CFA blocked city colleagues from Victoria fires

CFA blocked city colleagues from Victoria fires

www.news.com.au

THE CFA has been accused of blocking city firefighters from helping fight the horrific blazes that burnt Victoria and claimed 208 lives.
Leaked emails accuse Country Fire Authority (CFA) management of blocking Metropolitan Fire Brigade (MFB) and CFA professional firefighters, and incompetently handling the fires.

(visit the link for the full news article)



[edit on 19/2/09 by SG-1-9er]

I can personally confirm this is going on, I'm a CFA firefighter and I can tell you that right now there are over 1100 interstate, overseas and outside agency personal on the fire ground and only 575 CFA personal. CFA has around 60,000 volunteers as well as full time fire fighters. Fighting between CFA and MFB has been going on for years now, but we're not even using our own people.

www.news.com.au
(visit the link for the full news article)

[edit on 19/2/09 by SG-1-9er]

What's fueling this? The CFA are true hero's in my eyes. Just days before the major fires, the CFA put out a massive fire in my hometown. They were quick to respond, highly vigilant, professional and courteous to all those that approached them afterwards... and these guys were blackened head to toe and completely knackered!

I don't really understand the divide.

Still having said all that, I'm still very thankful for the Californian Fire Fighters putting their lives on the line out here in Aus.

IRM

[edit on 19/2/09 by InfaRedMan]

The in fighting between CFA and MFB has been ongoing for well over 5 years, MFB firefighters have made no secret of the fact that they hate CFA volunteers. MFB will often request a MFB truck come to their fires from 30km away when a CFA truck that does the exact same thing is sitting just 10km away. My guess is that CFA controllers are turning the tables on them, (totally unacceptable as far as I'm concerned) but there's more going on here than just that.

The whole situation of having more external personal on the fire ground then our own people is a disgrace, we have people flying in from all over the world to help with these fires and were not even using our own personal. I don't know if this is political or just bad management but what I do know is that CFA has no shortage of personal to send to these fires. On the weekend of February 7 we had many seasoned firefighters ready to go, the truck rolled with 3 people on board, 2 of them with less than 6 months experience.

Please note I'm not trying to degrade the great work everyone's doing up there, but I personally feel it's wrong for the government to be asking for outside help when we have 1000's of CFA firefighters ready and waiting to be deployed and wanting to do what they are trained for but are being prevented from doing it.

[edit on 19/2/09 by SG-1-9er]

reply to post by SG-1-9er


I am an 85 year old and it gives me the #s when we get this bickerig between the two fire groups so how about getting on with the job it goes matter who puts the bloody fires out it looks to me that some of the heads of the groups have big egos what does it matter who piddles on the fires first.
Richard Le Busque.
PS excuse the language.