Our fire services are failing to keep the public and firefighters as safe as they should, according to mass expert testimony received by a recent parliamentary inquiry.
Senior fire services leaders and professional firefighters urged the parliamentary select committee to pass the government’s fire service reform bill, for two main reasons. The first and most urgent reason is a morale and mental health crisis, precipitated by the divisive politicisation of the fire services. On that basis, senior leaders pleaded with the select committee to pass the bill, Emergency Management Commissioner Craig Lapsley warning that ‘to do nothing is a very dangerous, extremely dangerous position’. Professional firefighters (and a few volunteers) testified en masse of a mental health crisis, pointing the finger squarely at the media, the Liberals and Nationals and the putative representative body, Volunteer Fire Brigades Victoria.
The second major reason why reform is needed is the thrust of the present article: the fire services as they are currently structured fail to meet contemporary expectations for public safety and workplace safety. As with my previous article on the morale case for reform, my aim here is to let the mass testimony speak for itself, by compiling excerpts from the large number of submissions to the fire reform inquiry that gave concrete examples illustrating the need for reform. But many readers will benefit from some context, so let’s scratch the surface a little before we dive into the submissions.
Trigger warning: this article contains numerous first-hand accounts of situations that imperiled firefighters and the public. Look after your mental wellbeing and avoid exposure if necessary. Scroll to the bottom for mental health contacts.
Over the past several decades, Melbourne’s suburbs and Victoria’s regional centres have grown enormously, without any corresponding adjustment to the boundaries that define the geographical demarcation between the Metropolitan Fire Brigade and the Country Fire Authority. Included in the legislated ‘country area of Victoria’ are major regional cities, decades-old suburbs of Melbourne, and urban growth corridors throughout outer Melbourne. Think: Geelong, Ballarat, Bayswater, Dandenong, Hoppers Crossing and Epping.
The CFA responded to its growing urban fire risks by ‘integrating’ professional firefighters into volunteer fire brigades. But, as one senior CFA officer told the select committee, this is a ‘bandaid 1950s approach to service delivery.’ The CFA’s volunteer focus means that service delivery must fail consistently before there is enough impetus to overcome organisational inertia against professionalisation. Legislation introduced by the Baillieu government, along with the Liberals’ deliberately inflammatory 2016 Hands Off CFA campaign, served to crystalise that inertia and caused the integrated model to shatter, taking morale along with it. Meanwhile, our cities continued to grow at record rates, exacerbating the public safety and firefighty safety perils of CFA’s bandaid approach.
Like the MFB, CFA’s professional firefighters are uniformly trained to be capable of all routine urban firefighting activities, and are required to be on the road to any emergency within 90 seconds of being alerted. But unlike the MFB, in most areas CFA depends upon volunteers to make up the numbers. This is a problem, because in many areas volunteer response is unreliable. The system places unrealistic expectations upon volunteers in urban areas: they should complete extensive training, maintain their skills regularly, and reliably be available when the pager sounds, to drop what they’re doing and be at the fire station within two and a half minutes. Unsurprisingly, many volunteer fire brigades are unable to meet those expectations.
As a result, fire response in regional centres and Melbourne’s outer suburbs is not what it should be. Volunteer brigades are frequently late to arrive, or don’t arrive at all. When they do arrive, they often do not have training or skills suited to urban firefighting. The provision of limited numbers of professional firefighters is not able to fully make up for these shortfalls. This means that CFA is hampered in its mission to protect life and property, and those firefighters who do respond — both volunteer and professional — are exposed to unnecessary risk.
That is why the United Firefighters Union has long pushed for safer professional crewing levels within the CFA. Contrary to politically-motivated claims that the public safety argument for reform is merely a diversionary cover for securing a new Enterprise Bargaining Agreement, the improvement of firefighter safety and public safety through safe crewing levels has been an integral feature of EBA negotiations for many years. The staffing provisions of the 2010 CFA EBA were only enforced after an extensive legal battle by the UFU, after the CFA under the Napthine Government tried to renege on that agreement. The proposed 2016 EBA also provided for improved crewing levels by stipulating the dispatch of seven professional firefighters in any area in which professional firefighters are stationed.
