when you get things like tailshafts exploding, shock absorbers exploding—any liquid contained in a metal casing will explode in intense heat. But what’s worrying is— what’s in the load? I went to an accident where there was a 44-gallon drum of cyanide in the middle of the load of food in a semi-trailer. The driver didn’t even know. He’d just hooked up the trailer and hadn’t checked the manifest. A burning semi-trailer load could have anything, so now we carry binoculars on the pumps so we can stand off and check the load before we go in. Burning cars are fraught with danger and Kevin Neilsen of Southport believes strongly that if you don’t have to get close, then don’t get close. ‘I was hit with a diff [differential housing] one night on my helmet when a car exploded on the Gaven Way.’ Sometimes fate deals a cruel hand, as Neil Smith found at one particularly bad vehicle fire. We got a call that there was a tanker on fire and it wasn’t. It was the tanks of a truck—a semi-trailer carrying plasterboard—that were on fire. When we arrived there was a car extensively damaged in the middle of the median strip and two people were dead. The

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truck was on fire, there was a grass fire and it had got back into the hills, and it was just a huge job. It took a fair while to get it under control. I used to have a little business on the side on my days off, installing security screens. The very next day I went to this house and, you wouldn’t believe it, but it was the house belonging to the people that had been killed the day before. Their son was there and for some strange reason it tore me apart. Then he told me his mum had had dementia and his father had taken her up to Nambour hospital to have her checked out. But the day before they went up to the hospital—the day they got killed—he had a flat tyre on the front of his car so he put the spare on. On the way back from the hospital, the old spare—a retread—blew and dragged them across the median strip in front of the old Ettamogah Pub and into the front of the semi-trailer. Russell Mayne once turned out to a poultry farm, to be confronted by the awful sight of thousands of dead hens. ‘Roasted chooks. That was just heartbreaking, watching people’s lives ruined and everything gone: sheds, chooks, cars and trucks—everything.’ Ray Moore was working in Townsville and turned out to a fire in the beachside suburb of North Ward about fifteen years ago. He recalls: It was a fire in a block of flats. When we got there, everyone was running out and not one person had anything on. Everyone was naked! Not much firefighting had to be done—it was a cooking fire. But in the nude? We didn’t ask. Looking at the occupants, it could have been anything! Some fires can be described as ‘self-dousing’, as Wayne McLennan of Townsville found at one unusual job which Firecom had reported as a fire in a laundry. ‘A washing machine had caught alight. The fire then burnt up the wall, the heat melted the plastic water pipe, and the fire put itself out. There were plumes of smoke and we thought we had a goer, but when we got into the laundry it was out!’ Sometimes you needn’t get too technical. A probationary, Marcus Maffey, discovered this on turning out to a kitchen fire in Ingham.

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There was a large quantity of smoke. It was a pan fire on a stove and the flames had hit the ceiling. I went to get an extinguisher off the pump, but the station officer, Mark Castilano, walked up and took the pan outside . . . all over and done with.

Impact on the firies Attending a job in which people have perished or lost absolutely everything, or in which a business has been destroyed after years of hard work, can have a considerable impact on fire crews. Greg Scarlett of Caloundra puts it this way: ‘I usually find it affects me more when I get home—not in a great way, but I certainly think about it. On the job you detach yourself and you say to yourself: “Stay professional. You have a job to do, so do it well.” ’ But dealing with people who are totally distraught requires some expertise and the firies pride themselves on the way they handle the public. It’s reflected in the fact that there have been ‘thank you’ cards on the notice board in every one of the 30 or more stations I’ve visited. A certain amount of frustration creeps into the job at a fire, especially when the firies know the dwelling could have been saved if there’d been an inexpensive smoke alarm. Many times they find alarms with the batteries removed or gone flat. Batteries cost very little. The alarms activate extremely quickly: it only takes a 2.7 per cent change in the atmosphere to trigger the beeping, and that could be the difference between saving and losing a house. Russell Mayne says: Somebody’s house is their life; they have got their wedding photos, kids’ photos, their engagement rings and wedding rings, or the clothes they got married in. For most people, everything they’ve got is in that house. The quicker we can be notified of a fire the better the chance we have of saving it. Pat Scanlan turned up to a fire in a Cairns nightclub, where the owners decided not to evacuate the building and lose their customers. A fire was raging in a rear kitchen area and the staff had used all their BCF extinguishers to no avail. They were trying to put out the fire with

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bottles of milk, when the crew stormed in and saved a volatile situation from becoming worse. The firies shake their heads at what some people do, not realising the lethal potential of a fire. Pat Hopper recalls a tragic incident in Cairns: A bloke who owned a set of flats was trying to get vinyl tiles off the floorboards and had to remove the contact glue. He decided to use a wire scraper brush on an industrial polisher. He poured petrol over the glue on the floor to loosen it. His wife tried to tell him it wasn’t safe. As soon as he hit the switch on the polisher it all went up. He died later in hospital. The distress and sadness can also affect the fire crews indirectly, because they can relate to an event through their own families. Graham Cooke remarks: I went to a fire in a caravan one night where there were three young boys involved. One was fatal and the rest had serious burns. Those three all went to the same school as my three kids and they were all the same age. I could feel the impact through the school and through my own kids. On returning to the station, especially after a ‘bad job’ where a fatality or some other traumatic event occurred, the crews have a debriefing on what happened. As one firefighter says: It’s not a ‘bagging’ session. Everybody learns from it because it is not done to pick on anybody. I might have seen something that the officer didn’t see, and the pump operator might have seen something that neither of us saw. Or the officer might have seen something we were doing that was stupid and where we might have got ourselves hurt.2 The debriefing also acts as a kind of informal counselling session in which the firefighters can talk about what they saw and felt and can get something ‘off their chest’. Neil Smith has been to some pretty bad incidents and likes the idea of the crew getting together in the firies

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mess after they are back in the station and have replenished the pumps. But he adds: Well it happens before we even get back to the station. If we’ve had a severe incident where people have either died or been badly hurt, I’m always watching out of the corner of my eye. As soon as I get in the pump and we are coming back, we have a bit of a joke but I keep an eye on them to make sure their eyes are not rolling. If they’re quiet you’ve got to be a bit worried about them. But if they’re joking, talking about it and getting it out of their systems, then they’re being normal. You know your men, and your blokes know you, and they’ll keep an eye on you as well. The visions of a fire linger long after the fire is out. The images may fade but they remain in the firefighters’ memory. Kevin Neilsen was attending his second last fire at Woodridge. On entering a bedroom he found a small baby. ‘It was about three months old, burnt to a crisp and ten inches long. It had shrivelled to half its length—like a little rabbit caught in a bushfire.’ The mother had left a cigarette in the room which had set fire to a mosquito net. And Kev Anderson remembers a fire in Townsville. His crew had just put out a fire in which the family had ‘lost the lot’. The young daughter came up to Kev and, he recalls, ‘put her arms around my legs and cried . . . and there is absolutely nothing you can do to console a little girl like that’.

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CHAPTER 7

RESCUE The ‘R’ in QFRS stands for Rescue—primarily road accident rescue, and in particular the extrication of victims trapped in smashed cars. But firefighters also take part in other types of rescue. The most common of these are vertical rescue jobs, in which trapped people are removed from buildings, steep terrain or wells and underground drains. Anything involving the use of abseiling or rappelling by rope to retrieve someone is considered vertical (or high angle) rescue. Swift-water rescue is the saving of people from flooded creeks, raging torrents in rivers and so on. Urban search and rescue is more complicated and involves going into situations where structural damage caused by an earthquake, flood or landslip has trapped people in the debris. An example is the massive search and clean-up operation after the New York City World Trade Center towers collapsed following the terrorist attack in September 2001. Trench rescue is self-explanatory and is mainly the extrication of people from collapsed diggings, usually on construction sites.

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Road accident rescue Twenty-five years ago the responsibility for extricating car smash victims was not defined. Whoever turned up first—ambulance or fire brigade crews or tow truck drivers—and had chains, crowbars or hacksaws would attempt to remove the victims. It was done with good intent but in reality the effort was crude and often caused as much injury and trauma as the initial collision or impact. Station Officer Ian Ames is considered one of the ‘gurus’ of RAR. He became interested in this work at a very early time in his career. Now a 22-year veteran, he has specialised in RAR for the last twenty years. He began on what was called a ‘salvage truck’ and is now referred to as an emergency tender (ET). Ian has often worked out of the Mt Gravatt station and has attended literally hundreds of accidents. Mt Gravatt is very close to the busy, high-speed Southeast Freeway and Gateway Motorway, where the work on RAR far exceeds the jobs done on fires. In the days before breath testing came in, Ian recalls, the Roma Street ET went to five ‘cutouts’ in one night. He vividly remembers his first MVA—a ‘fatal’. We went out to Kingsford Smith Drive. I can still remember it as if it was yesterday. It was a 1976 Falcon panel van that had gone straight into a power pole—big time. I mean, the engine was on the front seat. I got out and I was amazed at the lack of activity and kept asking what they wanted me to do. I was keen as mustard. They said: ‘Sit back, we won’t be doing anything for a while here.’ I learnt that the worst thing with fatal accidents is that you are there for hours and hours, you have to wait for the police and the traffic accident appreciation squad and coroner. I looked around and there was debris everywhere . . . it was tragic. But it was also an eye opener. I was fascinated by it. I remember the next morning I drove home at about ten miles per hour, looking around everywhere! The hydraulic tools used to cut or spread metal to allow access for first aid and removal were initially developed by the United States Navy to release trapped pilots from wrecked aircraft on aircraft carriers, where

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debris needed to be cleared quickly off the landing deck. Once firefighters and ambulance officers saw the benefits of using specifically designed hydraulic equipment, and its potential to reduce trauma and shock, it took a significant cultural change in the workplace to sort out who should have primary carriage for the rescue in a car accident. It was obvious that it should fall to the firefighters as they had the trucks and the personnel to do the job, and the ambulance officers became primarily responsible for setting priorities on victim release and preparing the patient for transport. This became law in 1990 when the fire brigades were given prime responsibility for RAR wherever they had an urban service. In the early 1990s Len Watson of London and Robert Walmsley of The Netherlands, who had written books on the subject, were invited to Australia to lecture on their techniques at Lytton, and Ian Ames attended. Ian says: ‘From that I learnt techniques I had never done before, including heavy rescue stuff like buses and old fire trucks, and the latest about cars.’ Because of his expertise, Ian was tasked with running a one-day ‘half theory and half practical’ course on RAR for up to 200 fire service personnel. It barely scratched the surface of what was required. In 1993 the impetus toward proficiency gained momentum and again Ian was at the forefront. We got an expert panel together—firies, ambos and SES—and we created the Bureau of Emergency Services Road Accident Rescue Course. From that we developed a 40-hour, five-day course which is still going today. With a specially selected team of instructors, I proceeded to teach all over the region, and for the last three years every recruit has done the course as well. Today Ian Ames wears a ‘second hat’ as the RAR projects officer, keeping an eye on developments around the world and in Australia. There has been a tremendous increase in equipment available to all stations, including the auxiliaries, with most composite pumpers carrying hydraulic gear. And the world of RAR has extended to conducting competitions. Ian entered his own crew from Mt Gravatt station and after some hard-learnt lessons on gamesmanship has taken out many titles. He recalls: ‘At first we got our arses kicked and it was a bitter pill

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to swallow. We were beaten by auxiliaries and everyone.’ Now the crew are highly trained and motivated. They have won the State championship for two years and also came second in Australia. There are various categories of competition. Ian describes some of them: The ‘unlimited’ category involves everything you carry on a fire truck and you have 25 minutes to solve the rescue problem. A new category is called ‘rapid intervention’, where you have half the time and it’s a bit of bash and crash and rip and tear. There is also a team leader event and I have won that for the last two years and came second in Australia. The team consists of the fire crew and an ambo. If you win the national you get to go overseas. We went to the competition in Melbourne, had it tough and didn’t place. But Mareeba did very well and we were neck and neck with them. In the international contest they won one of the events. The equipment mostly used by the QFRS is called Holmatro; it is used worldwide. The techniques are always changing. Ian says: ‘Cars have a lot more safety gear now and have pre-tensioned seat belts, air bags, windscreens holding up roofs, intrusion bars and so on.’ An air bag can break a firie’s neck if it deploys, so if work has to be carried out a spiked bar is placed across the bag to deflate it in case it deploys without warning. At the accident scene the first requirement is to make sure that no further damage or loss of life occurs. When the fire crew arrive at the scene, normally the truck moves into a position called ‘fend off ’ where, with lights flashing, it is used as a ‘hard barrier’ to protect the crew and the crash victims from any vehicle careering into the area. The crew set about removing hazards in the immediate vicinity, including electrical wires. A line of Case 1 hose and a dry powder extinguisher are placed ready for use in the event of a fire breaking out. The battery leads on the crashed car are disconnected to reduce the chance of its catching fire. The station officer does a quick 360-degree recce and checks the victims. If an ambulance is not yet present two of the crew will begin basic first aid, but usually it’s the ambulance officers who decide the priority for extrication. Deceased people are covered with a blanket or tarpaulin and left in situ. The station officer decides on the method of rescue, telling the ambos what he intends to do, then briefs the fire

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crew, who in the meantime will have stabilised the car using wooden chocks they carry on their truck for that purpose. The number one and number three usually set up an equipment holding area on a tarpaulin to keep the hydraulic gear clean; everyone knows where it is. Basic ‘glass work’ is then undertaken to protect each person in the car. Windows may be removed by cutting them out or breaking them with special tools, all the time protecting the patient from debris. The ambulance officers will at the same time be stabilising the person for removal from the wreck. Ian Ames says: ‘Then the nitty gritty to release the load off the patient begins.’ There are three tasks the firies concentrate on. The first is to gain access to the vehicle for resuscitation purposes. The second is to remove the load from the patient (called ‘disentangling’). This might involve ‘a dash roll, a side flap down, a B pillar rip’—or whatever needs to be done. The third task is to open the car sufficiently to get the person out safely and without further injury. The power tools used can cut through a door pillar in seconds. I once removed the whole roof from a training wreck on the recruit course in under a minute. Some tools are better for cutting, others spread doors apart, and a ram device can lift up loads such as dashboards. Once the fire crew and ambulance officers have removed all the live victims, if there is a fatality the firies then have to wait until the police Accident Investigation Squad complete their sudden-death investigation. That can be a frustrating time as it can take hours, depending upon the circumstances. Once that is complete, the deceased is removed and the final cleanup can begin. The firies then wait until a tow truck has removed the wreck. Ian Ames recalls a time when they decided to return to their station before the tow truck driver had completed his job. We left before the towie had finished and then got recalled to a car on fire halfway up a tilt tray. It was our bloke. As he was yanking the car onto the tray, a severed fuel line had leaked. When the car was on the 45-degree angle, the fuel spilt out and sparks from the dragging metal ignited it. So now we always wait. An accident scene is never a safe place. Some people seem to drive around with their eyes closed or are so busy ‘rubbernecking’ that they

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fail to see the warning signs and create even more strife. Ian’s crew were working at a job on the Gateway Arterial, where a semi-trailer had hit the flyover wall, when they saw a car approaching way too fast. We were standing around and up quite high. All our warning signs and witch’s hats were out. This car came flying around the corner and we thought he wouldn’t stop. He cleaned up all of our signs, went sideways, missed the fire truck by a coat of paint and skidded to a stop pointing the wrong way. Fearing that we were about to get killed, we’d all jumped off the roadway and rolled down the embankment. Although it is now a competition category, rapid intervention is not normally the way the fire crews work. It is actually a case of taking it easy, preventing further trauma and injury and ensuring that patients are stabilised and won’t react badly when the pressure from being trapped is released—which can cause a toxic reaction if preparations are not in place. Wayne McLennan says: ‘Sometimes people can be trapped for quite a while, and if a chopper is coming we wait until the last minute to avoid the impact of release.’ But now and then circumstances mean that the victims have to be got out quickly. Ian Ames recalls a particular smash when time was critical: A garbage truck had hit a power pole, bounced off and trapped the driver. The pole he hit had three layers of power lines: 420 volts, 11 000 volts and 33 000 volts. The 33 000 volt line was tangled up in a Norfolk pine and it was arcing and going ‘zzzz’ and had blue flames shooting everywhere. We were waiting until Energex deenergised the system, but they said to hurry because the power might come back on and they couldn’t prevent it. We went cut, cut, cut and had the driver out quick smart! It’s one of the few rapid interventions we have done. Ray Moore was working in Townsville one night and went to a headon smash between a small car and a 4WD. The car was completely caved in, on top of two seriously injured young men. Ray says:

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We started cutting the car away from them but the ambos said, after we’d started, that we had 30 seconds or we’d lose them. We got them out in a lot of pain, because we couldn’t use our normal procedures. It was horrific for everyone. One bloke recovered okay; the other did physically—but not mentally. The distance to travel to a smash is a recurring problem: it can sometimes take an hour or more to reach an accident scene. As the onset of shock can be a killer for MVA victims, Rockhampton crews have used a helicopter fitted with a rapid intervention kit in order to deal with a crash more quickly. Tragically, one of the worst rescues the firies have done in this area involved the same chopper, which crashed in dense fog during an aerial medevac. Dave Semple recalls: We had to do a ground search, because the fog was really thick and you couldn’t see anything. Some people went within twenty metres of the site and didn’t see it. When we finally saw the prang it was awful: we knew the paramedics. We had to stay with the wreck and the bodies in it, all night. We just kept watch on it in case it went up—with fuel, batteries and so on. The SES were setting up lights but there was nothing we could do until first light. One of the ambos broke down when he found out who was manning the chopper. A large petrol tanker fire is a major event. Firecom’s automatic response is to send at least three pumps to provide enough water to produce foam to extinguish the fire. If there is no ready water supply, the crews will request water support. Barry Salway explains the approach used in Nambour: We work in pretty close with two trucking companies who have bulk water tanks which we utilise, when we go to an incident like that, to supplement the foam on board our appliances. We either contact Firecom or the water carters ourselves, because there are no water supplies along the road here. One of the biggest lifts a firefighter can get after attending a bad MVA is the gratitude of the survivors. Ian Ames says: ‘The work is great and

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saving people gives the biggest buzz. And making contact with people and calming them down. Many a bloody arm has reached out to me to shake my hand.’ Station Officer Pat Hopper agrees. He was standing in his local butcher shop when a woman smiled and said that she was sure she knew him, then blurted out: ‘Oh yes, you cut me out of a car last year.’ Survivors are one thing, but next of kin can complicate matters. Thanks to mobile phones, no longer is it always the case that a police officer knocks on the front door to tell a relative that a loved one has been injured or killed in a car accident. Kev Anderson was on shift late one afternoon just before Christmas when an RAR call came in. The first response unit was Wulguru station from Townsville and Kev’s crew from South Townsville were backing up. Someone going past had recognised the crashed vehicle and rung the family that owned it, using a mobile phone. Kev recalls: The 4WD had rolled and was on its side. The lady driver was deceased and was in the middle of the road. The first crew had covered the body, but traffic was still going past. We put some barriers up so people couldn’t see the body, but in hindsight we should have covered the vehicle as well. Then the police and coroner turned up. The traffic had been stopped so the public couldn’t see the body removal. We were just about to remove the deceased when a car started coming up the side of the road, along the grass verge. It was the husband of the woman and he had the kids in the car. One of the young police girls stopped him from coming any further. It was terrible. Wayne McLennan, who often works with Kev Anderson, has been to at least three accidents where next of kin have turned up at the crash scene looking for their relatives. He says: ‘Bodies in house fires are usually hidden inside. But with MVAs they’re out in the open and everyone can see what’s going on. It’s a public arena.’ Wayne cites another incident similar to Kev Anderson’s. His crew had responded out of Garbutt station. A car was split in half after hitting a tree. One victim was almost dead, but another girl was okay and had used her mobile phone to call home. The firies had to do a rapid intervention

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because the injuries were life threatening. They had just got one victim out when the scene became a worse nightmare as a hysterical mother arrived asking where her daughter was. Wayne remarks: ‘You can sometimes see them coming, but other times they sneak up on you. It’s a police responsibility but at a crash scene it’s hard to watch everything.’ The body of a dead victim is left in the vehicle unless it is impeding the rescue work, in which case the firies will remove it. It’s the firies’ call. The police are in overall command but they rarely if ever question a station officer’s decision. At fatal accidents the work can be gruesome and not for the fainthearted. Ian Ames recalls one terrible accident: Three concrete pylons fell on a bloke after a crash—he took three big hits between the shoulders and waist. His entire bodily contents from his waist to his shoulders came out through a hole in his arm and sprayed the area with minced meat and blood. We had to use two big cranes to get the pylons off. After about three hours we went in wearing disposable overalls. We had to peel him off the pylons because he had stuck to them by that time owing to the heat. Ian has had his share of fatal accidents and recalls one bad period when he had ‘30 fatals in eighteen months’. His worst accident was the Boondall bus crash on 24 October 1994, where there were twelve fatalities and ten trapped victims out of a busload of 51. In a horrific accident, especially one like this, and particularly if a probationary firefighter is in the crew, the station officer and other experienced firies keep a weather eye on anyone who looks as if they aren’t handling it well. But sometimes the circumstances can pretty well overwhelm everyone in attendance. ‘A dickhead in a semi-trailer, who’d been drinking, was running red lights at night and “took out” a family; a woman was killed, along with her unborn baby and a three-year-old child.’1 In small towns the firies may very well know the victims and that can make their job even tougher than it already is. Neil Smith of Caloundra went to one dreadful accident at which he knew all the victims: The three brothers were coming into town and this dog-trailer came loose from the back of a truck, hit their Ford Fairlane and took the top off it. It took the three guys’ heads right off their

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shoulders. That was especially bloody sad because it took three fathers away from their families—who I also knew. It wasn’t their fault; it was just a useless death. And given another second either way, the trailer would have run off into the bush and they would have survived. Vince Hinder adds: I have been to a hell of a lot more car accidents in the past few years than ever before and I think people imagine air bags will totally protect them—and they won’t. I have been to accidents where the bags have deployed but the people are dead. If you get a hard enough hit they won’t save you. Maybe it is a false sense of security. RAR work carries with it a fair amount of trauma, which can easily be transferred to others. Neil Smith has been to some bad high-speed prangs. He told me about a post-accident debriefing held after a young firie had had a tough time at a very serious accident at which severed limbs were involved. We eventually got him talking about it, and when we got back to the station the first thing we did was sit down with a cup of tea and have an informal debrief. It’s the only way to go—informally. It gets it off their chest. The other thing we’ve really got to be concerned about is that we don’t take the trauma home to our wives. If we don’t talk about it here we take it home and unload it there, and it can send the wives off the hill. Peer support, debriefing and counselling are all offered to assist firefighters in dealing with trauma and the stress of the job, especially when a ‘bad job’ has occurred. But Greg Scarlett believes many men shy away from having counselling because they think it shows weakness. Regardless, firies tend to agree that the informal debriefing takes care of most situations. Pat Scanlan is one station officer who asks his crew how they are going while they are still out at a rescue, and if they are troubled he moves them to another job at the scene.

