Because the maintenance of competencies is vital is us retaining the status of "quick-on your feet-lateral thinking professional volunteers who can manage anything that gets thrown your way without any politics or inter-agency issues"
some things are possible to learn without hands on approaches, but others are not, also, not everyone learns in the same manner, nor retains knowledge in the same way.
Also mock incidents allow more experienced members to step back and watch the less experienced ones work, without the politics related with having the most appropriate person doing whatever. ie. having a rescue operator with 15 years+ on the tools, always taking over and not letting equally capable young/new people work. (seen that happen.)
This can achieve 2. main things, 1. It can give the older more experienced operators confidence in the younger ones skills, (and the cfs's ability to train people well.) 2. the older/more experienced people can note down things which concern them done by less experienced operators, and bring these up at the post "incident" debrief, (like we all have
)
**SA Firey, Sounds like you guys got the risk assessment thing brought up at your meeting tonight too **