It was an all-agency affair when the Mt Rouse Group conducted their annual operational exercise on Friday 26 October at VEMTC Penshurst Campus.
AV and VICSES explaining patient extrication techniques and priorities to CFA volunteers
In addition to Group’s six volunteer brigades - Penshurst, Linlithgow, Gazette, Croxton East, Burn Brae and Buckley Swamp - Ambulance Victoria, VICSES, district mechanical officer, and VEMTC Penshurst Campus PAD staff were on hand to make the day a success.
The Operational Exercise was planned around three scenarios:
- A burnover/entrapment drill (plus draughting afterwards)
- A hazardous materials incident
- A road crash rescue incident
Burnover drill
The burnover drill not only ensures those attending meet the Chief Officer’s expectations for firefighters, it also gives the district mechanical officer a chance to check over our trucks to ensure they are in tip-top condition. It also means each truck gets a fresh tank of water by the end of the draughting drill.
Hazardous materials incident
One of the hard parts of living in a farming area is the ubiquity of hazardous materials and the possibility of them complicating what might otherwise be a simple incident.
The local rural merchandise store were happy to make their premises available for the exercise so that we could prepare a realistic hazardous material incident. In this scenario a call comes in that there is a problem with a delivery driver. On arrival crews see (hopefully) the placard showing UN 3048 Aluminium Phosphide Pesticide (a fumigant used in grain protection). They then find out that during unloading that a drum has been dropped from the truck, splitting the container and fumes are escaping. The driver is now slumped over the steering wheel of the vehicle. A simple incident just got complicated and working out what we can and can’t do to protect ourselves and the neighbouring residents comes into play.
Road crash rescue incident
Our group is fortunate to have the VEMTC Penshurst Campus (formerly Western District Training Ground) right next door. The training ground has recently undergone significant refurbishments and we were all keen to put it to good use. VEMTC Penshurst has a range of props including one for a non-structure rescue (i.e. person trapped in car crash with fire). This means crews can arrive on a hot scene with two cars collided and one of them on fire. Nothing like being confronted by a real car fire to focus the mind, especially for new recruits for whom this might be the first time they have put water on a real fire.
The VICSES rescue crew and AV paramedics were ready to lend a hand and share their experience to our crews facing the road crash scenario. The importance of protecting the scene using fend-off parking, the placement of appliances to allow access, checking the scene for dangers, stabilising the crashed vehicle and checking a patient’s airway are all things we read about in familiarisation sessions but seeing it all play out in front of you helps reinforce the knowledge.
Witnessing how a poorly placed fire appliance impedes the work of road crash rescue crews and ambulance paramedics is something you only want to see at an exercise, not in real life. Of course, learning why, and seeing how, a road crash rescue crew cuts a car to pieces to extricate a patient was fun too!
While grass and scrub fires might be our bread and butter, we are sometimes called to attend a road crash rescue. Being in a rural area these are likely to be at high speed, result in serious injury and involve a long delay before emergency services arrive on scene and local fire crews may be the first to arrive. More than likely the patient will be a friend, neighbour or relative of the responding crews making the task even more challenging. It’s a tough part of living in a rural area.
About the Mt Rouse Group
Mt Rouse Group comprises six rural (class 1), volunteer fire brigades protecting life and property across approximately 75,000 ha in south west Victoria. Our headquarters is at Penshurst Fire Station at the foot of an extinct volcano after which the group is named - ie Mt Rouse (“Coloro” in the Dhauwurd wurrung language).
A normal fire season for our group is a few grassfires and maybe a haystack fire as well as helping out our neighbouring groups with their fires and of course there are the trips away to campaign fires (especially to the Grampians just to our north). On rare occasions we are called to a house fire or a road crash.