Deplorably, the Herald Sun, the Liberals and the Nationals conspired to misrepresent the 7-firefighter-dispatch clause in an absurdly, obscenely inflammatory manner. According to their lie, volunteers would have to sit and watch fires burn while waiting for 7 professional firefighters to arrive, potentially from hours away. The mainstream media consistently failed to correct that lie over a period of several months, contributing in large part to the bitter divisions that have caused the morale and mental health crisis that has made reform more urgent than ever.
The following dramatisation — produced by the UK Fire Brigades Union — is perhaps the most accessible and convincing way to understand why public safety and firefighter safety depends crucially upon the arrival of a second fire truck to make up a total of at least seven firefighters, four of whom are wearing self-contained breathing apparatus (BA) enabling them to work inside burning buildings:
Firefighters in Melbourne’s suburbs and Victoria’s regional centres face the same scenario regularly, because they are depending upon unreliable volunteer response for backup. Volunteer trucks may arrive late or not at all, they may not carry enough crew, and those crew who do arrive may not be wearing the necessary protective clothing and equipment, or possess the necessary skills, including the crucial ability to use BA. As Submission 1916 notes, only 1373 of CFA’s 56,159 volunteers are fully trained in urban firefighting, itself only a subset of the training received by all recruit career firefighters.
Watching this video sets my nerves on edge, because I know it is realistic and have felt the same stress myself. But for us, the sound of sirens in the distance is not necessarily a comfort, as Submission 1801 to the fire reform bill inquiry explains:
As the video’s title indicates, it’s a terrible dilemma. Do you imperil your crew by sending them into a burning building without backup, in order to potentially save the life a member of the public? Contrary to our training, in Victoria our decision is generally ‘yes’. But we shouldn’t have to face such a dilemma, given that it could be fixed by reforming fire service staffing and dispatch protocols. And firefighters don’t bare all the risk: with inadequate crewing, the chances are very much diminished of finding and extracting any trapped occupants, and extinguishing the fire before it spreads unnecessarily. Like several other submissions, number 1755 labelled the dilemma ‘moral blackmail’:
Opponents of the proposed 2016 EBA complained that it was not appropriate for an industrial instrument to make such prescriptive operational stipulations. But those prescriptions are crucial to firefighter safety, and to date industrial instruments have proven the only means for CFA professional firefighters to secure them. The proposed fire service reforms promise to alleviate that somewhat, by shifting all professional firefighters to a single employer: Fire Rescue Victoria. This is not primarily about employing more firefighters. It’s about the structural organisation and service delivery priorities of the fire service responsible for major urban areas.
As a full-time professional fire service, like the MFB, FRV would be able to make use of CFA volunteers when dealing with incidents, but it would not rely on them to provide minimally adequate crewing at any scene. FRV, like the MFB, would be able to reliably dispatch sufficient numbers of fully trained firefighters to any fire or alarm, selecting at all times the crews able to reach the scene in the shortest possible time. FRV, like MFB, would be able to ensure this occurs even when multiple incidents unfold in a given locality, by moving trucks and crews (‘moving up’/‘stepping up’) to maintain uniform fire coverage. FRV, like the MFB, would be able to adjust its response arrangements to meet the changing risk environment, without facing a battle against parochial elements who prioritise ownership of ‘their patch’ over public safety.
That in a nutshell is why professional firefighters, in overwhelming numbers, urged Parliament to pass the fire reform bill as a matter of public interest. Approximately 1400 submissions — from a workforce of 3180 — made this point, and many chose to illustrate it with examples from their personal experience. I’m told some submissions revealed failures so grave they were not published, their authors advised they should be referred to the Coroner.
