Tuesday, 18 February 2020

Country Fire Authority Euroa electorate brigades

Ms RYAN (Euroa) (19:07): (1867) My adjournment matter this evening is also for the Minister for Police and Emergency Services, and I am pleased that she is at the table tonight. The action I am seeking from the minister is an announcement of funding for upgrades to CFA stations and firefighting equipment across my electorate.

I am particularly grateful to those volunteers who have gone away through this remarkable fire season, particularly on strike teams, many of whom have worked through very extreme conditions. We have been pretty lucky in the Euroa electorate compared with other parts of the state, but there are increased concerns in my brigades about their firefighting capability, and I guess we all know that it is only a matter of time before we are fire impacted as well. It might not be this year but in future years.

At Pyalong, Heathcote, Strathbogie and Molka volunteers are in desperate need of new CFA stations. At Pyalong volunteers have run out of room. They have no toilets at the station, and they have been told they are on the list but they are stuck in a bureaucratic impasse. I met with their brigade captain, Brendan Kelly, and other volunteers last week, who told me it is extremely difficult for them to recruit new members without appropriate facilities.

Heathcote CFA volunteers have similar problems. Their station has no change facilities, which makes things particularly difficult because 20 per cent of their brigade is female. They are also having to do much of their cleaning of vehicles on the footpath because there is not enough space. For seven years they have been lobbying for a new station. Volunteers have identified a number of potential sites, but the government will not accept any of them, leaving them frustrated and disheartened.

Strathbogie CFA has been circulating a community-driven petition which is calling on the government to urgently fund an upgrade of their fire station to provide more space. They are so cramped they cannot house their ultralight tanker in their station. Instead a neighbour has agreed to park it next door, and again an ideal site has been found but no action has been taken.

Forget about having a toilet at Molka; the CFA station does not have any power or even running water. The CFA have put some solar panels and batteries on the shed to have enough lighting to get the truck out at night, but the brigade has been virtually forgotten.

As Lima South CFA volunteers have told me, they are concerned about the age of their truck, which is 30 years old. Equipment of this age just cannot be as reliable as it once was. And the other thing I should point out is that changes recently to the guidelines around strike teams mean that only trucks with crew cabs can now be deployed, and as a result across the Benalla group we have 20 brigades but only six trucks with the necessary crew cabs. Without investment in new trucks, the brigades’ capacity to deploy during long campaign fires like those we have seen is heavily reduced, so the question in many people’s minds is: where is the fire services levy going?