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Barry Salway tries to detach himself from the trauma and the horror. He tells himself that it’s a job that has to be done and someone has to do it. The firies are highly trained and they do the work well, but it does impact on them and eventually some simply have to ask for other duties, or regretfully leave the QFRS, because they can’t stomach any more of the carnage on our roads. Thankfully, not all MVAs are fatalities and occasionally something will happen that makes people laugh or at least brings a wry smile to their face. One day John Watson and his crew responded to a single vehicle MVA about 25 kilometres outside Maryborough. John was a station officer at the time. A bloke had run into a tree. It was a rollover and he was still in the car. We could see from a distance that it was a mess. As we walked toward the smash, it looked like whoever was inside had just exploded, such was the mess inside and all over the windows. But in fact he’d been catering for a wedding or something and had pots of spaghetti bolognese in the car, and the whole car was bathed in spaghetti and sauce. He wasn’t killed but during the rollover he had got one of his legs trapped. We spent almost an hour trying to get the poor bugger out, covered in spaghetti sauce. On another occasion, John was not working with a crew but driving up to Bundaberg in his QFRS company car, when a long line of traffic indicated a bad smash ahead. He drove up the side of the road to see what assistance he could offer. A bloke in a sports sedan had run into the back of a flatbed truck trailer. I thought he must be dead, because it had taken the lid right off his car. I looked in underneath and there he was, sitting there— he was alive. He must have just leant down as he went under the back of the truck. He had a few injuries like a busted arm and a bit of blood was spread around. He was sitting there groaning—like people do in a bad accident. The firies were trying to get him out, but during this painful extrication his mobile phone rang. Well, with his good arm he answered the phone and chatted for about five minutes. Then he said, ‘No, no, I am not going to make it’, and hung up.

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I wrote an article about it for the Fire Life magazine and called it after the Telstra mobile ad on TV, ‘Hello Chucky’. I thought he was so dedicated—here he was with internal injuries and a broken arm, and he still answered the phone!

Other types of rescue Hanging off the side of a cliff or a building or being lowered down a well is not everyone’s idea of fun. But for firies it’s often necessary, and all QFRS firefighting personnel, from regional commissioners down, undergo vertical rescue training. Station Officer Bob Buckley is 55 years young but admits: ‘At my age, after that initial push off from the building, it sure gets your heart pumping. It’s physically hard moving the “bodies” [80-kilogram training dummies] with poor leverage, but I must be prepared to train although I’m not likely to do this work as a station officer.’ Probationary firefighter Marcus Maffey had done rappelling and climbing before joining the QFRS and was taken on a job outside Ingham because of his experience. A recreational walker and his mate had fallen off the side of Mt Fox while trying to find the wreck of a tractor. Marcus described the cliff gradient as ‘a good place to go if you wanted to suicide’. An ambulance crew were already in attendance, but they couldn’t retrieve the men. Marcus belayed down to the first patient, who was lying with broken limbs on a patch of lantana bush and could easily have dropped another 300 metres. We had to set up a lowering system and lower stuff down. We got the patient in a stretcher and had six people on safety lines to secure him, and eventually we winched him out. Took about three and a half hours in total. Some Level 2 vertical rescue guys arrived just as the second patient was being winched out. They might well have been pissed off! But it was good for us to be able to do it without outside help. Rescues can take place anywhere and at any time. Ray Eustace attended an unusual one when he was a sub-station officer (a junior

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station officer in the days of Fire Brigade Boards) and working out of Ipswich. A new pipeline less than a metre in diameter was being put in, going through Karana Downs, and over the weekend water had got into it. Ray remembers the scene vividly: Two blokes had crawled in with a pump and had asphyxiated themselves. A worker with a backhoe had found them. We went in with BA and we could only just squeeze inside. I got to the first bloke and dragged him back about 30 metres. One of my firies became claustrophobic in the cramped pipeline, so I had to go back in and get the next one. I dragged him out too but he was dead. The one we saved ended up in a mental hospital with brain damage. Every month or so a story appears on television showing a child with his finger or toe caught in something. The child is upset, the parents are often distraught and the fire crew have to extract the victim without damage. Sometimes it’s a major job. The Caloundra crew were called one day to help a three-year-old boy who was trapped with his whole leg down a drainpipe. Greg Scarlett was there. We actually had to jackhammer him out. It took us an hour and a half with the tool only an inch away from his leg. The kid was screaming and carrying on. It was a real scary thing because the ambulance crew were concerned about his blood circulation and thought he might end up losing his leg. In the end, he got out of it with just a little scratch. But the operation was real delicate [as it can be with a jackhammer]—imagine slipping up with a jackhammer so close to a femoral artery! Swift-water rescue can be especially dramatic. Station Officer Neil Lesmond recalls a flood that rose near Townsville after torrential rain had been falling for several days. We were called to an MVA where a ute had been swept off the highway south of the city about 8.00 a.m. By the time we got there the area of water was probably 2 kilometres wide. There was about

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a metre of very swiftly flowing water running over the road. The ute had been swept into a creek, but we didn’t know the creek was there because we were looking at a vast expanse of very fast, brown muddy water coming across the flats. All we could see were four people sitting on the roof of the ute, which was almost totally covered in water. Two of the people were council workers who had got the occupants out of the ute. The lady passenger now refused to get off the vehicle because she couldn’t swim and her husband also refused to leave her. After much to do, we set up rescue lines and got one of the firefighters, Frank McGuinness, out in a harness to the ute and he settled everybody down and we discussed a plan of attack from there. (A truckie had pulled up and had got a length of rope off his truck, tied it to his bullbar and thrown it out to the ute, but with the running stream it was about a metre short. So Frank used that as best he could and then lunged out and let the current take him to the ute.) The lady couldn’t swim and my concern was that if we put her in a harness and dragged her back from the ute she was going to go underwater for sure, because it was flowing so swiftly, and she’d panic. However, the Townsville rescue chopper was in the air, so we called it in and they winched down a crewie, put her into a harness and winched her up into the chopper. The dilemma facing the firefighters now was to try and get the other three people, one of whom was an elderly man, back through a raging torrent in which a lot of debris was coming down the creekline. The firies had no idea what was under the muddy water in the form of logs or posts and the like. But they did know that, when they started hauling them back with a line, there was a good chance of the people going underwater for a short time—until the speed of the hauling was enough for them to ‘plane’ over the surface. Neil Lesmond continues: Frank McGuinness gave the harness to the elderly gentleman first—he was quite happy to try it, it was probably only 10 metres from where we were standing in the water. He, and one of the

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council workers after him, tried to come in on their backs and pretty much they did, but they ended up being submerged for the first 3 or 4 metres because of the swift current. We knew it was going to happen and we warned them about going under. They did, but they were fine. The old bloke had a tough time, though, because we dragged him straight into a tree! The other council worker, who was quite a fit young bloke swam back. I told him to go and warm up in our truck, and a bit later I found him standing beside me again in chest-deep water. I said, ‘What are you doing?’, and he replied: ‘The bloody air conditioner was on in your truck and I’m freezing. It’s warmer here in the water!’ Finally we got Frank out. Seven hours later all the water had gone and there was the car sitting against a fence. If that hadn’t been there the people would have ended up further downstream. As a result of this sterling effort, the fire crew were awarded a Chief Commissioner’s Commendation. In early April 2000, prolonged and heavy cyclonic rain caused a rock and mudslide on the side of Castle Hill in Townsville. The threat to life and property was high and the situation was made extremely dangerous when an enormous granite boulder began teetering above some houses and could easily have rolled all the way down to the promenade alongside the bay. Station Officer Mick O’Neill and Firefighter Warren Evans, who are trained in urban search and recsue, were called out to ‘a bit of mud in the driveway’. Mick says there were people running back down the hill yelling ‘Help, help, help, we need you’. Then he could see it—an enormous raging torrent of brown mud coming down the hill. He said he was the most scared he has ever been. ‘Boulders, logs and trees were whizzing past at a great rate of knots. How nobody was seriously injured or killed was a mystery.’2 The threat of the runaway boulder was removed after geological engineers and the counter-disaster crews worked out that they could shore up the huge boulder with concrete. It was impossible to break it up or blow it up, so they stabilised it where it had stopped on its path down the hill.

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But not everything goes to plan, as Station Officer Kev Anderson found when his USAR team arrived later, when the entire area was covered in deep brown mud. Both Kev and fellow station officer Mick Quinn are USAR-trained. Wearing their bright rescue overalls, they began doing a house-to-house search for trapped persons. The mud was over our knees. Mick had climbed over a fence and as I was climbing over I heard a splashing noise. There were still torrents coming down the hill and I looked around. All I could see of Mick was his shoulders and head sticking out of the muddy water. I thought he’d been hit by a rock and knocked down, but he was in a swimming pool. He’d gone in the deep end—you just couldn’t see it. My biggest fear was that some little old lady would see all this and think: ‘These are the professionals that are going to be saving me!’3 Occasionally firefighters will be called to assist the police in dealing with suicide attempts like self-immolation or cases where a dwelling is likely to be torched or blown up. Senior Firefighter Greg Scarlett and his crew were called to Aroona on the Sunshine Coast and asked to stand by. A man in a house was threatening to set fire to himself. Police negotiators were talking to the man, who had doused himself with petrol. We had to basically stay out of the way but also be available in case he went ahead with it. He had locked himself behind a security door in the house. We were there for quite some time and one minute he’d be screaming and the next minute he’d be sad. It was a bad situation; the poor guy was having a hard time. He didn’t want the fire brigade or anything in here so we gave the police, who had someone hidden up the side of the house beside the front door, a big 9-kilogram dry chemical extinguisher. The plan was that if the man set fire to himself, the policeman would charge in through the door and quickly douse him with the dry powder. A 9-kilogram extinguisher gives off a lot of powder and normally it only

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takes one or two quick squirts—less than a quarter of the tank—to do a job like this. Greg Scarlett thought it was a good plan. Anyhow, time went on and he actually did light himself up. In a split second the policeman just let fly with the extinguisher. He would have put him out pretty quick, I imagine, because the man had been walking around for a while and the fuel had been vaporising and evaporating for a couple of hours. If he had lit up straight away it might have been a problem. So thankfully he didn’t do himself much damage. But the police officer emptied the whole of the 9-kilogram extinguisher in the house. At this point the fire crew didn’t know if the man was on fire or if the house was burning, so they entered with a charged line. There was so much dry powder in the air that it was difficult to see—the interior was blanketed in a white fog. Scarlett and his number one, Greg Loggener, were in BA sets and began searching the house, which had many closed doors. ‘Not knowing where the man was and whether he was armed,’ Scarlett says, ‘we started clearing the rooms, just like in the movies.’ They were taking quite a risk. Scarlett continues: The police officer kept coming along and choking because he didn’t have BA. He would come in for a bit, choke, go out, cough his guts up and then come back in. We finally got to the second last room and opened it up. The man started screaming and he had his arms up and he was going to charge and attack us. So I said to Loggie: ‘Water! Hit him!’ Loggie pulled the trigger on this fully-charged hose line—which has got something like 3000 kpa on it—on jet. He hit him fair in the chest and put him through the air and dropped him on his butt that quick that the guy never knew what hit him. By this stage the copper was on his hands and knees near the door and he just said: ‘Good shot!’ So it ended up being quite funny because we shot the guy with water. One of the most hazardous tasks for firies is cleaning up a chemical spill or having to work in an area where toxic gas has been set loose.

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To protect them the crews have Level 1 and Level 2 suits which they wear with their BA sets. There is also a Level 3 suit, which is fully enclosed and has its own air supply. A firie wearing one resembles a NASA space walker. Level 3 suits are only held in certain locations as they are very expensive and require specialist maintenance. Ken Besgrove is a firie in Townsville and has been to a few chemical incidents. ‘Initially you’re apprehensive, but the biggest thing is having faith in your gear. A Level 3 suit will protect you, it has positive ventilation; but you still have to be careful and not snag it!’ The firefighters undergo intensive training for these operations and then sit down with their station officer and do a DUCOT test covering ‘Description, Use, Construction, Operation, Testing and safety overall’. They give a five or ten minute talk on the equipment they will be using. Station Officer Fred Heiniger works out of Nambour station and has done some chemical jobs—‘mainly 44-gallon drums leaking stuff ’. Bob Buckley describes the work as ‘a slow, tedious, protracted methodical job that disrupts life for many others’. Dealing with incidents is a drawn-out process because the firefighters have got to be really sure of what they’re handling and not cause a chemical reaction with the cleanup materials that could endanger themselves and others. Russell Mayne says: ‘If you get a tanker that rolls over you’ve got to go through the whole process and check all the United Nations numbers.’ The UN numbers are shown on the side and end of all chemical containers and tankers and signify the exact composition of the substance carried. Firecom has the data on its computers and a detailed description of the required treatment and handling can be passed on to the crews. There are literally thousands of UN numbers matching the chemicals in use today. Occasionally firefighters are called on to rescue animals, and the rescue may require lateral thinking and ingenuity. Kev Anderson once used a link stick (a tool for de-energising a power line) to save a peewee (magpie lark) hanging from a nest by some string in which it was caught. The crew strapped scissors to the pole and with a length of line were able to close up the scissors and cut the string, freeing the bird. Kev recalls: ‘What tickled us was that the woman who called us thought it was a tool we used just for saving birds!’ On another occasion Ray Eustace was lowered down a very deep old

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mine shaft near Ipswich to effect a rescue. A man had been running through a paddock with his dog, which had fallen down the shaft. And Wayne McLennan is one of many firies who have saved cats. He laughs: ‘The last cat I rescued—after a fair bit of trouble—bolted, never to be seen again.’

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CHAPTER 8

A DAY IN THE LIFE OF AN URBAN FIREFIGHTER Many people believe that when the bells aren’t ringing, firefighters sit around all day and play cards or pool. Nothing could be further from the truth. I did several shifts in the regional centres to get a feel for a day in the life of a firefighter. No two days or nights were ever the same. As Neil Smith says, ‘There are only two constants in firefighting work, you get in at eight and leave at six . . .’ Each station carries a diary in which outstanding work, core skills training and the inspection program is recorded. The shift station officer checks the diary first thing in the morning so the work day (or night) can be adjusted as required. Usually, an hour and a half per day is allocated for complete maintenance checks. Another hour is needed to have the station clean and tidy. Then there are certain inspections that each shift has to conduct per month. The station

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officer and crew also undertake a regular skills maintenance program for training. In a typical one-pump or one-fire tender station, a shift consists of a station officer and three firefighters. This is known simply as ‘one and three’ or an officer and three firefighters—a driver/pump operator, a branch man and a back-up to the branch man. In larger city fire stations like Roma Street in Brisbane shifts comprise eleven men—a pump of one and three, a telescopic aerial pump (TAP) of one and three, and a turntable ladder (TTL) of one and two. A chemical Hazmat vehicle with an officer and one firefighter is also stationed but is not part of the Roma Street shift. The station officers in Roma Street also manage the shift manning for the area within the Brisbane North Region. They ensure that every pump in their area is fully staffed at the start of a working shift by juggling the roster and calling in people if required (this is also known as a ‘call back’). In this situation a firefighter from an off-going shift stays on at the station until the replacement arrives.

Roma Street, Brisbane—B Shift Roma Street is a busy station. The day I arrived any notions of sitting around playing cards were quickly put to rest. Time: 0801 hours Almost as soon as the names have been read out and firies start their work around Roma Street station, the bells go and Pump 902 is turned out to attend a fire alarm at Rydges Hotel in the Brisbane Southbank area. The crew put on their overtrousers and top boots, grab their turnout coats and are seated in the vehicle within 60 seconds. The automatic doors open and driver Tim Watkins has the large red truck nosing out into the peak hour traffic fifteen seconds later. Even though the hotel is only a couple of kilometres from the station, negotiating the heavy morning traffic costs valuable time. It seems as though some car drivers don’t hear our siren and air horn, nor see the flashing red lights and blinking headlights, as they sit in a traffic lane that would offer a clear path for our vehicle. The firefighters are unperturbed; they know they are not going to get to the fire any quicker by getting worked up. The traffic soon parts as we make our way through

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intersections—sometimes across traffic islands—but stopping at red lights as we have to do by law. Behind us is the telescopic aerial pump truck that has also been turned out as part of the response procedure for an automatic alarm at a high rise building. After four minutes Pump 902 pulls up in front of the hotel and we are met by the building supervisor and duty officer. A quick look at the alarm panel follows, then we move to the room where the alarm had been activated. It’s a double room with several young male occupants. One of them had had a very hot shower and had left the screen door ajar—a considerable amount of steam had wafted into the main room and set off the smoke alarm. Acting Station Officer Peter Lalor chats goodnaturedly with the young men and we go back downstairs to reset the alarm. A smoke alarm only requires a 2.7 per cent change in the atmosphere to be activated. It’s a common occurrence, but the firefighters all agree that it’s better to be safe than sorry. On our return to Roma Street the shift get back to their duties. Time: 0900 hours We roll out of the station without lights and sirens on an administrative move to the now derelict Homestead Hotel at Boondall, where an examination is being conducted for a Level Two qualification for Station Officer Wayne Halverson. Several pumps and an ET have been called out to act as the troops for this exercise, which is conducted without a live fire. The scenario for the test is a two-storey hotel; four in the morning, with a prevailing southeasterly wind; no staff on the premises but a security officer in attendance. Large volumes of smoke have been seen coming from both floors. Wayne will spend the next 90 minutes being put well and truly through the hoops in a theoretical but still practical situation involving a working fire. The things he’ll be examined on include his competency in sizing up the situation and his tactical management of rescue, exposure of hazardous materials, fire containment, extinguishment and overhaul—the latter being the cleaning up and scene preservation for investigation purposes. He will also be examined closely on his overall safety procedures (especially with BA), crew safety and public safety management. His radio procedure will be tested, as will his liaison with other agencies involved in the incident. The roles of the security officer and police, gas and electricity

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personnel are played as required by the examination board members, who are area directors from the Brisbane North Region. The fire truck crews act as the deployed firefighters and roll out their hoses and do everything except use water. They don BA kits and position themselves where they would be as if the fire was a real one. The demanding and thorough examination puts Wayne Halverson through the process he would have to follow as a station officer at a multi-pump incident. The examination board members throw various contingencies and developments at him as the practical examination continues. After 90 minutes the crews are stood down. They make up the vehicles for return to station, then have a quick cup of coffee and a chat before heading off. The station diary had recorded that Pump 902 was dropping oil when parked at Roma Street, so Station Officer Peter Lalor directs the driver to the QFRS garage to have the truck looked at. The mechanics there work on the 45-plus QFRS vehicles based in the Greater Brisbane metropolitan area. After 45 minutes Pump 902, with a new oil filter, is back on station at Roma Street. Lunch It is almost 1.00 p.m. and as we walk into the firies’ mess we are greeted by Brian Hayes. ‘Haysee’, as everybody calls him, is a firefighter with seventeen years experience. He takes it upon himself to organise the messing for B Shift. They have a system in which everybody throws in money for meals and Brian organises the tucker. The previous night he put on a roast and today our lunch is cold meat cuts and a huge salad—all for $2.50. The meal is a casual, noisy affair, with various conversations ranging across the three tables adjoining what the firies call ‘Cinema 1’—the TV room, which has about ten recliner chairs in which firefighters can watch television or read a magazine. The mess has a very large commercial stove in the corner, a couple of microwaves and several large commercial drink machines which operate on an honour system for payment. After lunch some of the firefighters assist the BA training centre storeman to move cylinders of compressed air, while others tend to their station maintenance and cleaning duties. There is always something to be done around the station or on the vehicles. There is an ongoing maintenance program for all equipment and it has to be completed to maintain proficiency on the fire ground and not place people at risk.

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Time: 1530 hours The bells ring and we are off to an alarm at the enormous Queensland University complex at St Lucia. The university is the equivalent of a small town and special maps are provided for its buildings and roads. Over 29 000 students and staff can be on campus at any one time. We are thundering down Sir Fred Schonnell Drive when Firecom advises that the situation is now a ‘stop’ and that we are to return to the station. Peter Lalor suggests that the alarm was triggered accidentally and that the situation is under control. We return down Coronation Drive toward the city but when we are 500 metres from the station another call comes over the radio. Time: 1545 hours We do a very smart right-hand turn and charge up Petrie Terrace, bound for the Gazebo Ramada Hotel. The duty manager takes us up to the floor where the alarm was activated and we find an embarrassed workman who has been refurbishing several rooms. He admits that he failed to use sufficient water on his concrete cutter, and as a result the room and corridor are full of hot concrete dust. He also failed to have the alarms isolated while he was working. The station officer chats with him and reminds him to keep the rooms ventilated and to use his tools in the correct manner. The tone of Peter Lalor’s voice is friendly but still displays authority, and the workman apologises for the inconvenience and promises to take more care. On our way back to Roma Street we are called out yet again, this time to a motor vehicle accident. Time: 1600 hours Firecom advises that there is a four-vehicle MVA on Captain Cook Bridge. It’s only a kilometre from where we are and, with sirens and lights on, we head to the scene. With peak hour building up, it has to be the worst possible time for an MVA on a bridge that forms part of the Southeast Freeway. We drive through dense traffic and manage to get into a fend-off position just in front of the four vehicles, which are all in line, indicating a massive nose-to-tail pile-up. Luckily no one is seriously hurt except for two people who are showing signs of whiplash, one of them a woman who also has the early signs of shock. Station Officer Lalor quickly details the number one and number three to put out warning signs, then tells Firecom what has occurred and

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requests ambulance and police attendance. Several tow trucks appear before long and position themselves on the road behind the smashed cars and out of the way. The traffic is chaotic, as four lanes are now compressed into two for safety reasons. A couple of the firefighters are quickly disconnecting the cars’ batteries to avoid sparks and a possible flare up of spilt petrol. Three of the vehicles are going to have to be towed away, as their radiators have been pierced and back ends knocked awry. Thirty minutes later an ambulance arrives after somehow negotiating the jammed traffic. The woman showing signs of shock and whiplash is quickly tended to. After an hour and Peter Lalor’s numerous calls to Firecom about police attendance, the authorities decide to clear the motorway, as traffic has gridlocked in the city and backed up as far as Toowong, about seven kilometres away. Just as the first tow truck has loaded a wrecked car and started to drive away, a lone motorcycle policeman arrives and asks what has happened. He resigns himself to the fact that it is all too late. Everyone departs the scene, leaving Brisbane’s southbound traffic in utter chaos. Just as we clamber back aboard our truck, two vehicles on the other side of the freeway have an end-to-end collision—probably as a result of ‘rubbernecking’, according to Tim Watkins. He drives the truck back along the freeway and once again we are bound for the station. We see the motorcycle cop heading off toward the two halted vehicles, salvaging something out of his trip down the clogged arterial. Time: 1700 hours Firecom is advised that we are back at Roma Street and the crew have a cup of coffee while Peter Lalor attends to his paperwork and completes reports for three incidents on the trot. Then the crew clean up the firies’ mess, ready to hand over to the next shift at 6.00 p.m. All the cups, dishes and pans are washed and put away and the floor is swept. These men would gladden their mothers’ hearts. By 1800 hours the incoming A Shift men are on deck, ready to be briefed on their individual responsibilities for the night. Alan Beauchamp, Roma Street’s senior station officer, whistles into the PA system and the changeover takes place. The B Shift men disperse to the car park, knowing they have 24 hours before they start night shift. They have been on their feet almost the entire day, apart from 40 minutes for lunch.

