I'm not worried at all Numbers - in two months I will be hanging the orange overalls up for good(or maybe swapping them for white ones
).
What you guys should be concerned about are the latest thoughts expressed in the latest Comment (SAFECOM Newsletter).
They are currently working on RCR training, however once that is fixed what's next?
Possile future - Emergency Services 2012
RCR - Trained by SAMFS
Structural Fire - Trained by SAMFS
Specialist rescue - Trained by SAMFS except for rescue types that SAMFS members don't normally do Trained by SASES
HAZMAT - trained by SAMFS
Wild fire/rural type fires - Trained by CFS
Flood Storm - Trained by SASES
Need I go on?
As I said above personally I don't really care as I won't be living here, so the above has no real impact.
Remember this also currently there is about 90 rescue teams looking after 250,000 people outside of the greater Metro Adelaide area & about 16 "heavy" resources for 1.2 million people!
And how many of those teams are competent/current (as far as training goes).
From a pure economic point of view this is not sustainable in its current form (check out whats happening with our hospitals for example).
So while the two vollie services are busy waisting time talking about crap (Who got paged to what etc), David Place & SAFECOM are quietly engineering a new era in emergency service provision. So you can sling the old sarcastic comments about SES & Chainsaws Numbers, but remember this - parts of the state currently are struggling to provide fire/ rescue response & there are huge black holes where there isn't adequate response at all, so if we don't have the STO's to supervise the training until SAFECOM soughts it out - whats going to happen to our customers?
The above are personal observations only.
cheers