Great work experience for local firefighters

FOREST Fire Management (FFM) operations officer Tori Spraggs has just recently come back from her deployment in British Columbia in the effort against recent bushfires.

Other Murrindindi FFM workers that also went along included Luke Heard from Alexandra and John George from Broadford.

Forty one staff from FFM Victoria were deployed to British Columbia and then were split into two taskforces.

The experience for Tori was quite special as it was her first overseas trip for work. It was a 36 day deployment which included 14 days of up to 14 hours per day and a two day break in between the next 14 days. Tori said, “We were all pretty tired, it was good though and genuine hard work.”

“We went to British Columbia. We flew into Vancouver, and we ended up at three different fire centres over there, here we call it our regions. We ended up at three different fire centres across seven different fires. There was a lot going on over there.

“Over there we saw a massive difference in the weather from when we were there. It got cold over there towards the end, when we arrived it was so hot.
“The last fire we were at it got a little more heated towards the end.

It wasn’t anything crazy, a lot of the work they had us do is mop up work but nothing too crazy, we never have to leave the fire.”

Tori’s fitness levels certainly had a test over there. “It wasn’t a holiday, it was hard work, we were doing lots of hiking,” Tori said.

“My watch tracked about 10 to 20 kilometres a day. We had heavy gear; this included our…

Image: Some of the Hume and Gippsland Forest Fire Management team.