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Night shift Before working the night shift I try to have a nap at home to be fresh for the job ahead, but I find it impossible to get to sleep. So I arrive a little weary for the 6.00 p.m. start and am surprised to find almost everyone is either in the mess or in the dormitory making up their bunk. I’m told that the firefighters actually go to bed during a night shift—not until 11.00 p.m. at Roma Street—but they are still able to turnout within 60 seconds. This, I say, I would have to see to believe. Peter Lalor and Alan Beauchamp are calling firefighters in to make up the numbers for a few stations in the area that are short-staffed, including Roma Street. A firefighter who normally works at Petrie station agrees to come in to Roma Street and the shift assemble for their briefing. Places are allocated on the pumps and once again I will be riding in Pump 902 with Peter Lalor, driver and pump operator Tim Watkins and firefighter Paul Goopy as number one, with Rob Brady from Petrie station as number three. Rob had been a firefighter for five years, as had his wife Lisette DeGray. They were the only married firefighter couple on permanent duty in the QFRS at the time. Asked if they had any kids, Rob smiled wryly and said they were too busy. Both were on B Shift but Lisette worked out of Caboolture station in the northern part of Brisbane North Region. She had previously worked at Roma Street and was regarded highly by the men there. A sales rep when she joined the QFRS, she’d had to overcome a great deal of ‘male culture’ when she first started fire work. This is not surprising, as there were no female firefighters in the QFRS until about that time.1 Firefighting is still a male-dominated occupation, again not surprisingly as the work is physically demanding and dangerous. That is not to say that a woman can’t do the job, but the physical requirements can be extremely onerous—for example, the need to carry heavy equipment, or possibly a workmate’s inert body, down a ladder. Peter Lalor informs the shift that first aid training will take place in the upstairs lecture room after dinner. The news is not greeted with any great delight, but every six months all firefighters must demonstrate their competency in a wide range of skills in order to maintain their standing.

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We also hear that a gas leak in the heart of Brisbane that closed off several streets has required the changeover of vehicles and personnel to be extended into the first half-hour of the night shift. Several firefighters from the previous shift have been treated for exposure to freon gas— a refrigerant that, while non-toxic, can be dangerous in confined spaces. Time: 1900 hours The crew of Pump 902 are turned out to an automatic alarm at an inner-city building. The security staff there appear to be totally unfamiliar with the workings of the alarm system, and frustration at this ineptitude shows on Paul Goopy’s face as he and Peter Lalor attempt to discover where the possible fire could be located. Manuals and emergency listings are referred to and all of them are out of date; the security staff are unfamiliar with the contents. A search of the building is made, senior security people are called on the phone, as are maintenance people—all with no result. Peter is convinced that it’s a faulty alarm circuit and finally decides to return to Roma Street after 45 minutes of fruitless effort. He tells me that it’s uncommon in that type of situation and that the day shift will be paying the building and security people a visit to rectify matters. Time: 2150 hours While the firies are at their training session, Firecom advises that an automatic alarm has been triggered at Kelvin Grove Teachers College, and both Pump 902 and TAP 402 are on their way within a minute of the alarm being triggered. The large trucks work hard to climb the steep hills up to the college and we are directed to the building in question by security staff on the roadway. Peter reports at 2155 hours to Firecom that we arrived and that no smoke is visible. We go down a series of outside stairs of a large cafeteria to find that a cleaner in the huge kitchen area has been using a high pressure hot water hose to scrub and clean the floors. Once again an automatic alarm was activated by excessive amounts of steam, because the cleaner didn’t ventilate the area prior to starting work. Once again Peter has a quiet word with the offender, and we return to the first aid refresher training at Roma Street. Time: 2245 hours Another automatic alarm call takes us to a high rise apartment building just off Coronation Drive. A male occupant guides

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us to the third floor where the alarm has gone off. He says there is no apparent fire but plenty of smoke on that floor. We exit the lift and enter Apartment 301, which is smoky indeed. The cause of the smoke, and of great embarrassment to the female occupant, is two pieces of steak left to char on an electric grill. The room is quickly ventilated and the alarms are reset by Paul Goopy. The pumps are back at Roma Street just after midnight. As we return to the station Peter Lalor calls in to Firecom and we notice that the voice on the other end of the radio belongs to Dean Baird. Peter tells him that we don’t want to be called again that night. Dean laughs and says that he won’t call until 3.00 a.m. All the fire crews are in bed, trying to get to sleep, by midnight. I find my way to my bunk and lie there wondering if sleep will come. Finally, I wake up with a start. Time: 0305 hours The lights have come on in the dormitory and the bells are ringing. I had laid out my gear so that I could get into it quickly. Within 60 seconds we’re on our way, but I’m worried about having my kit on correctly. Brian Edmonds once related a story about a firie turning up to an early morning fire without his pants on. I am impressed with the speed of the turnout; Tim Watkins admits later that the firefighters only doze lightly when they’re in the dormitory. As we charge down the deserted streets, Firecom advises that an alarm and a booster pump have been activated at the Northbridge Apartments building in South Brisbane. The reference point on the alarm callout places the truck in the wrong position, but Peter Lalor’s local knowledge soon has us heading the right way. For a minute I wonder if Dean Baird at Firecom might have called us out just to stir up Peter and myself, as we seemed to be on a wild goose chase. Tim Watkins executes a classy U-turn in the middle of an empty street and we head up a hill near the Mater Hospital. Paul Goopy remarks on how bad the reference for the call from Firecom was, but he knows they can only act on the information provided on the alarm sheets. We alight in front of an eight-storey building and are greeted by occupants in pyjamas and dressing gowns. They are standing in the car park next to the road in the cold morning air. We hear the sound of a small diesel motor and the escaping roar of water under high pressure. The booster pump for the building activates when water pressure falls below

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a certain point and it had switched on automatically when the main pipe burst and water pressure dropped in the system. The water is squirting everywhere and, as Peter and Paul desperately try to find the leak and engine shutoff switch, we all get soaked and swallow a good amount of diesel smoke. The switch is found after a minute or so and the problem is soon rectified. Peter asks the occupants to contact the maintenance man who had been working on the same pump the day before, and they say that he’s already on his way. After 30 minutes of securing the system and resetting alarms we return to the station, where Firecom is advised of the results and the need to amend the callout alarm sheet. Peter now completes the Australian Incident Reporting System documentation. Every incident is logged on to a computer, which records the what, where, who and why of turnouts. It all forms part of an overall picture of how resources and assets are used on a minute-to-minute basis across the State. This forms the basis for budgeting, forecasting, manpower allocations and various studies. At Roma Street, we’re all back in bed by 4.00 a.m. Time: 0600 hours The dormitory is empty when I awake and I find that all the firefighters are attending to chores and making the station shipshape for the next shift. Coffee is offered, which I gladly accept. The station officers for the next shift arrive at 7.00 a.m. and begin their roster attendance callbacks. The station officers change their shifts about an hour before the fire crews to facilitate the callback process in case of a turnout in the last hour of shift—and that is exactly what now happens. Time: 0715 hours Firecom advises over the radio that there is a fire in Boundary Street, West End. The station officer for the next shift gets into the jump seat next to driver Tim Watkins. The heavy morning traffic provides Tim with a special challenge as we head across Grey Street Bridge, but we still arrive in West End within three minutes of turnout. We see a man waving his arms and I notice that the body language in Pump 902 has changed, the word ‘fire’ was mentioned in the turnout. It is quite noticeable and small talk has all but ceased as we thunder down Boundary Street and pull up in front of a small building. We are led down a side lane to an outdoor concrete car park to see what

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looks like smoke emanating from a grille set into the concrete surface. We remove the grille and a foul stench fills the air. The owner of the restaurant says it must be smoke, but the firefighters recognise steam when they see it. An inspection of the grease trap and the revelation that commercial dishwashers are in use in the restaurant lead the station officer to believe that all we have is steam on a cold morning. The waste trap pumps are activated, no fire erupts in the trap, and hot water is pumped out—steaming as it meets the cold air. By 0800 hours we are back in the station, just in time to hand over to D Shift who are coming on duty for the first day shift of their ‘tour’. After one day and one night on shift I decided to do a complete tour, again with B Shift from Roma Street, from Thursday to Monday. It was a varied five days. We conducted several boarding house and building inspections. Most of the fire calls during this time were due to the accidental triggering of automatic fire alarms—a lot of burning toast—although there was a real fire caused by some people trying to barbecue satay chicken inside their flat! We also had to deal with a ‘roving arsonist’ who had set a grass fire dangerously close to a timber house in Red Hill and who then started setting fire to telephone books in phone boxes. There were two MVAs—one of a fairly minor nature, and another more serious one involving two cars and a pedestrian. Thankfully there were no fatalities.

Automatic alarm calls False alarms are a costly business for the fire service. In 2000, it has been estimated, some 23 700 alarm calls across Queensland were false. A program to encourage maintenance of alarm systems has now been put in place. At the time of writing, if a property with automatic alarms has more than one alarm call within 60 days a flat fee of $371.50 is charged for a second and all subsequent call outs. You might think it would be easy to become blasé about automatic alarm calls, given the number of them that most stations have to attend. But Station Officer Mick Quinn recalls a time at South Townsville when they got a call that was anything but false.

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I was the second driver when we turned out to the Townsville General Hospital nurses quarters about five years ago. We just thought: ‘Oh yeah, here we go again.’ As we pulled in, everybody looked up about the same time and saw that it was a goer—and big time. It was going about four or five floors up and the flames were tearing out from that floor. There were a lot of renovations under way, so fortunately a lot of the area was unoccupied at the time. We had trouble gaining access and used a line up the side of the building to drag the branch and hoses up. We then saw that the fire was starting to lick into the two floors above, so I brought the monitor, which was on top of the large Firepac 6000 pumper, into action and was able to suppress the fire quite dramatically and restrict it to a single floor. Overall it was a real good save that night. Every now and then something really bad comes along. On 19 January 1990 Greg Scarlett was a junior firefighter with four and a half years under his belt and doing routine shifts out of Kemp Place in the city, which is just as busy as Roma Street and has many automatic alarm calls. It was a memorable night. Firecom told us to turn out to McTaggart’s Woolstore. There’d been an automatic alarm. We proceeded there, and Tom Dawson was the officer on the first car and I heard him say Code Two. Joe Ryan, who was my officer, asked me, ‘Did he say Code Two?’ because Joe couldn’t see any fire or smoke—it was dark in the street and on our side of the building. Tom Dawson said they’d go around to the back of the building and he asked us to go around to the front street. So we went there and we got the absolute shock of our lives, because there were four storeys and every window on every floor had thick black smoke just oozing out of every window, but there was not one bit of flame. We went down past a laneway to what we thought at the time was a safe position. Joe Ryan ordered two of us into BA and I remember thinking, ‘I don’t know if I want to go in there with BA’, but he said to do it. So we put it on, and the other firefighter and myself walked down the laneway. Just as we did that, the nearest window blew out with a bang— exploded. We backpedalled really quickly and got out into the

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middle of the road. Then every window exploded in succession, just like a collapsing pack of cards, and along every floor at the same time. All four storeys at once, just boom, boom, boom! Within minutes every power pole in the street was on fire and the Railways house across the road was too. Then the woolstore next door caught fire. I remember thinking, ‘We’ve lost the first building’, and straight away we trained our branch on the woolstore next door. It had a timber bargeboard above the big sandstone blocks and that had caught fire and there was about a metre of flame coming from it. We were hitting it with a good solid jet and thinking, ‘Well, it can’t get any bigger’, but the next minute the whole bargeboard was on fire and the alarms started ringing. The flames shot across the roof trusses and then that woolstore was alight too . . . I remember the timber house next to the first woolstore was now on fire . . . So we had two woolstores and a house, plus the Railways house across the road, on fire. We also had smoke coming from an office block on the other corner, and every power pole in the street was burning. Except for the first woolstore it was all from radiated heat. It was just too hot. Roma Street’s pump had arrived and we had to reposition our TAP because of the heat on it. Roma Street’s pump was further away than we were, but its plastic red lights were melting! The radiated heat was phenomenal. A policeman came down and said there was a petrol tank on fire up the road, about 50 metres away, and we went there and saw these flames . . . but it turned out to be bitumen. I remember at one stage looking along the street and it was as if it was snowing. There was whitehot ash and you could hardly see the length of the street because of all the ash. It was in huge flakes—probably 8 inches across. It was truly an amazing scene. Twenty or so units turned out. It was certainly a major fire . . . the odds of us putting it out were long. It was menacing, it was ugly.

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CHAPTER 9

THE REGIONALS Firefighting work varies tremendously from one region to another across the State—from the far north, a cyclone belt subject to floods, torrential rain and an annual influx of millions of tourists, to the far west where drought and searing heat create grassfires of enormous proportions; from small beachside towns dotted along the coast to places where bush and town intermingle. The variety creates a diverse set of challenges for the QFRS. In this chapter we look at several regional stations; unfortunately it is not possible to cover more than a fraction of the total.

Cairns—Far Northern Region On a wall in the regional office hangs a photograph of the Mareeba RAR team that in one year (1999) won the State Championships, the

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Nationals and the World Championships. What is especially interesting about that achievement is that Mareeba is an auxiliary station—reflecting the high standard of training that has been achieved since the amalgamation of Fire Brigade Boards in 1990. The Mayor of Cairns, Kevin Byrne, explains one of the reasons why well-trained emergency services are vital in the city: ‘Cairns has a high tourist throughput; at the height of the season, on any one night, 30–40 per cent of the people in Cairns are tourists. Their safety is important to the city because of public perceptions and expectations.’ After the tragic Palace Backpackers Hostel fire in Childers, checks made in Cairns by the fire service and local council revealed that almost 80 per cent of the 50-plus backpackers hostels and B & Bs were operating illegally. Many lacked fire escapes or had boarded-up exits. In one establishment used by Japanese tourists there were no exits except the front door. Rapid action was taken by council to close down the offending establishments.1 According to Station Officer Russell Matthews, the bulk of calls in Cairns come from automatic alarms. Then follow MVAs, structural fires and grassfires in that order. Fuel reduction in the foothills and along main roads is essential with the seasonal change between wet season and dry season. Another major seasonal factor for the Far Northern Region’s two permanent stations, seven mixed stations and sixteen auxiliary stations is the impact of cyclones. Every station has a laid down procedure to prepare for these storms. Russell Matthews explains: ‘Cairns is quite a low area, so there are contingency plans to move equipment to higher ground if there is the threat of a significant tidal surge. Every time there’s a tropical cyclone alert, the firies start going through their plans, getting fuel, checking equipment, securing kits and preparing to move to high ground.’ And usually there will be community emergencies for them to deal with as they occur. Peter Beauchamp, who looks after strategic development in the Cairns area and spends a lot of his time dealing with local authorities, says that eco-tourism is now a huge business. In 1999–2000 about 1.2 million tourists flew into Cairns, many of them drawn by the rainforests. The challenge for Peter is ‘making the firefighters realise what the greatest asset is—the environment’. The ranges are worth far more to the economy than anything else. Buildings can be replaced but the

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world heritage rainforests would take a millennium to restore. For firies the problem is compounded by the housing spreading up into the foothills—the houses there are almost inaccessible in trucks and the dwellings are surrounded by forest.

Ayr—Northern Region Northern Region has four permanent, six mixed and ten auxiliary stations looking after almost a quarter of a million people in an enormous area that extends west to the Northern Territory border and south to the South Australian border near Birdsville. Ayr station is located in a wooden two-storey building, commissioned in 1955, that once housed the old Burdekin Fire Brigade and had the chief fire officer’s residence on the first floor. The station now has a complement of two station officers and six firefighters who work a five-days on/four-days off ten-hour shift system. At night, during their five-day tour of duty, the firefighters live at home and are recalled by pager. The Ayr day shift runs from 7.00 a.m. to 5.00 p.m. seven days a week. The permanents and auxiliaries who provide backup are all on pager after hours. The turnouts take no more than two minutes at Ayr as most of the firefighters live within one minute of the station house. Ayr is a busy station, as it looks after Area 2 for the Northern Region (Townsville being Area 1), and averages over 165 calls per year. In some years the average will be much higher if the grassfire season is a bad one. The station also has a very high turnout (70 per cent) to motor vehicle accidents.2 Auxiliaries supplement the station and there are about ten who serve at Ayr. Some of them are temporary firefighters filling in for permanents who are on leave. Apart from Area Director Brenton Walton, a twenty-year veteran who began his career in South Australia, and Sven Diga, a graduate of the February–April 2000 recruit course, the rest of the firefighters at Ayr, including Station Officer Darren Male, started their careers as auxiliary firefighters. Darren is a local man. His father was a firefighter and his grandfather an ambulance officer. Sven Diga arrived straight from his recruit course and recalls: ‘I was “bished” with

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a bucket of water from upstairs by Station Officer Greg Bousett. Sort of a welcome to the station!’ Late in the afternoon on which I was there, the second pump returned from a safety awareness day held for primary school students under the Giddy Goanna program. Auxiliary firefighter Jane Hill, an Aboriginal mother of three, was on the pump. She’d been out with the crew helping to give lectures and passing out kits to remind the children of fire safety procedures. Jane has been an auxiliary for four years and loves the work and its challenges.

Townsville—Northern Region Townsville (Area 1, population 140 000) comprises four permanently manned stations, each with one and three except for Townsville South, which normally has two and four. Wulguru, Kirwan and Woodlands are one-pumper stations. Townsville South has several appliances: a TAP, a composite pumper, a regional spare, a 4WD, a grassfire unit, an Operational Support Unit command and control vehicle, and an ET. It also has a magnificently restored 1938 Dennis truck that was on the original establishment of the Townsville Fire Brigade Board. In the area there are copper, nickel and zinc refineries, a large port and terminal, light and heavy industry, a gas loading and unloading facility, an industrial gas plant, oil farms, and a large urban spread along the Ross River. There are also swags of backpackers hostels (pun intended). There are no auxiliary stations on the Area 1 establishment, but auxiliaries are used to supplement crews as temporaries. The shifts in Area 1 are organised into ‘platoons’ to allow the firies to be moved from one station to another in case there is a shortfall in crews. The A Shift platoon, for example, has about five officers and seventeen firefighters. The people in Firecom are also included in this shift arrangement (but not for manning pumps). The experience level in the area is similar to that in urban areas around Brisbane, with an average of fourteen-and-ahalf years’ service per shift. Most of the firefighters are from the Townsville area. The work includes MVAs, structural fires, chemical incidents, and even pumping out sinking trawlers that have accidentally got jammed

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under a jetty. In the latter case, Wayne McLennan says, they use a venturi system through a case feed and actually put water in the sinking boat to enable a suction process to develop. Then they get the water out again. It’s disconcerting for trawler owners to suddenly see water going in to their boat. They yell out: ‘No, no, I want it emptied!’ The area is in a tropical cyclone belt. Mick Quinn remarks: ‘After floods we go around and assist people in cleaning mud out of their houses with the hoses—especially where the water mark is maybe 7 feet up the wall!’ But then dry season arrives, grassfires erupt with greater frequency. A ‘dry’ wet season adds to the fuel load enormously and the area can get several hundred grassfires in a couple of months. The platoon system adds to the camaraderie among Townsville firies. One of the ways they keep the drivers on their toes in this town is that if one of them clips a gutter while pushing his 13-tonne truck around the streets he has to buy his shift a cake. Dick Gledhill says: ‘Even the cake-shop lady knows about it. The worst part is driving the TAP in Mitchell Street in North Ward—it’s impossible and guarantees a cake every time!’ Townsville and Northern Region Firecom is a busy unit. Shift Supervisor Tina McLeod has been a communications officer for six years. Tina is a single mum with two kids. She works with one console operator, Juanita Pugh, who ran a small business prior to becoming a ‘commo’. The Firecom room has two ‘reserve’ consoles which can be used in very busy times and during critical incidents.

Charters Towers—Northern Region This very old gold mining town is 140 kilometres from Townsville. The fire station is cramped and old. The town has a population of almost 10 000. The shift manning of one and three includes two probationary firefighters, Scott Dewar and Warren Hosking. It is a day shift station and eighteen auxiliaries form the backup. The permanents work five days a week from 8.00 a.m. until 4.00 p.m. and are on pager seven days a week. The area the firies cover is about the size of Tasmania. Some calls might involve a 200-kilometre drive. Charters Towers is a typical old country Queensland town with the

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bulk of the houses being wooden high-set homes. There are some dilapidated buildings that are serious fire risks. The bulk of calls relate to MVAs, grassfires, automatic alarms at old peoples homes, private fire alarms, and snake catching. Yes, snakes! They’re almost wall-to-wall at Charters Towers, especially when it floods after heavy rain. Not just pythons, but deadly browns and tigers. The National Parks and Wildlife rangers run newly arrived firies through the procedures for catching snakes, and the firefighters have fashioned some ingenious devices for snaring and holding the reptiles. The firies at Charters Towers have to be self-reliant because they are hours from anywhere. They do their own BA set charging and diesel maintenance. Warren Hosking is a diesel and motor mechanic and can turn his hand to almost anything mechanical, which is a boon to the station. Roy Simpson is the area director for Area 4 in Northern Region and has five totally different stations to look after—Ingham (where he is based), Halifax, Forrest Beach, Charters Towers and Magnetic Island. His biggest challenge is: Bringing the troops into the twenty-first century and [helping them to recognise] the ethnicity and cultural diversity within the area. The people who make up the area are all quite different in outlook and character. We have a resort at Forrest Beach, a canegrowing community at Ingham and a western cattle-growing area at Charters Towers. At Charters Towers probably only 10 per cent of the people have a job and the rest are retired or out of work. So my challenge is to get the troops to realise all of that and work as a team in all that diversity.

Rockhampton—Central Region Central Region has four permanent, six mixed and 29 auxiliary stations servicing over 320 000 people. The region has a mix of cattle, sugar cane, mining and industrial operations and is enormous, reaching west to where the Northern Territory border meets that of South Australia. The main station (and area headquarters) is in Kent Street in Rockhampton.

