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House of Assembly - Fifty-Fourth Parliament, First Session (54-1)
2018-11-06 Daily Xml
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Metropolitan Fire Service

Mr BASHAM (Finniss) (15:32): I rise to acknowledge the vital work of the Metropolitan Fire Service in South Australia and, in particular, to congratulate the Victor Harbor MFS station on being awarded the Chief Officer's Shield, which is for taking first place in the 2018 Regional Operations Audit and Proficiency Assessment. The MFS has more than 1,000 personnel and, of those, 780-odd are full-time firefighters and 260 are retained firefighters or part-time firefighters. Those firefighters are basically on call and come in from their other occupations to fight fires.

That is how the Victor Harbor station is manned. It has only nine retained staff at the moment; the others are on call, as they need five members if there is a call for a truck to go out. There are also 48 non-operational management and support staff who work for the MFS. There are 36 stations across South Australia, 16 of which are regional. It is those 16 regional stations that were involved in the competition I just mentioned.

The MFS does not just fight fires. It attends road accidents; helps with search and rescue operations; deals with chemical spills, biological and radioactive threats; and deals with hazardous materials. It also helps people to be prepared and understand the needs of safety in their community. Also pleasing for the Victor Harbor station is that they are looking at getting a special vehicle to be based there to help them with that first response coming from the Christies Beach station and being transferred down to the Victor Harbor station.

There are many things that help our MFS operators and it is certainly their dedication to their work that is really important and recognised by the award that has been given to the Victor Harbor station. To win the shield, they had to show that, when put through their paces, they do everything that is needed of them in the case of a fire, so they are put through a training exercise to see how they perform. The comments at the dinner that was held in Victor Harbor on Saturday reflected how impressed they were at how they performed and that it was basically done to absolute precision.

They showed their skills, their community spirit and their commitment to public safety. Also, the commanders who were there from Adelaide made special mention of how well the station was kept. They made comments that the trucks and everything were in such good condition that the only problem with the trucks, is that with the amount of Armor All on the seats, sometimes it is a bit hard to stay seated because they are so slippery. That is how shiny they keep their equipment. They have done a great job over the last year or so with some difficult fires, including a business fire that destroyed a few businesses on Maude Street in Victor Harbor earlier this year.

Victor Harbor was certainly a deserving winner, but I should also mention that Berri and Port Lincoln were the next two stations to follow. There was also the award that went to Kadina for being the most improved station. Kapunda won the most family friendly station. They believe it is very important, given that in these retained stations it is very much eating into family time. To bring this back to home, it was interesting at the dinner that halfway through the dinner the pagers went off and half the people at the dinner left for a callout to a grassfire.

Another interesting thing is that when they came back they had to seek the permission of the command, right up to the chief officer who was there, whether it was okay to leave the truck outside rather than take it back to the station. I want to thank all the emergency volunteers, particularly of the MFS, and I congratulate the Victor Harbor station on their win.

Time expired.

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: Member for Hurtle Vale.

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