Happy New Year from the Hutt Valley Volunteer Fire Police!

Training for HVFP resumed on Monday with a trip around the corner and a drill involving three of our key capabilities; lighting, salvage, and traffic management.

Broken up into small teams HVFP members were put to work, creating a 'one lane shunt' to protect an incident scene; establishing salvage kit and a portable dam ready for use; and setting up lighting to light up a building's exterior.

The teams operated with minimal officer supervision, and after each was completed critique was rendered. Each time we do this there's something (or someone) different involved, and we're always learning.

Some images below...

HVFP are in the process of bringing on-stream some new Metal Hallide lights; these are very bright lights as proportionate to their power draw but have some special considerations when deployed. They will, however, bring a notable increase in total lighting capability to our kit. The two lights shown are the equivalent of ~1500W of Halogen Lighting, drawing around 800W.

One of the Unit's Aquavac's, set up and ready to operate.

During the Salvage Debrief, SSO Ackroyd and other members discuss the construction and use of Portable Dams. These are essentially small pools of water created with available equipment (usually salvage sheets for water, and other equipment as available as a frame) and are used to provide a water cache for firefighting; a cooling facility for hot Gas Cylinders or as a means to treat burn patients.

At the end of the exercise an overall debrief was held, going over what had been learned and identifying key issues to be raised again on future training nights.

Typically our first training night for each year would consist of a full vehicle and equipment check; making sure that we know what we've got (and where it's stowed), what needs servicing and what needs to be stocked up. On this night though, we coupled this with a 'get-into-it' set of exercises which helped to bed in existing skills and identify areas where we need to practise.

After a quiet Christmas and New-Years period we were able to quickly verify our operational capabilities - we look forward to continuing to help NZFS and our community during the year 2010.