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It is a big station with a 20-metre tower for rappelling and a large garage capable of holding an ET, a Firepac 400 composite pumper, a hydraulic platform and a grassfire tender. The RFS headquarters is also housed in the building, along with a small museum collection. The shift at Rockhampton’s main station has two and five—one and four on the composite unit and one and one on the platform. Most of the firefighters come from the local area. North Rockhampton has a brand new station built along composite lines, with the Queensland Ambulance Service sharing the property. The firies there work a shift of one and three. From time to time regional firefighters face big and very dangerous structural fires—their work isn’t confined to grassfires and the like by any means. A major incident in Rockhampton in 1989 illustrated this point all too well. A nightclub in the centre of the city called the Shark Club had been undergoing renovations when it was torched with accelerants. Station Officer Trevor Kidd, senior firefighters Brian Edmonds and David Semple and a number of their colleagues turned out to an ‘explosion’ at around 3.00 a.m. on 10 November 1989. Another station officer, Alan Titman, was on the first car and his crew had pulled up outside the club. The front door was open and they noticed several spot fires inside. Trevor Kidd was the second officer to arrive. He recounts what happened next: I pulled up around the corner. Alan and his crew advanced inside and put out the spot fires. There was not a real lot of smoke. I took over radio control on the outside of the building, which is the normal procedure for the second officer. David Semple and another firie, Stephen Shaw, entered the club wearing BA sets. The room was under renovation and there were sections of scaffolding in it. They now saw a small fire burning in a lighting system in the ceiling. Firefighter Shaw climbed up on to the scaffolding to put it out. As he did so, a huge explosion erupted. Trevor Kidd was outside on the footpath. I’d just passed a radio message to Firecom that the situation was under control, and at that instant the explosion went off . . . I had

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actually turned around and was starting to walk back towards the nightclub doors, and was probably about 2 metres away, when the explosion happened. From what I remember, there was a vivid flash, a bang, and then I found myself lying down on my back on the footpath. But all of that happened in a micro-second, of course. Trevor was in fact blown backwards about 3 metres. The bomb, consisting of six sticks of gelignite, had been inside the doorway to the right. The blast had channelled around and ripped the two doors off their hinges. A heavy iron bar used to secure the doors had hit Kidd’s ‘Cromwell’ helmet, shearing the top of it off. (The helmet is now in the Rockhampton Fire Brigade Museum.) Trevor continues: The damage to my body was mainly just massive tissue damage from top to bottom, and extreme whiplash that resulted in me having no feeling below my chest. So, my neck was injured, my helmet was ripped off, and my chinstrap was found across six lanes of traffic, a median strip and on the other side of the road! It must have just flown through the air. Strangely enough, Trevor wasn’t knocked out, but he was dazed for a couple of seconds. His portable radio was on the footpath beside his hand. He tried to grab it but found that his hands wouldn’t work. Firefighter Brian Edmonds was in the truck trying to call in with what had happened. The crew naturally thought that those inside the club could not have survived the enormous explosion. In fact there were injuries but, unbelievably, no deaths. David Semple had been blown against the scaffolding and had injured his right elbow. Dave, who was inside with Alan Titman, says: There was a yellow glow and then she went boom! I got blown against the scaffolding; my ears were sore from the explosion. The policeman with us had shrapnel in his leg. Alan Titman was flattened and had a sore neck for quite a long time.

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Brian Edmonds recalls Shaw had massive damage from being blown through the air the moment of the blast: I was behind the pump, facing the other way. I felt this cool air go past my face, and that must have been the air going in, and then it blew out with a huge force. It’s something I will never forget. We all got showered with glass. I was lucky in that I had just moved from the other side, where Trevor was, when it blew. It would have killed me probably, because I was taller than Trevor and the iron bar would have hit me in the chest. The brand new $125 000 fire truck had its windscreen blown out and another window shattered. The side door facing the explosion got badly buckled. The gantry on the ladder on top of the pumper was bent. Bravely, the firefighters went back inside the building to check for any fires that had been started or re-ignited by the blast. They found two more unexploded bombs, each of five sticks of gelignite. While this was going on, Trevor Kidd was slowly regaining his wits but was still flat on his back on the footpath. I could hear a Kiwi firie by the name of Steve. He was asking ‘Are you okay?’, and I thought: ‘If I don’t say something, this bastard is going to give me mouth to mouth!’ Finally, I was able to focus and apparently the first words I said were: ‘Piss off, Steve, and leave me alone.’ I didn’t want him giving me mouth to mouth. Brian Edmonds said later that he wasn’t sure what condition I was in, but when he heard me say that to Steve he reckoned I was okay. The injured men were taken to hospital for x-rays and the like. When they got there a male nurse started cutting Trevor’s clothes off. Firies’ boots in those days were heavy leather ones and they took years to get broken in. The nurse was about to cut them off too and ruin them, but Trevor yelled: ‘I don’t give a fuck what you do, just don’t cut my boots!’ Having been hit by a massive energy force equivalent to being run down by a bus, plus the hit on his head, Trevor needed three months off work. He slowly got better and with self-imposed rehabilitation was eventually able to walk without pain.

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A suspect in this incident was brought to trial but cleared of any wrong doing. The case is still open.

Nambour—North Coast Region Sitting with me in Nambour station, 27-year veteran Senior Station Officer Fred Heiniger remarks that his outfit is a bit unique in the area. He says: ‘Caloundra, Maroochydore and Noosa stations all look after their own districts, but here we look after Nambour, Woombye, Palmwoods, Eumundi and up on the Blackall Ranges. And even though Montville, Mapleton and Julong are “rural” areas, if they get a structural fire the Nambour crew are first response.’ Fred speaks with pride of the knowledge his men have of the local area, and then goes on to tell the story of the biggest night the Nambour fire station has ever had. It serves to illustrate the fact that even quiet rural areas can have their moments. On the eve of Anzac Day 1987 the crew were standing outside the station and talking about how they would attack the manse of the Catholic church across the road—where the nuns lived—if it caught on fire. A little later, around 11.30 p.m., they saw a man cross the empty road and within a matter of minutes a terrific explosion went off next door in the Church of England church. They raced around the corner and found flames coming out, everywhere. The crew informed the Firecom operator, who worked upstairs in the Nambour station at the time, that the church next door was on fire and that they were going to put it out. The operator then had to get the station manned with a backup crew while the first crew responded. She rang around and Fred Heiniger was one of the first to arrive, along with the fire chief. The Firecom phone now began to ring hot with numerous calls saying, ‘Our church is on fire’, and the operator kept answering, before they could say which one: ‘Yes, we know. The fire brigade’s there.’ Fred recalls: As I walked in, about a dozen people were running up the street. One was a mate of mine and he said: ‘My church is on fire!’ I knew he belonged to the Lutheran Church and I thought: ‘Shit, the

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Lutheran Church is also on fire.’ Just then one of the men who had been putting out the Church of England fire next door came over and said it was out. So I told him: ‘Jump in this pump here, you and I are going down to the Lutheran Church.’ But Fred and the firie were only part of the way to this second fire when the full drama of the night began to unfold. When we got to Maude Street we saw that the hall beside the Methodist Church was ablaze and going like a rocket. It was a huge brick hall with concrete tiles on the roof and it was exploding. I got on the radio to Firecom and said I wasn’t going any further because the Methodist Church was now on fire. I also said I believed that the Lutheran Church was on fire as well.3 The night went on from there. Fire engines responded from Caloundra, Noosa and Maroochydore. It was a big night for Nambour. Fred says: ‘I was at the Methodist Church, which is right next door to the Nambour Telephone Exchange. The flames and the heat were so intense that the girls working there all bailed out.’ Fred then tried to commandeer an appliance going past his fire. I saw the hydraulic platform from Maroochydore coming down the road and I thought: ‘This is exactly what I need to put a curtain of water across the gap to give us protection.’ So I stood in the middle of the road, calling them in and waving my arms . . . and they went straight past! Unbeknown to me there was a lot more going on down town. They were off to the Christian Bookstore complex, which included a bank, a hardware store, a hairdresser and a laundromat—so I missed out and only had one pump at my fire. But I finished up getting a few extra firefighters as they gradually arrived. In the end the firies didn’t have to attend the Catholic Church, even though a fire broke out there too. One of the nuns had got up during the night and had seen a glow in the church that was clearly much bigger than normal. She woke up the other two nuns and they went

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down to the church, looked across the road and saw that there were no fire engines at the station. So they took matters into their own hands. They quickly grabbed fire extinguishers and put the fire out. The damage was estimated at thousands of dollars; nonetheless it was a good save because it wasn’t a small fire and it had a lot of heat in it. At this stage only one church was left untouched—the Presbyterian, which was out on Coronation Avenue. By now, of course, the chief officer had realised that something evil was afoot. He asked the police to head immediately for the Presbyterian church. And there they apprehended the offender. In all, five fires were lit within a half hour period. The total damage was estimated at over a million dollars. The perpetrator was a 34-yearold former Army officer and Viet Nam veteran, Kenneth Gosschalk, who had served in 17 Construction Squadron in June 1968–69. He admitted the crime of arson when he was caught. Fred says: ‘He was put away for a while, but I think it became a psychiatric thing because he was a Viet Nam vet, and he ended up in a mentally-ill ward.’4

Toowoomba—Southwestern Region This vast region extends west to the South Australian border. It has two permanent, two mixed and 40 auxiliary stations. Getting to an incident can take a very long time—sometimes three hours. And Station Officer Jack Wensley says: ‘If I have to go to Cunnamulla, it’s a nine-hour drive.’ Jack is responsible for BA training in the region, which includes training some of the rural brigades so that they can tackle structural fires in very remote areas. On the Toowoomba range they have their own problems, like dense fog. One night a fire crew drove straight past a house on fire, the fog was so thick.5 Also, the firies say they always seem to be going uphill! There is increasing urban sprawl, creating problems of response time. There is no reticulated water at the far ends of the greater town area, so they always take two vehicles with about 2000 litres on the Type 9 composite pumpers. Toowoomba itself sits like a green oasis on the top of the range, but 50 kilometres out of town it is as ‘dry as a chip’. It gets seriously cold at night owing to the altitude and many firies

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recall having had ice form on their old woollen jackets at a midwinter fire. The main road coming down the Toowoomba range is deadly. The number of bad accidents has been enough for the council to build an emergency helicopter landing pad about halfway down, for casualty evacuation. Senior Firefighter Vince Hinder, who has been in Toowoomba for all of his 25 years’ service, says: ‘Many drivers get taken out by the load coming through and chopping them in half. The drivers don’t always put their trucks into low gear and their brakes fail; the grease in the front wheels catches on fire, and sometimes tailshafts come chopping through all the brake lines.’ The Toowoomba area has a heavy grass and bush fire turnout in the dry season from October through to December. It’s a real concern, as Bob Buckley explains: ‘Some of the range area hasn’t burnt in 25 years and council is desperately trying to reduce the hazard.’ About half of the total 600–800 calls each year are to automatic fire alarms and MVAs. Many of the automatic alarms originate at a local psychiatric hospital. Structural fires and other calls make up the balance. There have been several huge fires in the past but the number of structural turnouts seems to be dropping, a fact that many firies attribute to public safety programs and Fire Ed. But the local milk-processing factory has gone up at least twice, causing Bob Buckley to quip: ‘At least we know where to go these days.’ Amazingly, there are only some ten permanent firefighters on shift in a town of 85 000 people. Community support for them is very strong. The firies, in turn, have raised over $30 000 for the local hospital in the last six years through their annual golf day.

Dalby—Southwestern Region Dalby is about 85 kilometres west of Toowoomba. Area Director Graham Cooke has seven auxiliary stations to look after and, as they are spread over a fairly large area, he can clock up 50 000 kilometres a year visiting them. Women make up about 20 per cent of the area’s firefighters. Graham says: ‘I have 92 auxiliaries on the books and that number fluctuates. My greatest challenge is getting people to enlist.’ Training is

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difficult to arrange because of the distances involved, and a lot of time and effort is expended on it. A breakdown of the 350 fire calls in Dalby from 1 July to 30 November 2000 indicates that just over 42 per cent were grass and bush fires, 18 per cent were MVAs, 18 per cent were structural fires, and the rest were chemical incidents, animal rescues etc.6 The bushfire season runs from the end of winter, as the fuel gets dry from August/September. The peak fire period is often November, with early summer storms throwing out a lot of lightning. Water supply in the area is a problem and Graham says they have to be resourceful in using private supplies and council or shire water tankers. The MVAs are mostly out on the highway and are ‘high speed and fairly traumatic; on the remote roads they are often catastrophic’. In dry times many of the road accidents are caused by animals coming to the roadside verges looking for grass. Area support is the main concern; a unit can respond but backup is a problem. Attending to RAR calls on roads like the Moonie Highway means a three-hour run and Graham can have a crew out at a fatal accident all day. When a crew go out on a two-hour job Firecom have to arrange a backup. It is a ‘risk management’ approach and involves ‘staging’ with other units. As Graham explains: ‘We have to provide the service and not take a chance.’

Southport—Southeastern Region With a population of over three-quarters of a million and an inordinate number of high rise buildings, the region has fifteen permanent stations and seventeen auxiliary stations. There are 640 permanent firies in the region, who spend half of their time attending to automatic fire alarms. The rest of the calls are largely split between MVAs, chemical incidents and ‘real fires’. Apart from the hundreds of high rise buildings, the terrain varies from flat residential areas to steep forest-covered slopes in the hinterland. Julie Bennett, supervisor of Southport Firecom—the second largest Firecom in the State—has two particularly busy times in the year. One is the bushfire season. In the summer of 2000 she and her offsiders had 240 calls in one memorable day. The other busy time comes when the

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Gold Coast hosts the annual Indy Grand Prix car race. Units are placed at strategic points around the entire circuit to cope with emergencies— of all types. The firies’ role includes foot patrols. At Firecom, Julie also looks after the rural fire brigades, who are very active in this remarkably diverse region.

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CHAPTER 10

CHILDERS Childers Fire Brigade has a history going back 60 years. It began as the voluntary private brigade for Isis Shire, a cane-growing district in the North Coast Region. It was a council-funded brigade until 1996. The town is located in a large agricultural area, halfway between Maryborough and Bundaberg, that employs hundreds of itinerant croppickers every season—many of whom are young international visitors backpacking their way around Australia on a working holiday. The Childers fire station is manned by three officers and nine firefighters. All are auxiliaries. The crew profile reflects a blend of youth and experience, with an average time in service of almost six years. The captain is Curl Santacaterina, 50, a locomotive driver from the Isis sugar mill who has been an auxiliary firefighter for 21 years. The other officers are Lieutenant Wayne Harbourne, 40, a sugar boiler, with fourteen years’ service; and Lieutenant Richard Randell, 33, a scientific assistant who works at the Isis State High School and has been a

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firefighter for fourteen years. The firefighters are: Damien Tarda, 25, auto electrician, nine years’ service; John Ratcliffe, 36, tyre fitter, nine years; Tim Bunn, 41, cane farmer, seven years; Bob Winkelmann, 42, truck driver, six years; Martin Bettridge, 36, mechanic, five years (not all in Childers); Linda Ratcliffe, 32, bar attendant (and wife of John), two and a half years; Matthew Dalton, 28, receptionist, two and half years; Hayden Whitaker, 25, auto mechanic, two years; Nigel McKey, 35, mechanic, one year. The station is immediately off Churchill Street, which is the main street in town and forms part of the Bruce Highway. The Rural Fire Service in Childers operates out of the same building and compound. It has a complement of twenty. Many of the auxiliaries ‘wear two hats’ and also turn out with the RFS to grass and bush fires.

The fire At 12.32 a.m. on Friday 23 June 2000, the North Coast Firecom operator at Kawana, Colin Kennedy, sent a fire call to the Childers auxiliary brigade. Colin had received a 000 call saying that the Palace Backpackers Hostel at 72 Churchill Street was on fire. The hostel was originally the Redmonds Palace Hotel, which was built after a major fire in 1902 destroyed half the town. The two-storey structure featured a large atrium between the two sections of the building. The hostel had accommodation for 101 people; a stairwell in the atrium led to the sleeping quarters. The Palace was a typical Queensland commercial structure from the turn of the last century, with an awning over the footpath, and it formed part of a row of shops and business premises along the wide street, down the centre of which ran a median strip with trees. The pagers went off on the firies’ bedside tables. Some drove to the station, and others, like Lieutenant Richard Randell, ran a short distance from their houses. The first truck pulled up in front of the hostel five minutes after the fire call was sent. The captain, Curl Santacaterina, saw that the building was already well involved with flames and that smoke was rising in the cold foggy air. Curl immediately went into action with his crew, telling Richard to send the message ‘Pumps 3’ to Firecom, as he knew he would need support. It was a dramatic scene. Occupants

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were streaming out of the burning building, and the Childers crew were facing a big fire with limited resources.1 At Bundaberg station, C Shift were on duty and in their dormitory. The crew, who also happened to be the ‘buddy shift’ of the Childers brigade and helped with their training, were led by Acting Station Officer Andrew McCracken. Driving the pump, and number two, was Gary Black. Ross Gatley was number one and branchman. The number three was Vicki Shailer. Between them, this crew had more than 75 years’ firefighting experience. They reacted quickly to the Childers call for support and were out of their station within two minutes. They used the ‘out-of-town’ appliance, a Mitsubishi truck, which carried more water than the town tender did. They ran the sirens only through the occasional settlement en route, but had their flashing lights on all the way. The road down from Bundaberg along the Bruce Highway is good. But on this night a very heavy fog made driving fast difficult if not dangerous. On the trip the crew were listening intently to the messages being passed between Childers and Kawana Firecom and they knew that the Childers brigade had a big fire on their hands. They also heard transmissions from the Childers crew reporting ‘persons missing’. They became a bit frustrated listening to Childers asking Firecom where they were as they trundled down the Bruce Highway. The fastest they could go in the fog was 80 kilometres per hour and often it was less. It took them close to 40 minutes to make the 53-kilometre journey.2 Meanwhile, on the fire ground things were frantic. Lieutenant Randell had taken command, donning his ‘Fire Commander’ tabbard for easy identification, while Captain Curl Santacaterina and Bob Winkelmann put on their BA sets and went in looking for survivors. The middle and upper parts of the building were working and becoming involved. In the street, it was dark and foggy. People were milling around in a dazed fashion, but the local police quickly arrived and started controlling the crowd of backpackers who had managed to escape the inferno. Many of the young people were crying, others just stood in stunned disbelief staring at the dense smoke and flames belching out of the upper windows. The Childers rural tanker was also deployed and was sent to the rear of the hostel, in Macrossan Street, to attack the fire from that flank. The

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fire was now getting a strong hold there as well. Inside the building, Curl and Bob were faced with a huge wall of flame in the downstairs section near the stairwell. The fire was starting to show all the indications of a flashover and to suck smoke back in through the front door. The heat was now obviously very intense and, using his radio, Richard Randell told Curl and Bob to get out of the building. Nine minutes after the initial fire call, there was a huge flashover and Richard switched to defensive operations, withdrawing his branchmen. Their task was virtually impossible now, as they were confronting a solid wall of flame with a small Case 1 medium pressure hose and only 2250 litres of pumper water. Curl and Bob reacted smartly to Richard’s order, but as Bob exited the front door the massive flashover showered him with molten aluminium from the ornate fretwork on the top verandah. The plastic beacons on the brigade’s new truck melted, as did the plastic covers on its seats, and the vehicle’s mobile phone display window popped out. And the truck had been relocated some 27 metres from the fire! The hostel was now fully involved—all within ten minutes of the 000 call. The crew had decided to concentrate on protecting the adjoining buildings. The possibility of searching for missing people had disappeared when the fire exploded. Reports of 86 people staying in the hostel were circulating, but only 69 or 70 had been accounted for. There was a good deal of confusion among the backpackers about who was where. Different reports began to filter back to Richard Randell, who was still directing operations. This is the moment any firefighter dreads and with so many people milling around it became difficult to ascertain the exact number missing. The Childers crew now had to determine exactly who was not outside and should have been. The crew were also trying to get as many hose lines charged as they could. Curl Santacaterina had taken off down Churchill Street to find a plug. He recalls: ‘The power lines came down around me as I was putting in a standpipe. I was in such a hurry, and not wanting to get zapped, I broke regulations by not flushing the standpipe prior to coupling up the hoses.’ Power to the hostel was cut off by an Ergon Electricity crew about 30 minutes into the fire.

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Back in Bundaberg, Area Director John Watson was asleep in bed when his pager went off at 12.45 a.m. He says: ‘The message is still on my pager—saying, “A major fire at the Backpackers Hostel in Childers, people reported missing”.’ Three nights before that he’d been woken about a shed on fire in Bundaberg. He’d rung the fire crew and they’d said, ‘Don’t worry about it’, so he went back to bed. The next night they’d had an MVA and again he was told he wasn’t needed. His pager had gone off each night at one or two in the morning and his wife had threatened to put it in the fridge. On the night of the Childers fire John heard a heavy sigh next to him as he moved to answer the pager call. He got up, dressed, and his wife asked what it was. He replied: ‘It’s a bad one and I’ve got to go.’ John jumped into his QFRS car and drove as fast as possible through the pea-soup fog. When he got to Childers he took over as incident controller. He recalls the scene: It was surreal. It was still very foggy, and there were so many people around, it was phenomenal. There are only 2500 people in the town and they all seemed to be there . . . the street was just lined with people. Many of those who’d been evacuated were wearing white sheets—just standing there watching it all unfold. It was very spooky. The street had by now been closed by the police and traffic was being diverted with the assistance of SES personnel. John Watson needed to establish exactly what was going on, what had been done so far and what was planned, so that he could determine the resources that might still be required or have to be reallocated. I grabbed Richard Randell and got a briefing; he had done a head count but they were having trouble determining exactly how many were accounted for. At one stage it was 60 on the footpath opposite and nine in hospital. Andrew McCracken and his crew had arrived from Bundaberg at about the same time I did, so we split the job and Andrew took the back half and then we started searching. The fire in the building was such that there was very little chance of anyone being alive upstairs.

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Andrew McCracken was also briefed by Richard and they immediately dispatched Bundaberg’s Gary Black and Vicki Shailer as a team to the rear of the hostel. Wearing BA sets and using a Case 3 hose line, the pair attacked a two-storey rear deck which was now a raging inferno. As they advanced up the back stairs they found that large holes had already been burnt in the first floor. The towering flames provided sufficient light for them to see what had happened. To advance into the fire, Gary and Vicki had to shuffle forward to ensure a safe footing. It took twenty minutes of very hot, hard work but the pair—protected by defensive sprays directed by other firies—knocked the fire down at the rear of the hostel. They came back to rest for about five minutes and then returned to douse the area down. Rural Fire Service volunteers were also at the rear of the building; their task was to protect adjoining properties and provide support to Gary and Vicki and other attack teams.3 Bundaberg’s Ross Gatley assisted Childers firefighter John Ratcliffe on his Case 3 line in a side laneway. Flames were licking up high in the laneway and soaring over the top of the building next door, so the two firies immediately focused on protecting the adjoining building—an action that helped quell the spread of the fire. A local council employee diverted additional water into the Churchhill Street mains when the demand from four Case 3 lines, two Case 1 lines and two pumpers began to drain the supply. Before the fire was deemed totally out it would consume an incredible 3 million litres of water. By 3.00 a.m., with the help of additional gear sent down from Bundaberg, the fire was virtually out. But there were still hot spots that required attention and this kept the crews busy until dawn. John Watson recalls the scene: Downstairs there was next to no damage—it was unusual. We used the Ergon ‘cherry picker’ to get people on to the upstairs landing and verandah and into the building, but the devastation was such that it was totally unsafe. The roof and many walls were down. The crews couldn’t get very far in because the floor had burnt out. And all that damage was done in the first hour. They searched everywhere they possibly could, but to no avail.

