About the brigade..
The Sunbury Fire Brigade's main purpose is to protect life first and then to protect property where possible, and that's where the senior brigade come in. Within the brigade we have over 60 trained firefighters which are on 24 hour alert 7 days a week. The firefighters turn out to everything imaginable, from vehicle accidents to fully involved structure fires. Our firefighters have the best support and equipment to back them up.
Senior brigade meets every Monday from 7:30pm at the Gap Road Station for training. This consists of everything from a theory lessons with an examination at the end and the practical training for that lesson to on the spot scenarios.
Our station is now manned 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and 365 days of the year. These firefighters started on December 3 2007.
The brigade is alerted to incidents by a paging system after someone rings 000 (emergency number) and reports an incident that requires the fire service. The CFA operator then finds out which is the closest responding brigade and responds them. On the pager that every member carries, the message notifies them of the type of incident, address of the incident, response code and time of the call. The member is then required to respond to their appointed station and gear up ready to be crewed to an appliance.
Once the truck is appropriately crewed it will respond to the incident. Firefighters also respond to support calls by other surrounding brigades as they also respond to our support calls.
A support call is a call by another brigade and in our case it's usually Wildwood, Diggers Rest, Riddells Creek, Greenvale, Gisborne or Bulla brigades.
When the other brigade doesn't have the equipment or man power to keep control of the incident then they will call another brigade to help.
About the CFA..
Taken from the official CFA website.
CFA is one of the world's largest volunteer-based emergency services. There are around 58,000 volunteer members supported by over 400 career fire fighters and officers and more than 700 career support and administrative staff. In Victoria there are 2.5 million people and 150,182 square kilometres of land in the CFA area, this area includes more than 980,000 homes and covers all of rural Victoria and the provincial cities and towns (except State forests and National Parks).
The area CFA covers includes more than a million residents in outer Melbourne suburbs such as Frankston and Dandenong and key growth suburbs such as Cranbourne, Melton and Werribee.
CFA divide the land covered into nine CFA Areas and 20 Regions. Across these areas there are over 1200 CFA brigades and they carry out a wide range of duties.
Our brigades respond to a range of different incidents and our broader activities include community education and fire investigation.
The ties between CFA and state government, local government, industry and brigades are essential to the successful operation of CFA. As a community service organisation, CFA brigades are strongly supported by their local communities in responding to meet Victoria's fire safety and emergency management needs.