Cheers Footy, glad you could make it along.
Some would remember a chat about training opportunities to help build bridges between the services, and there weren't too many that could talk about a large training incident involving multiple agencies (I'd still love to hear about them if they've been done elsewhere!). We grabbed an opportunity to fill ForestrySA's recently vacated corporate office with smoke and do a casualty rescue with CFS, MFS and SES.
13 people (6 dummies) inside, smoke bombs and two smoke machines, 40 odd firefighters/SES crew with about 10 in BA from two entry points. We had four safety officers noting tactics and ensuring everyone was following the incident do's and don'ts - we used the senior staff to take them out of the equation and give others the opportunity to lead.
Many lessons learnt by all involved. For anyone willing to organise something like this I say make a plan, stick to it and give everyone plenty of notice. Don't let your crew have any preconceived ideas of the operation and make sure you spell out clearly what crews can and can't do on the night.
I had great feedback from the casualties in terms of their handling and the way they were reassured by crews. I guess we are used to having SAAS on scene and they would have taken the casualties when the BA crew dragged them out so in their absence our casualty handling once outside the building was a bit lacking LOL but most got up and walked away
All crews were able to locate the casualties correctly on the map they drew, and some areas were quite open and rabbit warrenish, difficult to navigate, and a few rooms were so smokey you couldn't see a hand infront of your face.
Ventilation was a bit average, and crews learnt heaps about strategic sequential ventilation.
Entry at the second point was slow due to us not being allowed to smash a window (it was a fire exit so only opened outward) but in a real situation you'd just break in. Also CFS crews got their head around a situation where the usual heirarchy was not present and the Lt had to step back and not get involved as they normally would - very good learning for the upcoming crew leaders.
I had organised that we could break two doors, and we locked them and stuck a sign on them saying OK TO DAMAGE. But they crews inside worked so well they figured out that the other side of the two doors could actually be accessed by other means so they never got to practice forced entry -
bugger!!
Communications was a bit messy, but mostly due to the fact that there was a need to change GRN channels mid incident as we were interfering with a job at Murray Bridge! That left a couple of BA crews on the wrong channel. Also SES can't join in the chat on our GRN channels, which was a surprise for some crews. Just meant more running back and forth. We also had a problem with similar sounding names over the fireground radio chat, and in the debrief we discussed the need to use the persons rank and last name as proper protocol.
We had some equipment we didn't use and could have, such as a thermal imaging camera which would have been useful for locating casualties. Again, a good reminder and I'm sure it will be grabbed next time.
SES had a groovy blow up tent, like an orange bouncy castle, which was great for keeping the casualties and the ECO dry in the drizzly rain.
Some photos were taken but I don't have any, will try and get hold of some. Border Watch took some and one appeared in the paper.
The MFS pagers went off in the middle of the debrief, and SES got paged just as they finished packing up afterward, but atleast it wasn't in the middle of the incident!