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After the fire In the freezing morning, shopkeepers in Churchill Street rallied at first light. The proprietor of the Sugar Bush Cafe cooked meals for the firefighters and volunteers. Others began providing hot drinks and sandwiches. The young backpackers who had escaped the fire in their night attire were given clothes provided by one of the local charity ‘op shops’. One British backpacker appeared in a brown suit and a seriously ugly 10 centimetre-wide tie. At dawn John Watson asked the firefighters to count the victims and make a map of where they lay. Planks were put down to enable people to walk about safely. All of the victims appeared to have perished upstairs, though one body had fallen through the floor. A flashover had also occurred in the front room, where there was a pile of seven or eight bodies in good condition. The corpses were described as ‘just black with no hair’. Several bodies were scattered in other upstairs areas and one was still in a bed.4 A relief-in-place for the fire crews was conducted later that day. The Bundaberg C Shift crew, nevertheless, elected to stay on until they had finished the search. In all, fifteen bodies were discovered. They were left in situ for a few days while the Fire Investigation squad, the coroner and the police began their job of trying to piece together what had happened and why. The Disaster Victim Identification Unit then undertook the grisly task of body recovery. An Urban Search and Rescue team arrived during the morning of the fire to work with the Childers crew and Bundaberg relief firies in making the building safe. They found some remarkable anomalies. A BMW sedan in the lane next to the hostel, and the pool table in a front room, were totally untouched. In the foyer of the building the goldfish were still alive! John Watson became extremely busy as the morning wore on. As the incident commander, the fire commander, I was the coordinator of all activity with agencies like Ergon, the police, SES, QAS—virtually anyone who came on to the fire ground— until it was declared a crime scene later in the morning. About mid-morning it was reported that owing to the fatalities the cops would take over.

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In an incident as serious as the Childers fire the police involvement is huge, with homicide, arson, scientific and scene of crime units arriving. The QFRS steps back a little after the fire is out, and the police have prime carriage of responsibility, but it is still a combined effort. While everyone was devastated by the horrific scene, John Watson says: ‘No matter which way you look at it, the Childers crew could not have done any more.’ The time it took the building to reach flashover, which indicates total involvement, was only a few minutes. The Bundaberg firies were also complimentary about the Childers crew. Despite the intense radiant heat, smoke and flames, the adjoining Silly Sollys discount store and a flanking butcher shop escaped with minimal damage. Apart from the hostel, which was impossible to save, the crew had done a remarkable job. Their captain, Curl Santacaterina, stated that he ‘wouldn’t swap any one of them’. News of the fire spread quickly, with media attention turning it into a national and international news story. John remarks: The media liaison officer took 300 phone calls in four hours—and that was just him. I had to take a fair share of calls myself. By 9.30 a.m. I was doing interviews for Australian and international TV and radio for morning editions; just fielding questions from everywhere. Sometimes the media can be a pain, but this time about 98 per cent of them were excellent and considerate. So many media helicopters arrived that aviation authorities had to set up a flight exclusion zone and control air traffice in the area. Also, reflecting the magnitude of the disaster, visits were paid by a number of dignitaries including two governors, the prime minister, federal and state ministers and foreign consuls. Seven days after the fire, Area Director John Watson conducted a formal operational debriefing, incorporating the Bundaberg C Shift, the Childers auxiliaries, Kawana Firecom supervisor Jim Legge, the RFS, the police, the ambulance service and Ergon. He says: ‘We dissected it, not looking for blame. It was about reinforcing everyone’s actions. Once all the stories were out, everyone could let go, and then they realised they’d done a good job. It also allowed me to get a fuller picture.’ Many of the firefighters were shocked by what they saw in the

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cleanup. John comments: ‘It doesn’t matter what happens, there will always be some carry-over trauma. It took about a week and a half for them to come back up again. It hit home hardest when you saw the ages of the victims.’ There was certainly major trauma for the backpackers who’d escaped the conflagration. Many were more than 15 000 kilometres from home, and as John describes them, ‘really only kids, and without any family support present’. The mayor of Childers did a great job rallying his townspeople and the wider community, who provided help and welfare. John adds: ‘He was shattered about what had happened to his town.’ The firies felt they needed to close off this terrible event and decided to have a social gathering of everyone who’d been involved. It was deemed to be part of the counselling process that occurs after a major incident. John Watson explains: ‘We usually have a formal debriefing ASAP after an incident, and then there’s a break of a fortnight or so and we have an informal activity like a barbecue and close it off.’ The Childers social, planned for late July, would end up ‘bigger than Ben Hur’. The then QFRA chief commissioner, Wayne Hartley, said he would come and ‘cook at the barbie’. The Emergency Services director general said he would come along too; and when the ambulance crews found out about the event, the whole thing snowballed. In the end, 200 turned up. The C Shift crew at Bundaberg took a bus to Childers so that they could ‘have a few beers’ at the party. They weren’t going to go thirsty in the meantime either, as they had an Esky or two on the bus. Wayne Hartley made the mistake of turning up to the social in uniform—complete with peaked cap, which somebody souvenired while the Chief was busy cooking for 200 people. Later it was restored to its owner.5 Another event, the Childers Multicultural Festival, held on Sunday 30 July 2000, provided a further respite from the sense of tragedy. Floral tributes to the fifteen backpackers who had perished were laid on a bench seat in front of the hostel. A temporary plywood wall screened the shell of the building from the street. A crowd of 30 000 people enjoyed a cool and slightly overcast day as they walked among the dozens of stalls in the closed-off main street. The fire brigade were present and chatting with passers-by. Childers was returning to normal.

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Postscript A man who had stayed at the hostel and who was known to many of its residents, Robert Paul Long, was arrested five days after the fire and charged with arson and with the murder of two of the victims. At the time of writing his trial is still pending. In terms of fatalities, the Childers fire matched the infamous Whisky Au Go Go nightclub fire in Brisbane in 1973.

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CHAPTER 11

OOPS! Not everything goes according to plan in the firefighting world, despite the professionalism of the crews and the intensity of their training. Sometimes Murphy’s Law works overtime to prove that firies are human after all. In one or two cases in the following events the names of the guilty have been changed to protect the innocent.

The wishing-well incident In 1990, in the days of the Queensland Fire Service, C Shift at Bundaberg station were asked to fill a wishing-well in Bourbong Street—the town’s main boulevarde—during an official ceremony. The well contained a layer of dry ice above some imported Irish water. Great importance was placed upon this symbolic fluid. The firies were asked to turn up in their best appliance and to slowly fill the well with town

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water, so that the dry ice vapour would flow dramatically over the lip of the well. It would provide a satisfying moment in the ceremony. Thinking they were going to fill a large monument, the crew were somewhat bemused to find that the well was less than a metre in diameter and about the same in depth. Still, unperturbed by a task that could easily have been completed with a garden hose, Les Von Deest ran a 64-mm hose from the tank to the well. Unfortunately, the arrangement was such that the pumper was between the well and the pump operator, Dave Nugent. Dave quickly had the pump motor up to 1000 revs and was waiting for the word. Station Officer Ian Cobban signalled for the water to flow by raising his palm upwards. Les dashed around to the other side of the pumper and said to Dave: ‘Go!’ Dave wound the throttle up—but no water came. Les said: ‘There’s no water, mate.’ Dave ran the throttle up another 500 revs. Ian Cobban was getting impatient and signalled again. ‘There’s still no bloody water, Dave,’ Les hissed. Five hundred more revs and the pumper was starting to vibrate and rock and roll on the pavement—but still no water issued forth. Les now dived into the cabin and saw that the gear lever for the pump was still in ‘neutral’, not in ‘drive’. Without hesitation he hit the lever. The 64-mm hose erupted as the full force of the pump surged water through it. The hose stood on end and danced like a whirling dervish, drenching the assembled officials and almost blowing them out of their VIP seats. Pandemonium ensued but Les collected himself long enough to push Dave out of the way and slam the throttle off. But the damage had been done. Strangely enough, Station Officer Cobban was not amused. The crew hastily recovered their hose and rapidly departed the scene. Many onlookers thought it was a deliberate act, and one bikie bystander said that it was the best show he’d ever seen in Bundaberg.1

The day the trains stopped In August 1999, C Shift at Townsville South station were turned out in the afternoon to a large bushfire threatening a State school and nearby grasslands. Manning the 4WD grassfire unit were Station Officer Neil

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Lesmond, driver Bob Hollis and branchman Alex Sutherland. Access to the fire was restricted by a low railway embankment, but the crew felt that their 4WD could cross it without difficulty. Unfortunately, the ballast on the edge of the tracks had acquired the consistency of quicksand, and the 5-tonne truck ground to a halt just as its front wheels crossed the first set of lines. Bob put the 4WD into low ratio but, embarrassingly, to no effect. The spinning wheels only settled the truck deeper into the ballast on one of Townsville’s busiest rail lines. As the metal chassis touched the rails it completed a circuit and triggered the boom gates. The closing of the gates led our intrepid firefighters to believe that a train was coming through. Bob Hollis anxiously swivelled his head from one side to the other looking for locomotives bearing down on them, while Neil Lesmond and Alex Sutherland frantically ran a winch cable out from the front of their truck. The only close purchase point was a power pole. Within a few moments they had the truck hooked up and began winching it out of trouble. However, as the cable took up the strain, the pole began to lean dangerously toward them, bringing the high voltage power lines perilously close to the ground. Murphy’s Law was now in overdrive. The truck rose and then sank back on to the rails—which this time triggered a signal to the railway control centre that something was on the tracks. The controllers immediately halted all trains heading to the spot as the firefighters struggled frantically to free their vehicle. Finally they got away and hurtled off to deal with the grassfire. While mopping up, Neil remarked to his crew that luck must have been on their side—that it must have been a slack period, as no trains had come along while they were stuck on the tracks. No sooner had he said that than eight trains rolled slowly past, the drivers looking out of their cabin windows for the cause of the delay they’d encountered. To top it all off, as the fire was finally being doused a civilian sedan drove up to the firefighters from the direction of the railway. The driver paused for a chat, during which he informed the crew that there was a side road nearby that allowed vehicles to avoid crossing the tracks they had come to grief on!2

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Pigs and firies Graham Cooke was working out of Toowoomba at the time of a fire whose after-effect was on the nose. He recalls: We were having a busy night with grassfires and a crew responded to one at the edge of town, near a piggery. The station officer pulled up near it, sent a team over with a branch to tackle it, and just after they took off he heard a splash. He called out to see if they were okay and didn’t get a response. He yelled out again and there was still no answer. All he heard was ‘oink, oink, oink’. The pigs were getting stirred up. One of the firies had actually run into a manure pond next to the piggery. The next morning, when they returned to the station, the firie who had gone into the pond asked for some fresh clothes to be sent up from Kitchener Street. But in the meantime, the crew had to go on parade to be dismissed. Instead of standing shoulder to shoulder with the others, this bloke was standing alone down at the other end of the room.3

Don’t forget your gloves Trevor Kidd learnt a painful lesson about the value of protective clothing, especially gloves. We had a fire in a big block of flats not far from this station. Right down the middle was a big set of steps with an iron handrail from top to bottom. The fire was burning at the top of the steps and was red hot. We went up the left side and put the fire out there. Then we had to go over to the right-hand side. Instead of going down the steps and up again, we hopped over the rail. The first guy over was tall and had no drama. But I’m only a short bloke, and when I threw my leg over the rail, all of a sudden I realised it was bloody hot, because my balls started burning. So then I had to make a decision to either burn my balls or grab the pipe and get off. So I grabbed the pipe and burnt hell out of my hand. I quickly let go

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and burnt my balls again—so I was between a rock and a hard place! I finally got over, but not before blistering my hands badly, and I had to go to hospital. Consequently I learnt a very valuable lesson.4

Burglars There were interesting times to be had at Woodridge, south of Brisbane, as Russell Mayne discovered. I went to a house fire and had to take in a hose line. It was a small house about three feet off the ground with a little verandah at the top of the stairs. Smoke was coming out through the windows and I was on the verandah, kneeling with my BA set on, waiting to get water so I could go in. Next thing, there was this whack on my head and my facemask was up across my nose. I couldn’t see anything because it had blocked off my right eye and my nosepiece was up over my left eye. I thought the roof had come down on me, but a couple of seconds later I copped a beauty in the ribs and I thought: ‘No, this ain’t the roof, there’s someone here.’ And then there was a second blow, and I got a third one just after that in my chest . . . Then I heard a hell of a commotion but I couldn’t see anything because everything was all squashed up over my face. And it was a woman! Finally one of the officers came and took her down the stairs. It was the woman who owned the house—she thought I was trying to break in. She had been kicking me with her feet as I was crouching down. She owned a tattoo parlour in Woodridge and was actually a lovely sort of lady.5

A barbie at Caloundra Neil Smith was a bit reluctant to tell this story about his own station, but he believes that most firies will commiserate with him over what happened.

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We always have a wonderful Christmas party—you usually do with a good team of blokes. Wives, children, everybody comes along—tow truck operators too, because we have a great rapport with them. Anyway, one year we decided we were going to have a pig on a spit. We hired one of those rotisserie things and got it going at about 10 o’clock. It was going fine and we put a bit of oil on the pig, and then at 11 o’clock a bit more oil. At 12 o’clock a bit more oil, and a bit more oil again at 1 o’clock. At 3 o’clock we were out on a call . . . and whooof! Up went the oil. When we got back, the whole bloody workshop was on fire! We went in and put it out and, of course, we had burnt bloody pig on the spit that night for Christmas dinner. We had to put a big tarp up in the workshop so we wouldn’t show anybody that we’d nearly burnt our own place down.6

Sorry, Chief As a very junior firefighter, in the days before the fire services amalgamation, Neil Smith discovered a novel way to bring yourself to the attention of your superior officer. I went to my first real fire over at Kings Beach. It was a tiny little three-bedroom house with front stairs and back stairs and a central hallway from one end to the other. The fire was going and the old chief officer told me to go to the front and get into it, and he would go around the back and check it out. The front door was locked, so the deputy chief officer told me to kick it in and give the fire a squirt. I got the hose—it was a control branch—and my number three said he would kick the door open for me. When he did, I hit the branch and let it go flat out. The jet went straight down the hallway and knocked the chief officer right off the back stairs! 7

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CHAPTER 12

COURAGE UNDER FIRE When a crew arrive at a structural fire, especially a house fire, and someone tells them that people are missing, the moment of truth has arrived. The operation switches immediately to search and rescue. It’s not a time for standing back and ‘putting the wet stuff on the red stuff ’, but for firefighters to don their BA sets, grab a high pressure hose if there’s time, and advance into the building. Ray Eustace of Maryborough recalls such a moment at a house fire in Ipswich. They had already established their hose lines when a girl told the firies that her two brothers were inside the burning building. It was an old house, on fire from end to end. The guys redirected a hose over us, and we went in with our BA sets on and we were shitting ourselves. I bumped into a body as I crawled up the big wide hallway. The other firie, Graham Knight, had missed it, so I clapped my hands and he came back to me. We lifted and dragged

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this big bloke out on the grass and his body was just a mass of huge blisters—face, back, hands, everywhere. We couldn’t go back in, because by then it was a total inferno. When the fire was out I went back in, and I saw this black stiff sitting up on the end of the bed. I couldn’t figure it out. There was a window behind his bed and I thought: ‘Why didn’t he jump out of the window?’ But crawling into that inferno was something else. Trevor Kidd experienced a similar moment when he and his crew turned out to a house fire in Campbell Street, Rockhampton. In fact Trevor was a ‘spare officer’ that night and turned out as part of the firefighting crew. They had saved an old woman in the house but there was still a young girl missing. We heard her whimpering, but then she wasn’t whimpering any more. So Peter Cook and I zoomed around to the back of the house, which was now starting to get very hot as well. We took a high pressure Case 1 and went into the kitchen. The smoke was down low and we started searching . . . The fire was rolling like a wave from the front of the house and going out the back, and pulsating as it was doing so—it was getting ready to flashover. I was about to grab Peter and say, ‘Let’s go’, because it was getting dangerous. But luckily he’d forgotten to put his gloves on and as he was feeling past the fridge he touched this little girl’s hair. She had crawled in between the fridge and a cupboard and was lying there unconscious. Just by chance, and with no gloves on, Peter had felt the hair fibre. So we bundled her up and brought her out, the ambos worked on her and we went back to fighting the fire. Saving that little girl is probably one of my best memories as a firefighter. Sometimes not even the courage of the firefighters can avert tragedy. On one occasion Peter Beauchamp was working on shift out of Brisbane’s Annerley station. It was 7.30 a.m. and they were turned out to a high-set house on fire at nearby Highgate Hill.

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Flames were coming out of every window. A woman was yelling on the steps: ‘My kids, my kids!’ We just grabbed a line and raced inside—no BA sets on—and quickly hit the fire and knocked it down. There were two kids: one about eighteen months and the other about three. The eldest was sitting on the floor in an upright position and the baby was lying on its face on the bed. The heat was so intense it burnt their hair back to the skull and they looked like porcelain dolls . . . poor little babes. We covered them over with a blanket and killed the fire. Most of the troops then just sat out on the ground—some were crying. They related to it strongly because it could have been their own kids. The cause was a gas stove. The mother had turned it on and was about to light it when the phone rang. There were five double adapters on top of each other in a nearby wall socket and they provided the ignition source and the explosion blasted through the house. Russell Mayne, working in Brisbane on relief, found himself in a position involving risk management and clear judgement. A chicken factory was over the road and I was called across urgently because they had a bloke lying in the cold room. I could see him through the glass. He’d been using a mechanical disc cutter and he was lying on the floor and he was blue. Everyone was just standing around looking at me—the ‘you’re a fireman, what are you going to do?’ kind of thing. I just took a deep breath and ran in and dragged him out. By that time our truck was there with the oxy-viva and we got to work on him, successfully. He was asphyxiated with carbon monoxide because of using a petrol motor in an enclosed area. As soon as I saw him, I knew what it was. The next day Russell was back at Kemp Place station and was paraded before the chief officer and disciplinary board. They were going to throw the book at him for not using a BA set in that type of rescue. The chief said: ‘Fireman Mayne, what have you got to say for yourself?’ Russell replied: ‘Not much. The only thing I know is that there’s a

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wife out there who still has a husband and three kids who still have a father. And they wouldn’t have him if I hadn’t done what I did.’ The board members all looked at each other, then the chief said: ‘Very well, you’re excused.’ Years later, Russell says: I couldn’t just stand there, I wasn’t going to wait until somebody else got there. I took an informed risk . . . a calculation that I could get in, pick him up and get out, all in one breath. He was bigger than me—I was quite proud of myself! But it was a smooth floor. I weighed all this up, though I didn’t have much time to make a decision. When you arrive at a scene it’s all about making a quick, informed decision and getting on with your plan of action. It’s not a time for dithering, it’s usually a time for rapid reaction—especially at a fire. But ‘diving in’ can be dangerous—and scary, as Wayne McLennan found out one night. A boat was sinking at a marina and his Townsville South crew had turned out. Being the youngest, he was ‘volunteered’ to enter the dark water to see if anyone was aboard the boat, which was well on its way to the bottom of the harbour. He stripped down to his dungarees and went in, having to find his way by sense of touch. Wayne recalls: ‘My “mates” were really helpful, yelling out to me to look out for sharks! In the cabin some floating toilet paper bumped into me and really scared me.’ But there was no one on the boat. As the preceding two events show, not all dangerous incidents faced by crews involve an actual fire. However, the threat of it can certainly start the adrenalin pumping. Peter Beauchamp was involved in a Hazmat (hazardous material) incident that could have had enormous repercussions were it not for the brave actions of the firefighters. When a very large above-ground fuel tank split at New Farm near the Brisbane River, Peter was working with the BA unit at Roma Street. The tank had dropped its load in the bund, which was almost overflowing. We had to try and control the spill and decant the bund. There was peak hour traffic and heaps of high-octane petrol! We had to close the Gateway Bridge; we had firies dropping

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foam over the bund, but stemming the flow was a drama. We had twenty or so sand-filled bags and had to try and get them into the split in the tank. To do that we had to carry them through raw petrol and hope like shit that the crews kept the foam up. It was ‘heart in mouth’ stuff, quite a frightening little exercise. It took 30 hours to decant the bund and deal with the split. The clothing we used to have then was pretty ordinary and offered little protection if the fuel had gone up.

A big one: the Cairns BLEVE One of the most dangerous situations a firefighter can face is a boiling liquid expanding vapour explosion, commonly called a BLEVE. These incidents occur infrequently and usually are the result of a liquid or liquefied petroleum gas being ignited and heated and then, when the boiling and expanding liquid can longer be confined within its container, exploding with tremendous force. Small BLEVEs occur when shock absorbers on cars explode in a car fire. Large LPG explosions have occurred around the world. One in Mexico City was so devastating that it destroyed hundreds of houses, killed 300 people and injured 7000 more. On 17 August 1987, in a rail siding in the Boral gas yard in Bunda Street, Cairns, firies were faced with Australia’s biggest BLEVE. The yard was the site for storage and distribution of town gas. This came in by rail and road and was decanted into storage tanks (called bullets) at the site. On the 17th, a fully charged rail tanker carrying approximately 40 000 litres of LPG was on the siding. At about 3.15 p.m. a Gas Corporation employee climbed on to the top of the tanker to connect flexible discharge hoses to the liquid and vapour outlets. As he completed this task a hose came loose, discharging liquid freely and forming a visible vapour cloud which quickly spread across the yard. The excess flow valve failed to operate, allowing the liquid discharge to continue. Yard employees immediately closed valves to isolate the tanker and began to evacuate the site. One of them told the switchboard operator to call the Cairns Fire Brigade (the incident occurred in the days of the former service structure).