The decision to go public with their experiences was vexed, for many, but there is a general realisation that long-overdue reform will not take place unless politicians and their constituents are made fully aware of the extent to which public safety and firefighter safety is imperiled. As a matter of public interest and workplace safety, no longer can we afford to stay quiet out of a desire not to avoid alarming the public, as this firefighter notes (Submission 1706):
Nor can we allow safety to suffer any longer out of a desire to protect the feelings of volunteers (Submission 1771):
As with my previous article on the morale and mental health crisis, I am aware of the scepticism I am facing due to the media’s blinkered adherence to a narrative that frames firefighters as villains, so I am going to hit you with mass evidence. The rest of this article is devoted to excerpts from the expert submissions of professional firefighters and other emergency services professionals. I have categorised the excerpts into three themes:
- Lack of adequate backup due to unreliable volunteer response
- Lack of crucial skillsets on the fireground
- Sacrificing public safety in the name of patch mentality
Let’s look at a few of each before proceeding to the full evidence dump.
Quick Look: Backup
There is possibly no more urgent threat to life than entrapment in a building fire. Saving lives depends on having enough firefighters with the right skills on scene within minutes. Submission 178 explains how this occurs in the area serviced by the MFB:
If there aren’t enough firefighters with the right skills, this imperils the life not only of the occupants but of firefighters. Submission 1914 tells the tragic story of Dick Zapart, seriously injured while fighting a spray booth fire. Although Zapart suffered horrendous injuries, this submission says Zapart was ‘a very lucky man’ — as all MFB and CFA professional firefighters know, Zapart would certainly have been killed if he had been working undercrewed in the CFA area:
In Submission 1382, a CFA professional firefighter articulates his own experience of these differing standards. I can only imagine the mental torment of knowing your life was spared by postcode lottery:
Other CFA firefighters have not been so lucky. Submission 813 speaks of long-term mental anguish after a lack of suitably skilled and qualified crew forced him re-enter a house to search for missing occupants, having already self-evacuated with injuries due to partial structural collapse:
In some instances, both the public and firefighters have paid the price of CFA undercrewing. Submission 1380 details how a man died after undercrewing prevented crews from rendering first aid, while firefighters received steam burns searching without backup for missing occupants:
Other submissions speak of property loss due to inadequate or delayed CFA response. An irate Jan Juc resident wrote in Submission 704 of the need for professional firefighters in her area:
It’s interesting to compare this homeowner’s view to that of her elected MP, Andrew Katos, who told Parliament that giving the Torquay community professional fire response would constitute being ‘stomped on by the UFU’.
Several firefighters from Mildura told the Inquiry of the catastrophic loss of a supermarket, which they blame on inadquate backup for the professional crew stationed in Mildura. Submission 1177 describes the incident:
Submission 1318 adds some further detail, including the endangerment of professional crews due to a lack of flexibility to manage fatigue, and poor skill-sets of volunteers:
While these are specific incidents chosen for illustrative purposes, the vast majority of the 1400+ submissions from spoke of widespread and systematic breaches of firefighter and public safety. A worthwhile appraisal how widespread those problems are comes from an emergency services telecommunications officer and former CFA volunteer appears in Submission 1807:
Quick Look: Skills
When the first vehicle from a CFA brigade arrives at a fire, the clock stops, for the purposes of response time statistics. Unfortunately, it may not in fact be a firefighting appliance. Or it may be the wrong type of appliance. Or it may not be carrying enough crew. Or those crew may not have a skillset that can contribute to an urban firefight in a useful fashion. This can lead to unnecessary endangerment of property, members of the public and firefighters. Numerous submissions gave specific examples of this.
