The Melton community witnessed some commotion yesterday with a response of more than 16 fire trucks to a structure fire, fortunately it was just a mock exercise.
On Sunday, 20 August, CFA and FRV joined forces to undertake a large-scale mock incident as part of CFA’s Mt Cottrell Group’s training exercises.
The crews met at 8.45am at Tabcorp park in Melton for the pre-briefing and then the exercise took place in a real time call-out scenario to a structure fire at a local food processing factory in Melton.
One of the exercise organisers from CFA’s Melton Fire Brigade, 4th Lieutenant Bailey Rhodes, said a huge amount of planning went into the exercise and it was a successful day.
“From what started as a simple idea in my head one night after brigade training, to the many months of work following, turned into a great multi-agency exercise,” Bailey said.
“I want to thank everyone involved, in particular FRV who provided their heavy pumper, ladder platform and firefighters.
“The Melton Fire Station is co-located with FRV and CFA so it’s always great to bring the crews together in an exercise to strengthen our skills and interoperability.
“We also had CFA crews attending from as far as Gisborne and Scoresby which was great to see, it also gave our crews a chance to see how the Scoresby hose layer truck works in action.”
The drill had multiple trucks on scene from Melton, Bacchus Marsh, Truganina, Rockbank, Toolern Vale, Werribee, Eynesbury, Coimadai, Mt Cottrell, Scoresby, Gisborne and FRV.