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When the vapour cloud reached some old weatherboard houses on the yard’s western boundary, it was ignited by the pilot flame of a gasfired hot water system in one of them—about 43 metres from the tanker. The flame flashed through the vapour cloud and a fierce fire developed around the tanker. LPG was escaping with a deafening roar. The volume of the cloud was such that its ignition was a comparatively violent event, described by some witnesses as an ‘explosion’.1 At 3.22 p.m. the Cairns brigade received several 000 calls to a ‘gas fire’, an ‘explosion’, ‘a very large fire’. Russell Matthews was on B Shift at Gatton Street station. He remembers a callout for two pumps; he was driving the second appliance. ‘By the time we got to Aumuller Street, about a kilometre away, we could see the plume of the smoke and the top of the flame shooting out of it. I thought: “Oh God!” My heart was racing.’ Russell had been to a few structural fires before, but nothing like this. He was fascinated by the towering plume of smoke, and afterwards couldn’t recall too much being said in the front of the Acco truck. The first appliance,with a manning of one and three, went into the yard and parked behind one of the buildings. The chief officer, his deputy and another officer followed in a staff car. Their immediate reaction on arriving at the scene was to call out every available piece of equipment, including the hydraulic platform, and off-duty men. They also advised the ambulance service and electricity authority of the catastrophe that was unfolding. It was now four minutes from the time the first 000 call was made. When I asked Russell how long he thought it took he replied, ‘Probably about 10 million heartbeats!’ Russell’s sub-station officer told him to park out in the street. The crew would be used as ‘manpower’ until the second pump was required. More than half of the rail tanker was now enveloped in an extremely fierce fire. Just as the first pump was pulling into the yard, gas escaping from the safety valve had ignited, producing a vertical jet of flame rising about 15 metres above the tanker, accompanied by thick black smoke. LPG was continuing to flow from the tanker’s outlet, and there was direct flame contact all the way round the circumference of the tanker, except at one end. The wind was a light southerly breeze; the crews were upwind on the southeast side of the fire. Russell Matthews reported to the yard, where people had to shout into each other’s ears to be heard above the roar. ‘I met the officer off

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the first pump, the one inside the yard. I had my BA set on and he asked me to try to turn on the drenchers over the rail tanker that was on fire. I went in towards the control valves but was forced back about 30 metres because it was just too hot.’ A hose line with a variable branch had been run out from the first pump and was being manned by Mal Armstrong and Steve Reynolds. The only thing giving cover from the incredible heat was a large concrete pipe about 24 metres from the tanker. The branchmen knelt behind this and applied a stream of water at where they thought the top of the centre of the tanker would be. A second line was established shortly afterwards from a hydrant in Bunda Street, opposite the entrance. Everything the firies were doing was spot on. They were upwind, behind cover, clear of the axis of the tanker and directing water to try to cool the venting area. After being forced back from the drenchers, Russell was now involved in getting more equipment into action. Dan Twomey, the officer off my pumper, had started getting the ground monitor down with the help of another firefighter, Graham Allen. I took over the duty of setting up the hose lines to the monitor. It sits down on the deck and you can back away from it if you have to. I got one line of hose into it and then, as I was getting the second line in, the tanker went BANG! I was facing away from it and the blast pushed me over on to my face.2 The BLEVE occurred at about 3.30 p.m., only four minutes after the crews had arrived. The explosion, which was accompanied by an enormous fireball, was heard on the northern beaches of Cairns, some 15 kilometres away. For Steve Reynolds and Mal Armstrong, who were only 24 metres from the tanker when it blew, the blast was horrendous. Steve told the Cairns Post: ‘We got a fair sort of shock from it [the blast]. We were more or less engulfed in the fireball. I realised I was on fire, so the quickest thing to do was to get out.’3 Unfortunately, when the two men ‘dropped and rolled’ in an attempt to extinguish the flames on their turnout coats, the grass was also on fire.

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Kevin Byrne (later to become mayor of Cairns) was working in a third floor office of the Cairns Regional Development Board, some 2 kilometres away. He remembers: There was this almighty explosion and the whole high-rise fivestorey building shook. I thought: ‘Christ, what’s happening here?’ I’ve been in an earthquake in Papua New Guinea, and this was obviously not a quake. I immediately thought that a ship had blown up in the harbour. Then I saw the fireball erupt and I realised it was the Boral gas area. Pat Hopper and Pat Scanlan were off duty and helping a fellow firie with some house building about 15 kilometres from town. Scanlan recalls: ‘We heard it. I felt the ground tremor and someone said: “Gee, that’s a big cane fire!” We headed back to town and came in to the station to see if they needed a hand.’ A report in the Cairns Post claimed that Mr Alan Scullen and his wife heard the explosion in Innisfail, 75 kilometres away. Veteran Melbourne newspaperman Jack Ayling, who was on a visit to Cairns, saw the incident. He told the Cairns Post: ‘In my 47 years as a newspaperman I’ve covered some of the biggest fires in Australia, but I’ve never seen anything like that in my life—it was like Hiroshima and Nagasaki all over again.’4 The fireball that filled the sky above the rail yard was several hundred metres long and a hundred metres wide, and it lasted for several seconds. It was truly awesome. The rail tanker had blown apart. The half that was being superheated opened out into a flat sheet. The other half, about 7 metres long and just over 2 metres in diameter, was propelled 109 metres northeast, in line with its long axis. It flew in a low trajectory, hitting the ground at least twice along the way. The base plate, bogeys and lower section of the tanker were left lying in the middle of the yard. The main blast effect was concentrated against the wall of a brewery on the southwestern edge of the yard—that is, away from the direction in which the tank section was propelled.5 Every window in the area for a distance of at least 100 metres was shattered, causing minor injuries to some bystanders. Such was the intensity of the heat from the fireball that the glass was sucked outwards and upwards by a ‘convection upsurge’ due more to the fireball than to

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the blast itself. A heavy railway wagon was blown on its side and long sections of railway line were buckled. Several cars and a truck were destroyed by secondary fires at the brewery. A section of the tanker rigging, weighing several hundred kilograms, crashed through the roof of a transport company shed (which had been evacuated moments before), causing severe damage. The flying metal then ripped a deep gouge in the middle of Dutton Street just over 160 metres from the explosion point. An elderly man who lived in one of the weatherboard houses near the yard received burns to 70 per cent of his body, and died a few days later in the Royal Brisbane Hospital. Back in the yard, Russell Matthews picked himself up and staggered out into Bunda Street where he helped Mal Armstrong, who was ‘stumbling a bit, with his turnout coat still smouldering’. An off-duty firie, Roy Devine, had seen the BLEVE and come down to help. Russell says: ‘He’d started up the pump and had the hose ready to put water on us. He was only in his T-shirt and thongs, and I’m glad he was there.’ Russell was burnt on the back of his hands and on one ear, and somehow a blob of liquid gas had got into his boot and burnt the side of his foot. But it was worse for Armstrong and Reynolds, as Russell explains: Mal and Steve were burnt quite severely and had to go to the burns unit in Brisbane. They spent a lot of time down there and an even longer time wearing pressure bandages and so on. (They were off work for just over six months; I was off about twelve weeks.) Mal was full of skin grafts and it ruined all his ‘artwork’—he was ex-navy and had a lot of tattoos. As a result of the injuries sustained by the BLEVE firefighters, a whole raft of changes were made in protective equipment. At the time, according to Russell, the firies didn’t have personal-issue gloves; there were welder’s gloves in the trucks’ lockers. The brigade helmets were made of plastic, with no visor, and looked more like a construction worker’s helmet. Meanwhile, the explosion and its enormous fireball had started secondary fires within and outside the yard, singed a number of houses

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and the National Hotel, and set fire to a brewery shed and even to the railway sleepers in the siding. Some of the fires were more than 100 metres from the explosion. And LPG gas tanks and cylinders were ruptured in the yard. The other firefighters resolutely launched into the attack. Firecom reports indicated that they were into the secondary fires within minutes. The bravery of the firefighters battling the blaze after the BLEVE is illustrated by the fact that they fought to cool the fires in the yard knowing that another explosion was highly probable. It took until well after 6.00 p.m. before the last fire was declared out. Crews visited the site during the night. The damage bill for the fire was estimated at between $5 million and $7 million dollars. Steve Reynolds deserves the last word. Despite being badly burnt and evacuated to hospital, he said later: ‘The real heroes were the guys who stayed behind. It would have taken real guts to stay in there.’6

Mates There are two senior firefighters in Rockhampton who are getting close to retirement. They have been working together for 30 years. They are good mates and they know each other’s family well. Brian Edmonds and David Semple started a shift at 6.00 p.m. on 11 August 1996. At about 1.30 a.m. they were called to a fire at the City Heart Backpackers Hostel in the centre of Rockhampton. Even though he was a station officer, Brian was driving the second appliance on the turnout, owing to a shortage of staff. When they arrived at the fire ground, the first car crew had already done a search of the building and the seven occupants of the hostel had been accounted for. The City Heart Backpackers was a typical hostel: an old building, brick construction, tall ceilings, and laundry and kitchen out at the back. Thick black acrid smoke was billowing out of the front door but no flames were evident. Brian and Dave were teamed together on a Case 3 line and took the branch to make an internal attack down the main hallway toward the rear, where they had been told there was a fire. Brian was branchman and Dave was his backup and number three. They advanced in their BA sets, passing another firefighter, who

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said to them: ‘It’s all in the back room.’ So Brian and Dave moved along the hallway, which had small cubicle-type rooms off each side. They had gone at least 30 metres into the building when a coupling to a length of hose had caught in a doorway near the foyer area and Dave went back to loosen it so that they could advance closer to the kitchen area. Brian found it was not easy to see: ‘The lights were still on when we went down the hallway, but then they must have gone out because I could no longer see Dave. But we were still able to communicate.’ Moving through thick smoke, the two firefighters reached the end of the hallway and were confronted by a small but fierce fire in the kitchen. Brian immediately started attacking with a jet to knock it down. This was not easy, as Brian explains: ‘We could hear the fire working but we couldn’t see it, the smoke was so thick.’ Dave was sheltered to an extent by Brian’s solid 115 kilograms and 183-centimetre frame. But he felt very uncomfortable as they continued to attack the fire. Brian was halfway into the room and I was just standing back supporting the line—probably level with the door. I said to Brian: ‘Gee, this is getting hot.’ I’ve been to hot fires before but this was super hot, and not like anything I’d struck before. I said: ‘I think we’d better get out, something’s wrong.’ There was a lot of noise above us and we were a long way in, and I thought, discretion being the better part of valour, we should get out.7 The fire crews out on the street could see that the building was getting ready to ignite and radioed the two men that they should get out. The pair responded and left the hose line where it was in order to follow it through the blinding black smoke, which was now down to a metre off the floor. They had to crawl along with the hose line between their knees. Then, after a moment or two, the extremely hot unburnt gases and smoke particles ignited in a classic flashover. Television footage filmed from the street would show the air being drawn into the pulsating smoke and a huge sheet of flame bursting 20 metres out above the heads of the pump operator and other firies. Inside the hostel, Brian Edmonds was slammed backwards by the flashover blast.

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A rush of hot air pushed me back on to Dave. I was burnt around the neck and ears right then. I weigh 19 stone and it was a huge force of air. I thought: ‘Well, nothing is going to stop me now!’ I went head down and arse up and followed the hose out along the hallway, and I was going to go straight through whatever was there. I kept going, thinking: ‘Dave’s got to be alright and in front of me, because I haven’t run into him.’ If he had gone down I would have crawled over the top of him. But the flashover blast had thrown David Semple into a side room where he slammed into a wall head first, leaving a neat circular hole where his helmet hit. He was probably knocked unconscious for a few moments, and was now in an area of extremely hot burning gases. But when Brian reached the front door he heard Dave screaming out. Without hesitation, he turned around and crawled back along the hose line looking for his mate. The smoke by this time was well below a metre off the floor. David Semple was in a lot of strife. He recalls: I was disoriented. I followed the wall around and couldn’t find the doorway. There was thick smoke, fire was dropping off the ceiling, mattresses were burning. Everywhere I looked there was fire all around me. Molten lead from old roofing nails was dropping through the ceiling. It was super hot. I checked my mask and my kit and still had plenty of air, and I was trying to stay calm and remember my training. I couldn’t think straight and had to pull myself together. I thought, ‘Well, hang on, Brian hasn’t gone past me’, so I started yelling to Brian with a few choice words. I could hear him and he could hear me, but I couldn’t see him. I was hurting like hell, which didn’t help, but finally Brian came into the room, grabbed me and put the hose in my hand. The building was now becoming fully involved, with fire erupting through all the rooms. The two mates started their painful journey back through the flames and smoke. Brian says: ‘I had to go back because if something had happened to him . . . I couldn’t have lived with that.’

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When the pair exited the inferno they staggered out and collapsed from the severe heat. Dave was in a bad way. He recalls: ‘Once I got into clear air at the doorway I went straight over the top of Brian— after that I don’t remember too much. But after a while on the footpath, and some oxygen, I came round a bit.’ Brian adds: ‘Dave’s clothes were so hot they couldn’t touch them; they couldn’t take his coat off and he was cooking.’ The steel clasps on his BA set were too hot to unclip, and the on/off switch was fused ‘on’. His helmet and heat shield (the visor) were partly melted. Scientists at Queensland University later did tests on the damaged equipment and estimated that Dave had been exposed to temperatures in excess of 550 degrees Celsius for about 8–10 seconds.8 His burns were mostly third degree. He recalls: ‘When I finally took my gloves off, the skin started to peel off and I was in a fair bit of pain.’ Brian had also been burnt, but was only just beginning to realise it. The ambos gave me oxygen and sat me down. I was starting to burn—because you gradually cook—and my neck started to really sting then. They said they would take me to the hospital too. I went over and looked at Dave and he was all red and had skin hanging off him. The firefighters were evacuated to Rockhampton Hospital, where they decided they should ring their families. Brian says: When we got to the hospital they had me in a chair and Dave was lying there. He asked, ‘Can you ring my wife up?’, and I said: ‘Sure, what will I tell her?’ He said: ‘Tell her we’ve been to a fire and we’re in hospital, but I’m alright.’ I rang up and said: ‘We’ve had a bit of a problem and we’re at the hospital . . .’ (Then, in an aside to David—What will I say now?) ‘Don’t panic, we’re alright.’ (What will I say now?) I was relaying his messages and then all of a sudden they grabbed me and put me on the table. Then I had wires and tubes hanging off me and I thought I was going to die. Dave’s blood pressure was up around 200 or something and at daylight the doctor said about him: ‘We’re going to have to put this man in intensive care.’ I said: ‘Shit, you’d better ring his

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missus, because he’s supposed to be alright, and now you’re going to put him in intensive care!’ She hasn’t believed a word I say ever since. David Semple was now at the start of a long, torturous road. ‘They shifted me to the burns unit in Brisbane the next day, because they didn’t have the gear to look after me in Rocky. Brian had been discharged and came to see me as I was being wheeled out to the plane.’ At the airport, Brian said to Dave: ‘Well, that’s two; I don’t want to be around when the third one happens.’ They had both been caught by the blast at the Shark Club bombing seven years before. Brian Edmonds was decorated for his bravery in the hostel fire by the State Governor, with a Commendation for Brave Conduct. I would have given him the Star of Courage. Their equipment saved the lives of Brian and Dave and allowed Brian to rescue his mate. If they had been wearing the clothing that was around at the time of the Cairns BLEVE they would not have survived. The importance of working in pairs was again demonstrated. The value of training in overcoming stressful situations was illustrated when Dave refused to panic, checked his BA and used the hose as a life line, even when he was looking death in the eye. But what was exemplified most of all in this incident was the trust between two firefighters who were prepared to put themselves at great risk to save a mate. Although, thankfully, it didn’t happen in this case, the death of a firefighter can have a greater impact than the loss of a close relative. Firefighters who place their lives on the line take the loss of a colleague even harder: they lose their sense of ‘invincibility’, they are brutally reminded of their own mortality. Peter Beauchamp observes: ‘A shift is like a second family and you look after each other every time you go into battle. When we lost Chris Warburton at a job in 1989, the shift broke up and went their separate ways, like some families break up after a death in the family.’

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APPENDIX 1

THE ENEMY During the course of their career, firefighters will face their enemy on many occasions. As for any good combatant, it is important that they know their enemy, for if they don’t they will fall victim to its power, its vagaries and its dangerously lethal character. They must fully understand its properties and what makes it start and grow and what kills it. This account contains a brief and hopefully not too technical glimpse at the properties, character and behaviour of fire.

Properties of fire Fire is about combustion. Combustion is a rapid process that releases heat and light. Because fire gives out energy we say it is exothermic (exo: gives out; thermo: heat). Combustion is a chemical reaction involving fuel and oxygen. Fuel Fuels are any combustible material; that is, anything that can burn. They can be solids, liquids or gases. A fuel is on fire if it is undergoing combustion. When a candle burns, the wax is being consumed, not the wick: the wax is undergoing combustion, reacting chemically with oxygen and air. The candle’s wax is fuel for the fire—the flame. Combustion reactions also require heat throughout the whole reaction process. The heat produced in combustion sustains the combustion; that is, as

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firefighters say, ‘combustion is self-sustaining’. If heat is no longer present in the process, combustion will cease. So, for a fire to occur, there must be three things: fuel (something that is capable of burning), oxygen and heat. If any one of these three elements is missing, combustion will not occur. In combustion, solids and liquid fuels give off vapours (gases). It is the burning of these vapours that form the real danger during combustion. For example, after a house fire the wooden wall struts will often be merely blackened and charred—they have been burnt to that extent—but the gases emitted from the material are what has actually been on fire. Oxygen The oxygen required for everyday fires is found in air. Air is a mixture of gases and is made up almost entirely of nitrogen (approx. 78 per cent) and oxygen (approx. 21 per cent). Other minor gases make up the remaining 1 per cent. But oxygen is the essential element. For combustion to occur, oxygen must mix with the vapours or gases from the fuels in the correct proportion. If there is too much fuel vapour compared to oxygen, we say that the mixture is too rich and will not burn. If there is not enough fuel vapour mixing with oxygen, we say that the mixture is too lean and will not burn. For combustion to occur, the air–fuel mixture must be within the flammable limits of the fuel. For example, carbon monoxide is a gas that can burn. However, it will only burn if it is between about 12 per cent and 74 per cent of the air–fuel mixture. Perhaps the most common example of a correct mixture is in cars. The carburettor of a car controls the air–fuel mixture so that combustion can occur efficiently. If the carburettor receives too much fuel—if the mixture is too rich—the system will probably ‘flood’ and not be able to achieve ignition. If the carburettor doesn’t receive enough fuel, the mixture is too lean and again combustion will not be possible. Every substance has its own flammable limits. These are determined in a laboratory. Even rock will burn (viz: lava) if it has enough heat.

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Heat Heat is a form of energy, which, if intense enough, can cause fuel to ignite. Temperature is different from heat. Temperature is a measure of how heat energy is absorbed in a particular substance. The difference between heat and temperature is demonstrated if you boil a cup of water for two minutes and then do this with a cup of salt crystals. They both receive the same amount of heat but the water will be hotter after the two minutes. Heat capacity is the term used to describe the amount of heat required to raise the temperature of a substance. A large heat capacity means that it takes a lot of heat to raise the substance’s temperature, just like the salt crystals. If you wanted to increase the temperature of the salt a lot more heat would be required. As the temperature of a liquid fuel increases, the amount of vapour given off increases. Notice that petrol smells more in hot weather. This is because there is more vapour as the temperature increases. The lowest temperature at which vapour is produced from a liquid to form a flammable mixture with air is called the flash point of the liquid. For example, petrol has a very low flash point, minus 42.9 degrees Celsius. At any temperature above this, petrol produces enough vapour to form a flammable mixture with air. Heating (fuel) oil has a far higher flash point, 54.4 degrees Celsius. When a substance is at its flash point and is ignited, it will flash; it will not continue to burn. This is because there is not enough heat to cause a continuing supply of vapour from the fuel to sustain the combustion. The lowest temperature of a substance at which sustained combustion can be ignited is that substance’s ignition temperature. This is called the fire point. The ignition temperature of a substance is higher than its flash point because at the flash point the temperature is not high enough to produce a continual supply of vapour to sustain combustion. However, at the ignition temperature, or fire point, a continual supply of vapour is produced to sustain combustion.

Nature of flame There are many things happening within the flames of combustion. It is the place where the combustion reaction occurs. A common candle is

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a good way to observe the nature of flame. The region closest to the wick contains unburnt vapours. This is where the vapours concentrate from the solid, waxy fuel and where the mixture is too rich to burn. When combustion is ‘complete’ all the fuel is burnt to invisible carbon dioxide gas and water vapour. Incomplete combustion occurs when not enough oxygen and heat are present to convert the reactants totally to carbon dioxide and water. Instead, carbon monoxide, smoke, soot and other matter are produced. In a candle incomplete combustion occurs in the yellow flame region. If the flame is sooty then combustion is incomplete. The blue flame region is the hottest region. It is where the combustion is occurring most efficiently. Chain carriers Combustion is a chemical chain reaction that occurs within the flames of combustion. In this chain reaction the reactants (fuel and oxygen) begin to react slowly to form temporary substances called chain carriers. These chain carriers are vital in the combustion process and they are referred to as the fourth element of combustion. (The others are fuel, oxygen and heat.) Chain carriers are very reactive substances. These highly reactive chain carriers react rapidly with more fuel and oxygen to produce even more carriers and so on. This process is referred to as a chain reaction because it accelerates: it starts off slowly but then gets faster as more and more chain carriers are produced. This process continues until the fuel is nearly all burnt, when the fire begins to die. Chain carriers are vital for combustion. Without them the combustion would occur only very slowly. Rusting is an example of a very slow process of combustion—rusting is a chemical reaction between metal (e.g. iron) and oxygen. Rusting is so slow that it isn’t easily observed by the naked eye. During this chain reaction heat is released, which is needed to sustain the process, and the products of combustion are produced.1

Extinguishment of fires The processes of extinguishing fires are starvation (removal of fuel from the combustion reaction), smothering (removal of oxygen), cooling (removal of heat) and inhibition (removal of chain carriers).

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In a bushfire, for example, starvation is achieved by cutting or digging firebreaks and thus removing the fuel source, or by back-burning so that when a fire advances to the back-burnt area there is no fuel left for combustion. The capping of burning oil wells in Kuwait (following Operation Desert Storm against Iraq) is a good example of smothering. When a burning oil well is capped, oxygen is no longer available and the fire is extinguished. In other cases fire blankets are draped over a fire to separate it from oxygen in the atmosphere. Once the amount of oxygen under the blanket drops sufficiently, combustion will cease. Foam is another tool used by firefighters to smother combustion. Foam poured over the top of a fire prevents oxygen in the atmosphere from reaching it. Cooling by the direct application of water is the most common method used by firefighters to extinguish a fire; known among the firies as putting ‘the wet stuff on the red stuff ’. When water is applied to a fire it absorbs some of the fire’s heat. If the water is able to absorb heat faster than the fire can produce it, the fire begins to cool. If the fire cools sufficiently, eventually the temperature of the fire will drop below its ignition point, then below its flash point. Once the temperature of the fuel falls below its flash point, it is generally regarded as safe from combustion. If water is applied slowly such that it only removes heat slowly from a fire (slower than the rate at which the fire produces the heat), then it won’t cool and extinguish the fire. Carbon tetrachloride was once used to extinguish fires by inhibition, but its use was discontinued as it produced toxic gases as by-products. Up until 1993, the most widely used substance for inhibition of a fire was BCF (bromo chlorodi fluoro methane). However, being a chlorofluorocarbon (CFC), its use has also been discontinued because of its depleting effect on the ozone layer.

