Fatima Halloum
The Werribee Fire Brigade won overall first place at the 2022 New South Wales State Road Crash Rescue Challenge.
The competition was held in Dubbo, New South Wales from April 29-May 1 and saw Werribee CFA win first place in three categories and second place in two.
Team leader Daniel May said he was pleased with the team’s success.
“I’m certainly proud of the team and the amount of work that they put in after hours…training and setting scenarios up in preparation for the challenge,” Mr May said.
The Werribee Fire Brigade are the only Victorian team invited to compete in the event.
Mr May says the opportunity came up to join the competition last year.
“That was the first ever event of its kind for a state competition, and we actually won that outright,” he said.
“We attended this year off the back of that and once again [were] successful this year in winning a number of events and taking overall winners out.”
Mr May said the team’s “youthful energy” helps them to stand out against the rest.
“It’s a relatively young team and quite often in the scenarios I need to deliberately try and slow them down because they’re just full of energy and that plays out in the scenarios as well as probably one of our strengths,” he said.
The main reason they attend the event, Mr May says, is to develop skills that can be used to benefit the wider community.
“For example, last year upon our return from the competition, that night, we were dispatched to a rescue involving a car and a truck,” he said.
“Several members of the team turned out to that job and that was probably one of the most difficult extraction’s in recent years that we can remember and we’ve put a lot of those skills to the test.”
