Northern Victoria Region
Rikkie-Lee TYRRELL (Northern Victoria) (13:37): (158) My question is for the Minister for Emergency Services. With the government’s unquenchable thirst for renewable energy, proposed solar farms and storage cell batteries, it has been brought to my attention that local regional CFA brigades have had no initial training to extinguish these potentially hazardous blazes. The volunteers I spoke to said if a solar farm and its base components were to ignite during a bushfire, the potential for live power to create unnecessary risk will be the determining factor in their threat matrix and subsequent actions – those actions being that they are likely to let it burn. To mitigate the potential for an environmental disaster when the battery chemicals melt into the water catchment areas, when will the minister initiate a training package to be rolled out for the likely responding units?