Character of fire Backdraught Imagine you are at a house fire. Inside the house is a room whose door is closed. You open the door and enter the room. It is very, very hot. Red hot! The windows are closed. There is a lot of dark, sooty smoke around the

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room. Being a typical room in a house, there are many fuels present— wood, carpet, curtains etc. There are no visible signs of flame. Occasionally small puffs can be heard. Suddenly the windows break and the room bursts into flame. You are engulfed in the middle of a raging fire. This is the result of excess product which, by itself, was too rich to burn because there was too much smoke in the room. The room atmosphere was choked with very heavy smoke and gases. But when air entered through the broken windows it brought the atmosphere in the room down to the upper flammability limit, and a backdraught occurred. The atmosphere was too rich before that because there wasn’t enough oxygen in there for anything to burn correctly, but as soon as the right amount of oxygen entered the room, you had instant backdraught. In other words, incomplete combustion was occurring at first. Had the combustion been complete there’d be no soot or dark smoke. Instead, invisible carbon dioxide and water vapour would be produced and there would be flames. When oxygen entered the room when the windows broke, both reactants (fuel and oxygen) were present, and there was enough heat (the room was very hot) to cause ignition. As soon as the oxygen rushed in, the stalled combustion ‘took off ’ with devastating speed. Firefighters often overcome a backdraught situation by allowing the built-up heat and gases to escape through the roof (the firies lift tiles or peel back roofing iron). Ensuring that the room has proper ventilation reduces the danger of a sudden gush of oxygen igniting an oxygendeficient room.2 During my time attending the training at Lytton in Brisbane, a shipping container fitted with ‘windows’ and ‘doors’ was used to demonstrate a compartment fire and the nature of backdraught. The container was closed except for a rear door. A wood and fabric lounge chair was set afire in a corner of the container. After five minutes heavy black sooty smoke began rising to the ceiling of the container and hanging above everyone’s head. As the fire consumed the chair the smoke level sank until it forced us to kneel to be clear of its choking properties. The gases being produced from the combustion are called pyrolysis gases. Without our breathing apparatus and protective clothing we would have had to leave the container after only a few minutes. We were under the guidance of Barry Salway. Above our heads it was

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about 500 degrees Celsius. What we had in the container was an overpressure region, an under-pressure region and a neutral plane. Generally, below the neutral plane there’s an area of cool gas where a firefighter can survive. Above the neutral plane is the over-pressure region where the hot, combustible gases gather. So firefighters need to stay under the neutral plane, whether it is a metre or half a metre off the floor, or even less. For this purpose, firefighters have padding in the knees of their fire-retardant overtrousers, but sometimes the gases may be so low that a firefighter can’t even crawl without being in danger. Salway told the recruits: ‘I have been into buildings where the neutral plane has been as low as 30 centimetres off the ground.’ Finally the shipping container was evacuated and its back door was suddenly thrown open, introducing oxygen into the combustion process. The gases suddenly ignited and, because of the high buildup of pyrolysis gases they exploded in a powerful blast that sent a training ‘dummy’ flying backwards at least 15 metres. If it had been a firefighter he would have suffered extensive burns to his equipment and exposed flesh and suffered from the blast. Without breathing apparatus he would have had damage to his face and lungs. Flashover A flashover occurs when a room or other area becomes heated to the point that flames flash over an entire surface (like a ceiling). Everything in the room reaches its ignition temperature and is so hot that it will fully ignite. It was once thought that a flashover was the result of flammable gases being released from items on fire in the room. It was thought that these gases collected at ceiling level. When mixed with oxygen, and with the heat of the fire, the flammable gases were thought to ignite, causing a flashover. However, it is now known that a flashover is the result of intense heat building up from a fire. The heat causes all the contents of the fire area to reach their ignition temperatures. When this happens, they all burst into flame and the area becomes fully involved in fire. An explosion will accompany a flashover if it is severe enough.3

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Fire behaviour A fire has several phases and most fires grow through three stages: incipient, smouldering and free-burning. During the incipient stage there is no flame, though there is enough heat and oxygen for combustion to occur. In this incipient stage the surface of the fuel undergoes ‘decomposition’, often noticeable by colour changes, charring etc. A good example of combustion in this stage is a piece of tissue paper being placed inside a hot incinerator: the tissue turns very brown, showing signs of combustion. During this stage the products of combustion are invisible—there is no smoke or soot. In the smouldering stage up to about 10 per cent of the combustion products are visible. Smoke is produced as the fire smoulders. In the free-burning stage the fire has ignited into flames. It is now generating enough heat to warm the area around it. Backdraught can occur when the products of combustion are clearly visible and there are no flames; it often occurs in the smouldering stage.4 The spread of fire When a fire breaks out and reaches the heating stage, it transfers some of its heat to its surroundings. If the surroundings are flammable and oxygen is present, this heat can cause new fires to break out. Heat always flows from a hot body to a cold one. An object at a high temperature is able to pass some of its heat to an object at a low temperature and thus warm it. The three methods by which heat is transferred are conduction, radiation and convection. Heat moves through all substances by conduction. In solids, molecules are packed tightly together and don’t move very much, they just ‘vibrate’ slightly. In liquids, molecules are spaced further apart and are able to move around. This is why liquids can flow or be stirred, unlike solids. In gases, molecules are very spread out and move very rapidly. Conduction is most efficient in solids because the atoms and molecules are packed closest together and heat can pass easily from one to another. Gases conduct heat very poorly because their molecules are much further apart. Because gases conduct heat very slowly they are often used as heat insulators. Insulators are substances that conduct heat very

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poorly. When air is trapped in substances like polystyrene, a very good insulator is made. Another good insulator is made when air is trapped between two layers of glass (double-glazed windows). As in the case of a bar heater, heat can also be transferred by radiation. In this process heat is not transferred by one particle passing it to another particle. Rather, in radiation, heat is ‘beamed’ directly from one object, through empty space, to another object. This heat energy can be absorbed by other substances, particularly dark substances. As an example, take two pieces of metal—one shiny and unpainted, and one black—that are left in the sun, side by side, for the same period of time. The dark object will be much hotter than the shiny one, as it has absorbed more heat from the sun’s radiation. This form of heat transfer is important to firefighters in situations where, for example, a building on fire is close to another building. In this case, heat radiated from the fire can initiate new fires in the neighbouring building. Convection is another process by which heat is transferred through a liquid or gas. It cannot take place in a solid. If heat is applied to the bottom of a container of liquid or gas, the liquid or gas near the bottom of the container becomes heated and rises toward the top of the container. Meanwhile, colder particles of liquid or gas sink toward the bottom. This causes a current to be set up: the particles begin to circulate. Convection is important in many day-to-day situations, for example hot water systems and refrigerators use this process. In a fire, convection currents can carry hot gases produced by combustion upwards through stairwells and lift shafts, spreading fire to the upper parts of the building. In turn, the cooler air sinks toward the fire replacing the rising hot gases. This supplies the fire with air and helps to accelerate the burning. Because of this, fire is said to be able to ‘supply its own air’. The result is often called a ‘mushrooming fire’.5

Bushfires Firefighters will always be called out to bushfires. Australia is the most bushfire prone continent on earth. Such is the nature of Australian terrain and the manner in which we have settled in it that we will always have bushfires threatening the built environment. Bushfires do not

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stand still; they move and change direction, raging across plains and up hills. Their movement depends on four things: the type, condition and arrangement of the fuel; temperature and humidity; wind speed and direction; and terrain. The fuel for a bushfire can be divided into five categories: trees, shrubs, grass, litter and humus (decomposing material found on the ground). The condition of the fuel affects the nature and intensity of a bushfire—for example, whether the fuel is moist or dry affects the way the fire will burn. Water, as moisture in the fuel, serves to cool the fire and combustion is retarded because the amount of heat present is reduced (cooled). The arrangement of the fuel also has a major bearing on the way in which it burns. If a small fire of twigs is lit, the fire burns rapidly. However, if the twigs are separated out, the fire will probably go out. In State forests it is quite possible to find a variety of arrangements—from grass to thick forest litter, steep heavily timbered slopes and dense underbrush. Humidity is another factor in the process and relates to moisture in the air; it will interfere with combustion. Bushfires are more likely to occur when the air is dry. Air and ground temperatures also affect rural fires. As the daytime temperature rises, the risk and intensity of fire also increases. This is because the temperature of the fuel is raised closer to the ignition point. This means that less heat is required to start the fire. Generally, rural fires are fiercest during the early afternoon when the daytime maximum temperature is reached. They tend to quieten during the night as temperatures begin to fall. The wind has two important effects on a bushfire. First, it can drive a fire forward by blowing flames toward fresh fuel. In hilly areas winds can change direction quickly, causing bushfires to change direction almost instantly. I was caught in just such a manner when fighting a bushfire in December 1968, west of Cessnock in the Hunter Valley. The fire turned and advanced with such rapidity that our truck was overtaken by roaring flames. Acting on an unnecessary call to ‘run for your lives’ we abandoned the truck, which was burnt to the ground and left sitting on its steel rims with absolutely nothing salvageable. When attempting to manage a bushfire, firefighters must always allow a safety margin in case the fire changes direction without warning.

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The second effect that wind has on a fire is that it provides a continuous supply of oxygen. This causes the intensity of the fire to increase. Sometimes it is said that ‘large fires cause their own wind’. As the air heated by the fire rises, cooler air is drawn into the fire by convection, thus creating what appears to be its ‘own wind’. The terrain or countryside is an important factor in bushfires and has the main effect on a fire’s movement. Fire is said to travel faster uphill than down. The reason for this is related to convection. A fire must preheat a fuel to its ignition temperature in order that it will burn. In convection, heat is transferred upwards and not downwards. Hence a fire travels best uphill.6

Into battle One veteran firefighter was quoted by Vince Hinder of Toowoomba as saying: ‘There are three main causes for fire—men, women and children.’ Wherever fire breaks out, whether it be in a pan on a kitchen stove, a burst gas cylinder in an industrial plant, or a grassfire along the side of the road, the firies will be called out. The bells will go in the fire station, or a pager on an auxiliary firefighter’s belt will signal the need to respond—and immediately. During my interview with Peter Beauchamp in Cairns, he recalled the words of a firefighter named Tom Quine who had served for many years. ‘He once said that “every time our firefighters jump in those red trucks it is like going into battle”, and in a sense that’s right, because they are going to an environment that is extremely hostile.’ For Peter the analogy hits home because he had a good friend who died at a job. He has many other mates who have been medically ‘boarded out’ because they can no longer perform their duties owing to either ‘eating too much smoke’ or being injured in the course of their duties. The fire ground is not only hostile, it is downright deadly, and it is not being too dramatic to say that firefighters do place their lives on the line every time the bells go off. The impact of a domestic house fire on the owners is easily seen by the casual bystander. The memorabilia of a lifetime will often be destroyed by the flames or ruined forever by the smoke and water used to extinguish the blaze. Like victims of a cyclone, the family’s lives will

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never be the same again. If they lose more than their possessions, the impact will be severe and very long lasting. Peter Beauchamp has been to many house fires and says: Personal tragedy is always the downside and house fires are still the hardest to deal with, because you can relate to the victims—the loss of memorabilia, photographs, albums and so on. Going to jobs is an adrenalin boost for most firefighters, but tragedy is the downside. What makes it worse for the firies, when they do come across a tragedy in which someone has lost a close relative or friend, is the discovery that the house has no preventative measures such as smoke or heat detectors. This frustrates firefighters a great deal. Graham Cooke of Dalby has an auxiliary firefighter who often gives public safety talks to people in the bush. The auxiliary has a saying when talking about the need for smoke alarms in the house: ‘You can spend $9 on this smoke alarm here, or $3000 for that burial casket over there.’ Graham adds with a wry smile: ‘Sometimes you need to kick the door down to get the message across.’ Amen to that.

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APPENDIX 2

QFRS REGIONS

Cairns

Far Northern Townsville

Northern

Central

Rockhampton

Maryborough

North Coast South Western Toowoomba

Greater Brisbane Beenleigh

South Eastern

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GLOSSARY AFA ambo appliance area director auxiliaries BA

backdraught BCF BLEVE

branch branchmen bund bushfire

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automatic fire alarm (call) colloquial term for an ambulance officer fire truck, fire engine senior officer responsible for an area within a region part-time firefighters who are paid on turnout training and to fight fires, conduct Fire Education programs etc. compressed-air breathing apparatus: a backpack containing 1800 litres of pressurised air and a mask (the ‘Sabre’ is the set used by the QFRS; it has a 45-minute duration) explosion resulting from an oxygen-starved fire being inadvertently fed air bromochlorodifluro methane: the substance used in extinguishers to put out oil-based fires acronym for Boiling Liquid Expanding Vapour Explosion: the result of flammable gases escaping from a container and prone to ignite; a highly dangerous situation nozzle on the end of a fire-fighting hose that can vary the water spray the team (number one and number three) who work together on a hose or line an earthworks or other structure around a tank, designed to contain spills sometimes called wildfire: a fire in open bush or grassland

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CABA callback callout case feed Case 1 Case 2 Case 3 Case 4

CBD charged line Code Two composite pumper CPR DUCOT

ET

Firecom Fire Ed fire ground

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see BA process of telephoning firefighters to make up a shortfall in a shift see turnout filling through the pump or the truck 25-mm hose attached to a reel on the fire truck and used for smaller fires type of hose drill off a hydrant and not energised by the pump type of drill where a 64-mm hose will be charged through the pumper from a hydrant large 100–150-mm hose used for drawing or inducing water through a filter attached to the end of the hose; used to supplement a water supply from a dam or river, in the case of larger fires, or where the water mains supply might be threatened or where reticulated water is not available central business district a hose that is full of water, with the branch nozzle in the ‘off ’ position fire or smoke visible fire truck carrying water, with high-pressure hose lines, a pump for inlet and delivery, foam capability, BA sets and RAR kit closed pulmonary resuscitation acronym for Description, Use, Construction, Operation, Testing and safety overall: a testing procedure to ensure that firefighters fully understand and are familiar with their equipment emergency tender: a truck equipped with devices for the extraction of people from vehicular accidents, and with other rescue equipment and breathing apparatus; also a control HQ for larger incidents fire communication centre Fire Education programs, usually for Grade 1 children at primary school area of a fire incident, where firefighters will battle the fire

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ignition of hot gases within a smoke-filled room, creating an instantaneous and sometimes lethal situation foot 30 centimetres (approx.) 4WD four-wheel-drive vehicle fully involved structural fire where the fire is well under way and has consumed the greater part of the building gallon 4.5 litres gas pad training facility for practising firefighting techniques against LPG and other flammable fuel situations grass fire uncontrolled fire in heath or grassland Hazmat hazardous material hectare 2.5 acres high angle see vertical rescue rescue hot fire training with live fire situations training hydrant water mains outlet point on either a footpath (HP) or a roadway (HR) for QFRS use HP hydrant, path HR hydrant, roadway inch 25 millimetres line a hose; a charged line is a hose full of water LPG liquefied petroleum gas mile 1.6 kilometres monitor fixed hose position MVA motor vehicle accident nozzle the fitting on the end of a 25-mm hose overtrousers yellow, fireproof pants held up by braces and capable of taking a protective inner lining pay points levels within fire officer grades indicating the degree of training plug ground hydrant plugging bar device used to open a ground hydrant lid pump/pumper vehicle with pumping or energising capability QAS Queensland Ambulance Service QFRA Queensland Fire and Rescue Authority QFRS Queensland Fire and Rescue Service

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Q-Step RAAP

RAR recce region RFS senior firefighter SES

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a graduated learning program for firefighters Road Awareness and Accident Prevention program, designed for Year 12 students on road hazards, accidents etc. road accident rescue reconnaissance Queensland is broken up into eight QFRS regions Rural Fire Service; volunteer firefighters in rural areas rank of a firefighter immediately below station officer

State Emergency Service, a volunteer, Statewide search and rescue organisation shift period of either a 10-hour day or 14-hour evening/ morning duty standpipe device used to connect a hose to the ground hydrant of a water mains supply station building housing the firefighting equipment station officer officer responsible for the crew of a pump or tender or, in small stations, the shift on duty structural fire any fire involving a building or similar structure TAP telescopic aerial pump truck tender fire vehicle, usually a pump truck top boots protective, shin-high, rugged footwear designed to give added protection and to allow quick dressing of individuals on turning out to a fire TTL turntable ladder (vehicle) tour four shifts, most commonly of two 10-hour days and two 14-hour nights turnout dispatch of a pump or other appliance in response to a 000 call or an automatic alarm turnout coat fireproof jacket worn over the overtrousers and shirt UFU United Firefighters Union USAR urban search and rescue ute light utility vehicle, pickup truck variable nozzle on the end of the hose that can be altered from a branch jet (stream) to a wide fan of spray

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vertical rescue recovery of persons trapped on an incline or a cliff, down a drain etc. working fire a fire in which flames and smoke are visible yard 90 centimetres (approx.)

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NOTES AND SOURCES Notes Chapter 1 1 Interview, Jack Wensley, Station Officer, Toowoomba, 7 December 2000 2 QFRA Annual Report 1999/2000 Chapter 3 1 Interview, Neil Smith, Station Officer, Caloundra, 15 June 2000 Chapter 4 1 Interview, John Watson, Area Director, Bundaberg, 31 July 2000 2 Interview, Mark Clyne, Captain, Coolum Brigade, Yaroomba, 2 December 2000 3 Interview, Jodie Burnett, Firefighter, Sarina Brigade, Sarina, 2 August 2000 Chapter 6 1 Interview, Russell Mayne, Senior Firefighter, Noosa, 14 June 2000 2 Ibid.

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Chapter 7 1 Interview, Ian Ames, Station Officer, Kemp Place, Brisbane, 1 December 2000 2 Interview, Neil Lesmond, Station Officer, South Townsville, 7 August 2000 3 Interview, Kevin Anderson, Station Officer, South Townsville, 6 August 2000 Chapter 8 1 Interview, Tim Watkins and Rob Brady. Regrettably Brady and Lisette are no longer married, having separated in 2001 owing to ‘pressures of the job’. Chapter 9 1 Interview, Kevin Byrne, Mayor of Cairns, 10 August 2000 2 Interview, Brenton Walton, Area Director, Ayr, 3 August 2000 3 Interview, Fred Heiniger, Station Officer, Nambour, 20 September 2000 4 Ibid. 5 Interview, Vince Hinder, Senior Firefighter, Toowoomba, 7 December 2000 6 Interview, Graham Cooke, Area Director, Dalby, Toowoomba, 7 December 2000 Chapter 10 1 Interview, Curl Santacaterina and Richard Randell, Childers Fire Station, 30 July 2000 2 Interview and debrief, C Shift (McCracken, Black, Gatley and Shailer), Bundaberg, 31 July 2000 3 Ibid. 4 Interview, John Watson, Area Director, Bundaberg, 31 July 2000 5 Ibid.

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Chapter 11 1 Interview, C Shift (McCracken, Black, Gatley and Shailer), Bundaberg, 31 July 2000 2 Interview, Neil Lesmond, Station Officer, South Townsville, 7 August 2000 3 Interview, Graham Cooke, Area Director, Dalby, Toowoomba, 7 December 2000 4 Interview, Trevor Kidd, Station Officer, Rockhampton, 1 August 2000 5 Interview, Russell Mayne, Senior Firefighter, Noosa, 14 June 2000 6 Interview, Neil Smith, Station Officer, Caloundra, 15 June 2000 7 Ibid. Chapter 12 1 QFS Report on the Cairns BLEVE, September 1987 2 Interview, Russell Matthews, Area Support Officer, Cairns, 9 August 2000 3 Extract from the Cairns Post, 1 September 1987 4 Extract from the Cairns Post, 18 August 1987 5 Op cit., QFS Report 6 Op cit., Cairns Post, 1 September 1987 7 Interview, David Semple, Senior Firefighter, North Rockhampton, 31 July 2000 8 Uniquest report dated 2 December 1996 Appendix 1 1 The technical information supplied by QFRA Fire Science booklet, Q Step 103 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid.

