Life Interrupted: The Occasional Musings of a Volunteer Firefighter.

There's many things that suck about being a firefighter, getting dragged out of bed on cold, wet nights, hours in high temperatures copping the odd lungful of smoke but the thing which sucks the most (well, with the exception of structural fires with people trapped, which, thankfully I've never had to attend) are motor vehicle accidents or MVA's as they are known.

The small brigade I'm part of covers around 20km of the New England Highway, one of the busiest regional highways in the country, in the dozen or so years I've been a member of this brigade (I was a member of my previous one for around 20) we've had two or three MVA's a year and in that time there's been 4 fatalities (3 in a 500m stretch* in just a couple of years and another nearby just prior to my joining). The odds really aren't that good.

You might be tempted to think with those numbers that the road was crap or that people are going through at high speed but the highway is generally fine, with the exception of "the pinch" a narrow 75k S bend and people stick more or less to the speed limit. 

By far the majority of MVA's around here are caused by human error and in that fatigue and drink driving make up a large part, and then there's things like inattention (and mobile phones come into play here), inability to keep within their lane and plain stupidity, like doing a U turn over double unbroken lines just after a hill crest.

We're a couple of hours out of Newcastle and three or so from Sydney so in the "fatigue zone" and many of the MVAs reflect this, but there's also locals who work shifts at the mines (including some very lucky repeat offenders).  

Road conditions, wildlife and mechanical failure add to this though to a lesser extent.

Okay, so where am I going with this? Well, most people would have seen footage of MVA's on the news, or may have been involved in one but have you considered what really goes on? What do the anything up to a couple of dozen rescue workers and others do at these things?

All MVA's are different in their own way and things work differently in different areas, in this area NSW Fire and Rescue are the primary rescue agency, in others it will be the State Emergency Service or the Volunteer Rescue Association and in some cases the Rural Fire Service will be the rescue agency. 

In some areas there's rivalry between Fire and Rescue and the Rural Fire Service, luckily that's not an issue around here, with some F&R members also being members of their nearest RFS brigade which works well when both agencies are at an incident. The main issue is that F&R get their calls through Triple Zero well before the RFS does, in some cases they'll be on the scene before we get the call out, it's a shock to them when they find out!

MVA's have a hierarchy, the Ambo's are in charge, police may think they are but really what an Ambo wants an Ambo gets, Fire and Rescue handle the rescue, removing people from the wreckage and the RFS provides fire protection and provides extra people for lifting, moving and other duties as well as working on the clean up and the Police direct traffic till the roadworks clean up crew arrive. At least, that's how we do it here. The local general duties cops let us get on with the job (and one local is also a member of one of a local F&R brigade).

And then we have the Roads and Maritime clean up crew (if they come out) and of course the Towies that drag the mess aboard their trucks and take it away. Oh, and the rescue helicopter is a fairly regular participant in all this as well. 

That's a lot of people and agencies for a fairly average MVA, that's usually a couple of hours till things are cleaned up and safe, no further risk of fire and oils and fluids cleaned up.

Unless it's a fatality.

In a fatality it becomes a recovery rather than a rescue, and that's the job of Police Rescue (I've seen them in action a couple of times, they really know their stuff), with the nearest units a few hours away from us so there's a lot of sitting and waiting. As well as Police Rescue there's also Accident Investigation and the Coroner. 

There's a lot of boredom, there's a lot of standing around trying hard not to focus on the nasty bits but also being aware of what's going on, there's also humour which only rescue workers and the military can understand. 

There's images you don't want in your head, of cars violently torn apart and scattered over the landscape, a wheel and suspension over there, small pieces of camchain and oil pump torn out of the engine by the impact, of the engine oil coating the nearby grass, of dealing with people who can be having the worst day of their life, of a lump, under a blanket on the road.

Then you go home, grab a beer, jump under a hot shower and push it all back knowing when the pager goes off you'll be out and doing it again.

MVA's suck.

(* these were out the front of a horse stud I worked at for a while, a week or so after the fatality I attended I was mowing out the front on that area and met the father of the bloke that passed away, we had a good chat I talked about my role in the response)