Submission 1784 gives an example where a professional crew was able to just get by, despite being unable to source any additional crew members qualified in internal structural firefighting from any of the four volunteer appliances that responded. This submission serves to illustrate that the lives of community members trapped in structure fires depends utterly on the ability of responding crews to respond rapidly, skilfully and decisively. A woman’s life was saved in this case, but the crew were injured exposed to unnnecessary risk of death due to the lack of suitably qualified backup:
The officer in charge of this incident testified (Submission 18) of the ‘grave concern’ he held for the crews whose safety he was accountable for:
Submission 749 tells a similar story, of lives saved but firefighters placed at unnecessary risk:
In some instances, volunteer crews included people who were qualified to wear breathing apparatus but were unable to do so because they were not clean shaven, were wearing the wrong protective clothing, lacked the fitness, experience or confidence. Submissions 277 and 959 cover instances of this:
Breathing apparatus is not the only skill commonly found lacking in the volunteer crews relied upon in urban areas for public safety and firefighter under the CFA’s response model. A variety of other essential skills employed by all professional firefighters and officers are frequently missing from those they share their inherently risky workplace with.
One safety-critical skill is pump operation. A functioning hose line is a internal structural firefighter’s most important safety consideration after breathing apparatus. A spray of water droplets effectively absorbs radiant heat, cools hot gases and extinguishes fire. A number of submissions speak of crew endangerment due to the incompetence of volunteer pump operators. Submission 342 offers this:
Submission 1263 gives another example of loss of water during internal firefighting operations, along with other safety breeches:
Other submissions detail poor decision-making that resulted in loss of property and the imperilment of crews. This example from Submission 342 is a laugh a minute, unless you’re the property owner:
Submission 749 describes a woefully inadequate response that could have ended in disaster, had the professional crew not decided to ignore a radio message telling them they were not required:
Submission 796 details how an inexperienced volunteer incident controller’s unwillingness to take professional advice combined with a lack of BA qualifications in the volunteer crew led to unnecessary property damage:
Quick Look: Patch mentality
As an emergency service, the overriding priorities of the CFA should be public safety and firefighter safety. Unfortunately, at some volunteer brigades there is a mentality of protecting their ‘ownership’ of emergency response in ‘their patch’. That mentality can interfere with the prioritisation of service delivery. This kind of patch mentality has marred fire response and led to dispute since the 1880s in Victoria, the volunteer association (now Volunteer Fire Brigades Victoria) serving since those days as a vehicle for that disputation.
This mentality manifests on the fireground when, in the name of ‘giving the volunteers a go’, professional fire crews are not requested, or are turned away from, incidents where their involvement could deliver better outcomes for the public.
Submission 392 gives a typical example of what goes on, and also indicates that the Chief Officer and Emergency Services Commissioner are well aware of these issues:
CFA system failure due to parochialism not only impacts the safety of the public and of firefighters, but also of other emergency services workers, according to this paramedic (Submission 421):
Patch mentality featured in many submissions relating to road accident rescue. For example, Submission 461:
As that submission pointed out, like fires, road accident rescue failures can have fatal consequences. Another firefighter spoke of how potentially avoidable fatalities haunt him/her (Submission 1582):
Another damning example appears in Submission 1425:
Many submissions complain that CFA permits and encourages response arrangements that prioritise patch mentality over public safety. At the same time, CFA can and does integrate professional firefighters into brigades that are consistently failing to meet service delivery standards. Many brigades with a public safety focus have embraced that process or even initiated it themselves.
However, others are more interested in holding on to ‘their patch’, and resist it. A number of submissions allege that certain brigades systematically distort their response time statistics through fraudulent radio transmissions. This impacts upon safety both in the longer term, by masking the need for professional support, and in the immediate term, by misinforming other crews concerning the likely availability of backup.
Submission 1734 gives an example of this, going on to note that the practice is widespread:
A number of career firefighter testified of these practices based both on their experiences both as a volunteer and as a professional firefighter. For example, Submission 1926:
Further Evidence: Backup
A large number of submissions give further examples of how public safety and firefighter safety are endangered by current fire response arrangements. This section and the two that follow show further illustrative excerpts. Many of these submissions involve potentially avoidable loss of life and property. All involve unnecessary risk, which unfortunately is a daily occurrence under current fire response arrangements.