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Interviews Ian Ames, Station Officer, Kemp Place, Brisbane, 1 December 2000 Kevin Anderson, Station Officer, South Townsville, 6 August 2000 Dean Baird, Communications Officer, Firecom, Spring Hill, 5 June 2000 Lauren Baxter, Grade 1 student at Fire Ed, Goondi State School, Innisfail, 8 August 2000 Peter Beauchamp, Manager, Strategic Development, Far Northern Region, Cairns, 10 August 2000 Julie Bennett, Firecom Supervisor, Southeastern Region, Southport, 8 November 2000 Ken Besgrove, Firefighter, South Townsville, 7 August 2000 Rob Brady, Senior Firefighter, Roma Street Fire Station, Brisbane, 22 July 2000 Bob Buckley, Station Officer, Toowoomba, 7 December 2000 Jodie Burnett, Firefighter, Sarina Brigade, 2 August 2000 Kevin Byrne, Mayor of Cairns, 10 August 2000 Mark Clyne, Captain, Coolum Brigade, Yaroomba, 2 December 2000 Graham Cooke, Area Director, Dalby, Toowoomba, 7 December 2000 Scott Dewar, Probationary Firefighter, Charters Towers, 4 August 2000 Sven Diga, Probationary Firefighter, Ayr, 3 August 2000 Brendan Doyle, Regional Commissioner, Far Northern Region, Cairns, 9 August 2000 Brian Edmonds, North Rockhampton, 31 July 2000 Ray Eustace, Area Director, Maryborough, 30 July 2000 Tom Franks, Station Officer, Lytton, 20 March 2000 Dick Gledhill, Senior Firefighter, South Townsville, 7 August 2000 Richard Gorey, Station Officer, Lytton, 20 March 2000 Fred Heiniger, Station Officer, Nambour, 20 September 2000 Vince Hinder, Senior Firefighter, Toowoomba, 7 December 2000 Pat Hopper, Station Officer, Cairns, 9 August 2000 Warren Hosking, Probationary Firefighter, Charters Towers, 4 August 2000 Trevor Kidd, Station Officer, Rockhampton, 1 August 2000 Peter Lalor, Station Officer, Roma Street Station, Brisbane, 20–22 July 2001

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Jim Legge, Communications Supervisor, Kawana Firecom, 30 November 2000 Neil Lesmond, Station Officer, South Townsville, 7 August 2000 Marcus Maffey, Probationary Firefighter, Ingham, 8 August 2000 Russell Matthews, Area Support Officer, Cairns, 9 August 2000 Russell Mayne, Senior Firefighter, Noosa, 14 June 2000 Andrew McCracken, Acting Station Officer, Bundaberg, 1 August 2000 Wayne McLennan, Senior Firefighter, South Townsville, 7 August 2000 Barry Mooney, Captain, Sarina Brigade, 2 August 2000 Ray Moore, Station Officer, South Townsville, 7 August 2000 Roy Moss, Second Officer, Yuleba RFS Brigade, Toowoomba, 7 December 2000 Kevin Neilsen, Area Support Officer, Southport, 8 November 2000 Michael Quinn, Station Officer, South Townsville, 5 August 2000 Richard Randell, Lieutenant, Childers Brigade, 30 July 2000 Arthur Read, Captain, Mt Morgan Brigade, Mt Morgan, 2 August 2000 Paul Royal, Lieutenant, Coolum Brigade, 4 November 2000 John Ryan, Probationary Firefighter, Innisfail, 8 August 2000 Barry Salway, Senior Firefighter, Nambour, 20 September 2000 Curl Santacaterina, Captain, Childers Brigade, 30 July 2000 Pat Scanlan, Station Officer, Cairns, 9 August 2000 Greg Scarlett, Senior Firefighter, Caloundra, 15 June 2000 Robert Schulze, Captain, Killarney Brigade, 8 December 2000 David Semple, Senior Firefighter, North Rockhampton, 31 July 2000 Roy Simpson, Area Director, Northern Region, Ingham, 8 August 2000 Luke Smith, Probationary Firefighter, Innisfail, 8 August 2000 Neil Smith, Station Officer, Caloundra, 15 June 2000 Brenton Walton, Area Director, Ayr, 3 August 2000 Tim Watkins, Senior Firefighter, Roma Street Station, Brisbane, 22 July 2000 John Watson, Area Director, Bundaberg, 31 July 2000 Jack Wensley, Station Officer, Toowoomba, 7 December 2000

NOTES AND SOURCES 197

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Pamphlets, documents and reports AFCA Conference, speech notes by John Watson, Adelaide, September 2000 Cairns Post, 18 August, 1 September 1987 QFRA Annual Report, 1999/2000 QFRA Fire Science training booklet, Q-Step 103 QFS Report, September 1987 Uniquest Report, 2 December 1996

Acknowledgements Peter J McNamee, Karen S McNamee, James E Kemp, Julianne Stewart and USQ Distance Education Centre

198 NOTES AND SOURCES

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INDEX Acacia Ridge, 86 Allen, Graham, 167 Ames, Ian, 31, 99–106 Anderson, Alec, 83, 105 Anderson, Kevin, 88–90, 97, 113, 115 animal rescue, 115–16, 143 Annerley fire station, 14, 162 Armstrong, Mal, 167, 169 Aroona, 113 Australian Army, 49, 141 Reserve, 58–9 Australian Fire Service Medal, 72 Australian Incident Reporting System (AIRS), 126 automatic fire alarms, 6, 49, 60–1, 63, 118–27 passim, 135, 142–3 annual calls, 6, 127 annual cost, 127 auxiliary firefighters, 57–70 passim brigades, 14, 58–80 passim championships, 63, 65 equipment, 59, 64–5, 69 pay, 58–9, 69 Auxiliary Firefighters Association, 68 Ayling, Jack, 168 Ayr fire station, 132 backdraught, 27–30, 81, 179–81 Baird, Dean, 49–50, 125 Bargara, 47 Barnes, John, 40 Barter, Wayne, 89

Baxter, Lauren, 53–4 Beasy, Neil, 49 Beauchamp, Alan, 8, 122–3 Peter, 9–10, 48, 82–3, 131, 162, 164–5, 174, 185–6 Beenleigh, 7, 51 Bell, Alan, 89 Bennett, Julie, 51, 143–4 Besgrove, Kevin, 34, 36, 115 Bettridge, Martin, 146 Birdsville, 132 Black, Gary, 147, 150 Blackall Ranges, 139 BLEVE, 28–9, 165–70 passim boom box, 27 Boondall, 119, 106 Boral, Gas Corporation, 165, 168 Bousett, Greg, 133 Brady, Rob, 123 breathing apparatus (BA), 2, 16, 18–19, 30, 44, 60, 82–5, 92–3, 110, 114–5, 120, 128, 135–6, 147, 150, 159, 161, 163, 167, 170, 173–4 Sabre sets, 22–4 training, 22–26, 61, 141 Brisbane, viii, ix, 6, 18–19, 29, 43, 59, 63, 82, 86, 118, 122, 133, 154, 159, 162–3, 174, 180 CBD, 6, 18, 23, 29, 118, 124 City Council, 32 Metropolitan Fire Brigade, 15 Port, 15, 24 River, 7, 15, 165

199

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Broadbeach, 14, 92 Brophy, Sean, 49 Browns Plains, 88 Bruce Highway, 146–7 Buckley, Bob, 7, 12–13, 51, 55, 63, 85, 109, 115, 142 Bunda Street, Cairns, 165, 167, 169 Bundaberg, 6, 12, 38, 55, 108, 145, 147–50 city, 47, 156 fire station, 147, 150, 153 C Shift, 147, 149, 151–2, 153, 155 Bunn, Tim, 146 Burdekin Fire Brigade, 132 Bureau of Emergency Services Road Accident Rescue Course, 100 Burleigh Heads, 86 Burnett, Gary, 43 bushfires, 19, 71–9 passim, 142–3, 184–5 Byrne, Kevin, 131, 168 Caboolture, 6 fire station, 123 Cairns, ix, 2, 4, 6, 9, 14, 48, 84–5, 130–1, 165, 167, 185 city, 95–6, 131, 165 Fire Brigade, 165–6 Gatton Street fire station, 131, 166 B Shift, 166 mayor, 131, 168 Cairns Post newspaper, 167–8 Cairns Regional Development Board, 168 callouts, see turnout Caloundra, 6, 9 fire station, 42, 46, 55, 57, 59, 95, 106, 110, 140, 159 Captain Cook Bridge MVA, 121 Castilano, Mark, 95 Castle Hill, 112 Cawco, John, 90–1 Cecil Plains, 47 Central Region, see regions Cessnock, NSW, 184 chain carriers, 178 Charleville, 6, 45, 48 Charters Towers, ix, 36, 134–5 fire station, 134–5

200 INDEX

chemical spills, see Hazmat, incidents Chief Commissioner’s Commendation, 112 Childers, 47, 131, 145–54 passim Auxiliary Brigade, 47, 145–54 passim debriefing, 152–3 fire, 131, 145–54 passim Fire Brigade, 145–54 passim, Board, 145 station, 145–6 mayor, 153 Multicultural Festival, 153 Palace Backpackers Hostel, 131, 146, 149 police, 151–2 Rural Fire Brigade, 146–7, 150, 152 SES, 151 Chinchilla, 47 Christiansen, Reg, 47 City Heart Backpackers Hostel fire, Rockhampton, 170 Clifton fire station, 63 Clyne, Mark, 59–61 Cobban, Ian, 156 Commendation for Brave Conduct, 174 Community Safety, 46 Cook, Peter, 162 Cooke, Graham, 3, 13, 40, 47–8, 62, 75, 96, 142–3, 158, 186 Coolangatta, ix Coolum Beach, 59–60 fire station, 59–62 Country Fire Authority, VIC, 13 Courier Mail newspaper, ix Coventry Climax, 2 Cromwell, helmet, 137 crown fires, 19, 71–9 passim, 142–3 Cunnamulla, 141 Curtis, Lyle, 68 Dalby, 3, 6, 13, 47–8, 62, 75, 142–3, 186 Dalton, Matthew, 146 Darling Downs, 45 Dawson, Tom, 128 de Landelles, Kellie, 68 Deaf Foundation, 85 debriefing, 77, 96–7, 107, 152–3

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defensive driving training, 19 DeGray, Lisette, 123 Department of Emergency Services, 6 see also Queensland Emergency Services Devine, Roy, 169 Dewar, Scott, 33, 36, 134 Diga, Sven, 15–17, 34, 132 DUCOT, 115 Dutton Street, Cairns, 169

firefighters, attributes of, 3–5, 17, 32, 40 firefighting techniques, 80–97 passim First Aid Certificate, 15, 60 flashover, 27–9, 30, 81, 148, 151–2, 162, 171–2, 179–81 Forestall, Greg, 33 Forrest Beach, 135 Fortitude Valley, 83 Franks, Tom, 2, 80–1

Edmonds, Brian, 84, 125, 136–8, 170–4 Elliott, Lindsay, 55 Ellis, Henry, 40 Emergency Services, 50 Director General, 153 Emu Vale hotel, 64 Energex, 103 helicopter, 62 EPA, 8, 43 Ergon Electricity, 148, 151–2 cherry picker, 150 Ettamogah Pub, 94 Eumundi, 139 Eustace, Ray, 3, 14, 39–40, 48, 90, 109–10, 115–6, 161 Kathy, 39 Evans, Warren, 113

Garbutt fire station, 88, 105 Gateway, Arterial Motorway, 99, 103 Bridge, 164 Gatley, Ross, 147, 150 Gatton Street fire station, Cairns, 131, 166 Gaven Way, 93 Gazebo Ramada Hotel, 121 Gestetner, 13 Giddy Goanna program, 66, 133 Gin Gin, 47, 68 Ginns, Ross, 27 Gledhill, Dick, 3, 41, 51, 54, 82, 134 Gold Coast, 7, 14, 80, 144 Hinterland, 75 Goondi, 52 Goondiwindi, 45, 48 Goopy, Paul, 123–6 Gordon and Gotch, building fire, 83 Gorey, Richard, 12, 14, 20, 32, 34, 45 Gosschalk, Kevin, 141 grass fires, 71–9 passim, 131, 134–5, 142–3, 157–8, 167, 185 Grey Street Bridge, 126

Far Northern Region, see regions Fight Fire Fascination program, 55 fire properties of, 175–7 extinguishment of, 178–9 Fire Brigade Boards, 7, 9, 110, 131 Fire Education program, aka Fire Ed, 52, 64, 66, 142 Fire Life magazine, 109 Fire Officer’s Association, 8 Firecom, 18, 40–1, 48–52, 58, 76, 80, 88–9, 104, 115, 170 Brisbane (Spring Hill), 88–9, 121–2, 124–6 Kawana, 146–7, 152 Southport, 51, 143 Toowoomba, 143 Townsville, 133

Halifax, 135 Hall, Mike, 33 Halvorsen, Wayne, 119–20 Hannon’s Hotel, fire, 85–6 Hanrahan, Jason, 60 Harbourne, Wayne, 145 Hartley, Wayne, 11, 68, 153 Hastie, Geoff, 17, 27, 29 Hayes, Brian, 120 Hazmat, 19, 60 equipment, 118 incidents, 114–5, 124, 143, 164–5

INDEX 201

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Headland golf course, 60 Heineger, Fred, 3, 58, 78, 115, 139–41 Hermit Park, 89–90 high angle rescue, see vertical rescue high rise buildings, 143 fires, 91–2, 118, 128 Highgate Hill, 162 Hill, Jane, 133 Hinder, Vince, 1–3, 13, 41, 73, 93, 107, 142, 185 Hollis, Bob, 157 Holmatro, hydraulic equipment, 101 Homestead Hotel, Boondall, 119 Hopper, Pat, 2, 4, 14, 39, 44, 84–5, 96, 105, 168 Hosking, Warren, 33, 36, 134–5 hot fire training, 19–20, 26–30 Housing Commission, 86 Hunter Valley, NSW, viii, 184 Hyatt Regency, Coolum, 62 Indy Grand Prix, 51, 144 Ingham, ix, 35, 94, 109 fire station, 35, 135 Innisfail, 34, 52, 168 Ipswich, 7, 14, 116, 161 fire station, 110 Woollen Company, fire, 15, 90 Isis Shire, 145 James Street fire, Mt Morgan, 67–8 Jandowae, 47 Julong, 139 Juvenile Arson Offenders program, 56 Karana Downs, 110 Kawana, Firecom, 146–7, 152 Kelvin Grove Teachers College, 124 Kemp Place, 29–30, 128, 163 Kennedy, Colin, 146 Kent Street, Rockhampton, 135 Ketchion, Malcolm, 33 Kettle, Bob, 9 Kidd, Trevor, 4, 44, 51, 136–8, 158, 162 Killarney, 63–5 Auxiliary Brigade, 63–6, 70 Kings Beach, 160

202 INDEX

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Kingsford Smith Drive, Mt Gravatt, 99 Kirra Surf Life Saving Club, 14 Kirwan fire station, 133 Kitchener Street fire station, Toowoomba, 13, 158 Knight, Graham, 161 Koala Inn, Lytton (aka Kamp Krusty), 18, 34 Kuwait, burning oil wells, 179 Lalor, Peter, 118, 120–6 Legge, Jim, 152 Lesmond, Neil, 83, 85, 110–11, 156–7 live fire training, see also hot fire training, 19–20, 26–30 Live Fire Training Unit, Lytton (now Whyte Island), 26, 29 Logan River, 7 Loggener, Greg, 114 Long, Robert, 154 LPG, 27, 29, 170 explosions, 28–9, 165–70 gas, 28, 165–6 Lytton, viii, 15, 17–19, 27 gas pad, 30 Training Academy, 17–19, 27, 30, 33, 100, 180 McAllister, Chad, 60 McCloskey, Mick, 89 McCracken, Andrew, 147, 149–50 McDermott, Tim, 60 McGuiness, Frank, 111–12 McKay, Don, 24–6 McKey, Nigel, 146 McKissack, Glen, 26, 33 McLennan, Wayne, 5, 13, 94, 103, 105–6, 116, 134, 164 McLeod, Tina, 134 McTaggart’s Woolstore fire, 128–9 Mac’s Brewery fire, Rockhampton, 84 Mackay, 68 Madison Apartments fire, Broadbeach, 92 Maffey, Marcus, 33, 34, 94, 109 Magnetic Island, 135

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Male, Darren, 132 Mapleton, 139 Mareeba, 101, 130 auxiliary station, 131 Maroochydore, fire station, 43, 139–40 Maryborough, 3, 6, 48, 108, 145, 161 Fire Brigade Board, 12 Matthews, Russell, 131, 166–7, 169 Mayfair Crest Hotel fire, Brisbane, 92 Mayne, Russell, 1, 4–5, 7, 15, 38, 40–1, 54, 82, 86–7, 91–2, 94–5, 115, 159, 163–4 Meendarra, 47 Metropolitan Fire Officer’s Association, 8 Mexico City, LPG explosion, 29, 165 Miles, 47 Mitchell Street, 134 Montville, 139 Mooloolaba, 60 Mooney, Barry, 68–70 Moonie Highway, 143 Moore, Ray, 15, 39, 94, 103–4 Moss, Roy, 71–7 motor vehicle accidents, see MVA Mountains, Peter, 27 Mt Cotton driver training facility, 18 Mt Fox, 109 Mt Gravatt fire station, 31, 99–100 Mt Isa, 51 Mt Morgan, 66–8 Auxiliary Brigade, 66–8, 70 Fire Brigade Board, 67 fire station, 67 Murphy, Tom, 83 MVA, 35, 42, 51–2, 62–3, 65–6, 69, 98–109 passim, 110, 121, 127, 131–3, 135, 142–3, 148

Firecom, 104, 139–40 hospital, 94 telephone exchange, 140 National Hotel, Cairns, 170 National Parks and Wildlife, 135 Neilsen, Kevin, 5, 14, 45–6, 75, 80, 83, 86, 92–3, 97 New Farm, 165 New South Wales, viii, 6–7, 63 Fire Brigade, 51 New York City, viii, 98 New Zealand Fire Service, 9 Noosa, 60–1, 91 District High School, 54 fire station, 7, 38, 139–40 North Ipswich, 90 North Ward, 94, 134 Northbridge Apartments, North Brisbane, 125 Northern Region, see regions Northern Territory, 6, 132, 135 Nugent, Dave, 156

Nambour, 4, 94, 104, 139–41 churches, Catholic, 139–40 Church of England, 139–40 Lutheran, 139 Methodist, 140 Presbyterian, 141 Christian bookstore, 140 fire station, 43, 58–9, 78, 115, 139

Q-Step, 10, 35, 46 Queensland, throughout Queensland Ambulance Service (QAS), 49, 136, 151–2, 166 Queensland Emergency Services comms centre, 49 director general, 153 Queensland Fire and Rescue Authority (QFRA), 11

O’Neill, Mick, 113 Oxley, 60 Paddington, 82 Palmwoods, 139 Parker, Blair, 33–4 Pepper, Daryl, 48 Petrie fire station, 123 Petrie Terrace, 121 Pico pager system, 58, 69, 185 propane gas, 27 Proserpine, 13 protective clothing, 2, 84, 169 Pugh, Juanita, 134

INDEX 203

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Queensland Fire and Rescue Service (QFRS), throughout Commissioner, 11, 68, 153 Fire Investigation squad, 151 garage, 120 HQ, Kedron Park, ix, 4, 17, 51 Pipes and Drums band, 33 regions, 6–7, 187 restructuring, 9–10 state championships, 65 Stores Section, 8 Queensland Fire Service, 7, 9–10, 77, 155 Queensland Police Service, 151–2 Disaster Victim Investigation Unit, 151 Queensland Public Services Union, 8 Queensland Rail, 68 Quine, Tom, 185 Quinn, Michael, 88–9, 113, 127–8, 134

RAAF, 14, 46 RAAP program, see Road Awareness and Accident Prevention program Randell, Richard, 145–50 RAR (road accident), 18, 30, 44, 64, 68, 98–109 passim, 143 Championships nationals, 131 state, 31, 100–1, 130 world, 131 incidents, 64, 68, 99–109 passim procedures, 101–2, 121 rapid intervention, 101, 103, 105 training, 18, 30–32, 44, 60, 62 Ratcliffe, John, 146, 150 Linda, 146 Ray, Graeme, 29–30 Read, Arthur, 67 Recruit Course 45/00, 15–36 passim, 132 recruit training, 12–36 passim examinations, 119–20 physical testing, 16–17 syllabus, 18–19 Red Hill, 127

204 INDEX

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Redbank, 14 regions, 46, 187 Brisbane North Region, 6, 118–27 passim Brisbane South Region, 6–7, 29, 31 Central Region, 6, 135 Far Northern Region, 6, 48, 130–2 North Coast Region, 6, 46, 55, 78, 139–141, 145 Northern Region, 6, 132–5 Southeastern Region, 7, 51, 143–4 Southwestern Region, 6, 62, 141–3 rescue, 99–116 passim Reynolds, Steve, 167, 169–70 Road Awareness and Accident Prevention program (RAAP), 54–5 Roberts fire, Toowoomba, 85 Rockhampton, 4, 6, 44, 66–9, 84, 104, 135, 162, 170 fire station, 135 Firecom Central, 67, 69 hospital, 173 museum, 136–7 Rural Fire Service headquarters, 136 Rockhampton North, fire station, 136 Rolleston, 75 Roma, 6, 45, 48 Roma Street, fire station, ix, 8, 18, 23, 99, 118–27 passim, 128–9, 164 A Shift, 122 B Shift, ix, 118, 120–27 passim BA training facility, 18–19, 23–4, 120, 164 D Shift, 127 Hazmat unit, 118, 164 training facility, 18 Ross River, 133 Royal Brisbane Hospital, burns unit, 169, 174 RSPCA, ambulance, 50 Rural Fire Service (RFS), 6, 50, 64, 71–9 passim, 146, 150, 152 Ryan, Joe, 128 Ryan, John, 34–5 Rydges Hotel, Southbank, 118–19

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Safehome program, 55 Salway, Barry, 4–5, 27, 39, 43, 51, 54, 78, 104, 107, 180–1 Berys, 39 Sandford, Tamara, 60 Santacaterina, Curl, 145–8, 152 Sarina, 68–9 Auxiliary Brigade, 69–70 Scanlan, Pat, 14, 39, 44, 85, 95, 107, 168 Scarlett, Greg, 39, 42, 55, 90–1, 95, 107, 110, 113–14, 128 Schulze, Robert, 63–6 Scullen, Alan, 168 Sealy, David, 68 Semple David, 104, 136–7, 170–4 Senior Officers Association, 8–10 Sexton, Lloyd, 85–6 Shailer, Vicki, 147, 150 Shark Club, The, 136–7, bombing, 174 Shaw, Stephen, 136, 138 shift work, 37–8, 117–29 passim call back, 118, 126 impact, 38–40 times, 38–9 Simpson, Roy, 135 Smith, Luke, 34–5 Smith, Neil, 8–9, 15, 42–3, 46–7, 55, 57, 81, 83–5, 91, 93, 96, 106–7, 117, 159–60 South Australia, 132, 135, 141 South Brisbane, 125 Southbank, 118 Southeast Freeway, 31, 99, 121 Southport, 31, 86, 143 fire station, 75, 92–3 Firecom, 51, 143–4 South Townsville, see Townsville St Lucia, 121 Stanthorpe, 60 State Emergency Service (SES), 6, 30, 60, 78, 100, 104, 149, 151 State Governor, 174 structural fires, 22, 63, 84–91 passim, 128–9, 131, 136–42, 146–53 passim, 166 Sugar Bush Café, Childers, 151

Sunshine Coast, 6, 38, 59, 84, 113 Surfers Paradise, 80, 86 Sutherland, Alex, 157 Swedish Fire Service, 30 swift water rescue, 98 incidents, 110–11 Tara, 47 Tarda, Damien, 146 Telstra, 50, 109 Tewantin, 54 Thornton, Laurie, 67 Tinker, Darren, 60 Titman, Alan, 136–7 Toowoomba, 1, 3, 6–7, 12–13, 48, 51, 63–4, 66, 72–3, 85, 141–2, 158, 185 Fire Brigade Board, 7, 13 fire station, 41–2, 45, 141–2 Firecom, 76, 143 ranges, 73, 141–2 Toowong, 122 Townsville, 3, 5–6, 13, 34–5, 51, 54, 68, 88–9, 103, 105, 111, 112, 115, 133, 157 city, 85, 94, 97, 110, 113 Fire Brigade, 15, 132–4 Board, 133 Firecom, 133–4 General Hospital, 128 Operational Support Unit, 133 Shire, 132 South Townsville, 127 South Townsville fire station, 34, 89, 105, 127, 133–4, 156, 164 A Shift, 133 C Shift, 156 trauma, 106–8, 153 turnout, 6, 20–1, 40, 51, 58, 64, 67, 78, 86, 118–29 passim, 143, 170 Tweed River, 7, 51 Twomey, Dan, 167 unions, 7–8 United Nations, 115 United Firefighters’ Union, 8 University of Queensland, 121, 173 Uniquest Report, 173

INDEX 205

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United States, exchange program, 92 United States Navy, 99 urban search and rescue, see USAR Urquhart, Glen, 34 USAR (urban search and rescue), 18, 44, 98 incidents, 112–14, 151 vehicle fires, 93–4, 104, 142, 165 vertical rescue, 98, 109 Viet Nam, viii, 14, 46, 141 Von Deest, Les, 156 Wallaville, 47 Walmsley, Robert, 100 Walton, Brenton, 132 Warburton, Chris, 174 Warwick, 48, 66 Fire Brigade Board, 63 Watkins, Tim, 118, 122–3, 125–6

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Watson, John, 12, 38, 47, 108, 149–53 Watson, Len, 100 Wensley, Jack, 3, 13, 39, 42, 45, 141 West End, 126 Whisky Au Go Go fire, 154 Whitaker, Hayden, 146 Whyte Island (QFRA Academy), 15, 26 wild fires, see bushfires Winkelmann, Bob, 146–8 Woodlands fire station, 133 Woodridge, 51, 86, 88, 97, 159 Woombye, 139 World Firefighter Games, 59 World Trade Center, viii, 98 Wulga, 75 Wulguru fire station, 105, 133 Yuleba, 72–3 Rural Fire Brigade, 72–3, 76–7