Ok, let’s establish some basics here:
1 – SES and CFS are here for the one purpose – to serve our communities and provide them with the best damn emergency service we can
2 – CFS is primarily a fire-fighting organisation – sure they do some RCR and other things, but the name says it all – Country FIRE Service
3 – SES is primarily a rescue organisation – and we do a lot of other things, as the name says - State EMERGENCY Service
As far as the counting of incidents goes – I cannot remember ever attending multiple incidents in the one street, except for a couple of occasions where one tree has nuked two houses – that counts as one job. So, our incidents are invariably all over the place, and when major storms hit the Adelaide Hills it is not unusual for our vehicles to rack up 500km each over a period of two or so days. Each job counts as one incident in those circumstances.
Where one tasking extends over more than 24 hours, each day is written up as a separate incident, as that accurately represents the change-of-shift which with CFS would be accomplished by calling in another brigade.
Using the above criteria, Adelaide Hills SES attended 205 incidents last financial year, for a total of 4080 man hours and 13,857 km travelled.
A break-up of the incidents gives the following stats:
Animal Rescue 3 occasions
Storm Damage 151 occasions
Wind 98 occasions
Flooding 53 occasions
Powerlines 12 occasions
Community Service 40 occasions
Public relations 15 occasions
Communications 3 occasions
Evacuations 4 occasions
Fire Support 22 occasions
Hazards present 65 occasions
Traffic Control 29 occasions
Emergency Ops Centre 16 occasions
Transport 19 occasions
Vehicle Entry 1 occasions
And yes, I know that when you add them up, it adds up to more than 205 – that’s because some jobs have multiple components…
These 205 jobs were managed with two vehicles – a “light rescue” Ford Courier 4WD and a “medium rescue” Mitsubishi Canter 2WD, both of which are well and truly past their use-by date!
We have over the last 12 months also provided base camp support to CFS at both the Eyre Peninsula and Kangaroo Island fires – a role we are both happy and proud to undertake.
Adelaide Hills SES covers an area of around 1,000 square kilometres, ranging from Callington in the east, Meadows in the south, Harrogate / Woodside / Basket Range / Piccadilly / Summertown in the north and Mylor / Aldgate / Stirling / Crafers / Bridgewater to the west.
And for the record, Adelaide Hills SES is the only non-metropolitan SES Unit that does not have a road crash capability. In fact, we don’t even have any powered hydraulic gear – only a very ancient set of hand-pumped gear.
Much has been said of our response times. For the record, in the last 24 months there have been TWO occasions where the Unit took longer than 10 minutes to respond to an incident page, and neither job was a life-threat situation. Our typical “out-the-door” response time for a life-threat incident is less than 5 minutes and less 10 minutes for storm damage and the like. Because of our area of coverage we have to travel long distances to some jobs (especially those on our boundaries) and that adds to the time it takes us to actually get to a job.
Added to this is that, until recently, CFS responded to virtually everything “lights and sirens” - SES very rarely did. We now have new guidelines that enable us to respond to more things as Priority 1 or 2.
What particularly irks me is that on a couple of occasions we have been accused of taking an hour or more to respond to a request from CFS for assistance. I am more than willing to share our records with anyone, and what they will show is that on those jobs the CFS person responsible (no name, no pack drill) for calling us has waited an hour or more to actually place the call, and then gone back to their CFS members and said “Oh, I called SES an hour ago, I don’t know where they have got to…”
Play safe people
Chatty
