The CFA training college at Fiskville has always been a hot spot, but claims of a cancer cluster shouldn’t diminish the importance of the southern hemisphere’s largest fire-training ground. Sarah Harris reports.Until recently Ross Iudica worked at Mars. Now, silhouetted against a red-gold halo of fire in his helmet and hunchback of breathing apparatus, it looks like he’s landed on it.
It’s the final training night for the last class of firefighter recruits of 2011. Within days Iudica and 24 of his classmates will be “on station” where they will find themselves facing real-life fire rescue situations instead of play actors groaning “My arm, my arm” beside a gruesomely authentic-looking raw lamb shank smothered in tomato sauce and stuffed inside a glove.
The heat is on. Every metre he advances it doubles in intensity. The fire’s burning at 900 degrees and he is using water as a shield to absorb the radiation. Wouldn’t he rather his old job back?
“I worked in the manufacturing environment for 10 years. It wasn’t going to be a career. This is a career and a well-respected one. Wouldn’t it be better to tell people your father is a firefighter rather than a cat food manufacturer?” Iudica explains of his motivation.
The average age of recruits in this class is 30. There are no women, although there were several among the previous graduating class, including a 40-year-old, and four more have applied for this year’s first intake.
“It’s not about age, race or gender,’’ says Chris Bigham, the operations officer in charge of recruit course and continuation training programs. ‘‘It’s about ability to do the task. The job itself tends to eliminate a lot of people.” Career firefighters must be very fit. Before even being accepted into a recruit course they must demonstrate their cardiovascular capacity by completing a shuttle run back and forth over 20 metres which is recorded by beeps.
The minimum CFA beep test requirement is 9.6, which means completing 78 shuttles in under nine minutes. The Victoria Police beep test pass rate is just 6.1 while the Army demands 7.5.
Norman Hocking, a nuggety mechanical plant fitter from Romsey who competed on the Australian rodeo circuit as a bull rider, admits to spending 12 months to get fit enough even to apply.
Almost half the recruits have, like Hocking, decided to become career firefighters after serving as volunteers.
The junior development program is an important part of the CFA’s retention strategy for both volunteer and career firefighters.
At 16, Olivia Cox is the youngest member of Werribee CFA to complete volunteer training at Fiskville before the start of the summer fire season. She joined the junior program after attending an open day when she was 11.
“I am the only one out of my family in the CFA,” she says.
“Mum worries for me but she says she can’t complain because she knows I’m not sitting on the computer all the time or riding around in cars with boys.”
Instead, she’s riding around in trucks with men and women, turning out to everything from brush and house fires to motor vehicle accidents and chemical spills.
Where the residents of Ballan routinely see billowing smoke, there is a lot more than fire to the story of Fiskville.
The centre which started life as a radio transmitting station in 1927 (operating until 1969 when it was rendered obsolete by satellite) assumed new purpose when it was bought by the CFA in 1971.
It now serves as the state training headquarters for the CFA as well as the field training ground for volunteers from Melton-based district 14 as well as districts 15 and 7.
The 146-hectare site is believed to be the largest hot-fire training ground in the southern hemisphere with a huge variety of props including trains, planes and automobiles.
The props are used to simulate anything from single-vehicle accidents and clandestine drug laboratories to large-scale building collapses and biochemical terrorist attacks.
Imaginative and complex scenarios include 90kg sandbag dummies being retrieved from trees after a light-plane crash, a sarin gas attack on a subway, train derailments, and a car delicately poised on the edge of a collapsed bridge.
It’s like a movie set for the apocalypse, only in this case the stuntmen will take their skills into the “real world”.
Last year Fiskville played host to 5556 students running 251 potentially life-saving courses ranging from driver training to trench and confined space rescue.
Victoria Police, the State Emergency Service, the Environment Protection Authority, Search and Rescue Dog Australia and the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency are among the many organisations which use Fiskville alongside commercial clients like Shell, Mobile and Alcoa.
Now, though, a pall of uncertainty hangs over $6.4 million plans to expand facilities.
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