Submission 1927, from an emergency services dispatcher:
Further Evidence: Skills
Submission 574, Attachment 1 (copy of email sent to colleague):
Further Evidence: Patch mentality
Fire Service Reform is Necessary
These submissions prove beyond doubt that many Victorians are not receiving the fire service they pay for, and firefighters are not provided with the workplace safety they deserve.
In addition to addressing the urgent crisis of morale that has been caused by the Liberal-Nationals’ politicisation of the CFA, and preventing politicisation in the future, fire service reform is essential to address these gaping safety holes.
The proposed reform packages would address these problems by:
- Creating a single service for professional fire response: Fire Rescue Victoria
- Legislating an independent process for determining fire response boundaries based on objective, public-safety-focussed critera: the Fire District Review Panel
- Providing a uniform standard of public safety and firefighter safety within the FRV district, commensurate with current standards within the MFB district, including:
- - Reliable 90-second dispatch
- - Adequate appliance numbers and types dispatched
- - Adequate crew numbers dispatched
- - Adequate qualifications, skills and aptitude of all crew
- - Move-up/step-up to cover short-term gaps in coverage
- - Flexible relocation, addition and deletion of stations, appliances and crews to meet long-term risk profile evolution
- Providing additional funding and support to improve service delivery by an all-volunteer CFA.
These reforms are decades overdue. It is time for those who profit from the politicisation of our fire services to step aside. As a matter of public interest, we need fire service reform.
The media need to step up, too. Politicians will only do the right thing if voters are informed. That’s how democracy works, and why an effective news media is crucial. These submissions were published four months ago, to little or no media attention, despite the scandalous revelations they contain and their clear relevance to the public interest. Yes, it’s a lot of work to skim them all, but here you are: I’ve done it for you, and handed you the paydirt.
Please tell the public there’s a problem, so politicians will fix it.
Those a position to act or to speak out must do so, now. Those opting to remain silent despite now knowing the truth, I have this to say. From now on, every time property is needlessly lost and every time a human being is needlessly injured or killed, you will remember how you could have done something, but didn’t. Where’s your conscience? How will you feel if it is your house, or your loved-one?
Readers experiencing distress in response to this article are urged to seek support. The following list of contacts is excerpted from a recent UFU bulletin.
SUPPORT SERVICES AVAILABLE
As previously notified, there are dedicated support services available including support services for MFB and CFA members, external support services available to everyone, and the additionally the UFU Welfare Officer.
MFB and CFA
Both the MFB and the CFA have support services which members are encouraged to access. The contact details are as follows:
• For MFB personnel there is 24-hour access to a dedicated counselling service with psychologists by calling 1800 451 138 or 1300 366 789. If you call this service you can have immediate access to a psychologist via telephone or alternatively make an appointment. This service is also available for family members.
• Additionally, for MFB personnel there is an extensive peer support programme where a clinician can be accessed by calling 9665 4405 or 0407 665 174 or the Peer Coordinator on 0417 538 289 or 9665 4516.
• CFA members can access Critical Incident Stress Peer Support by calling either the CFA Chaplain Service on 1800 337 068 or the CFA Member Assistance Program 1300 795 711. [Corrected from previous version]
We encourage you to use the above services provided by the MFB and CFA, but if you feel uncomfortable in doing so there are external support services which all can access.
Services available to all:
On the beyondblue website https://www.beyondblue.org.au/ the following support services are listed that are external to the CFA and MFB and that are available to all.
The website has comprehensive information that deals with a range of mental health awareness and the support and help that is available.
The numbers for these services are as follows:
• Lifeline 13 11 14
• Suicide Call Back Services 1300 659 467
• beyondblue Support Service 1300 22 4636
