BY ISABEL EVERETT
The Fire Brigade Employees Union says under-resourcing across the Hunter is making it harder to conduct flood rescues.
The FBEU is calling on the NSW government for increased resources in response to climate change related disasters, including bushfires and floods.
The Union's NSW Secretary Leighton Drury says cuts to funding, and training programs over the past decade are making it harder to keep the community safe.
“Over the last week Fire Rescue NSW has completed hundreds of flood related rescues and call-outs across the state, around eight times our normal workload."
"What we're seeing specifically across the Hunter, we've only got very few swift in water technicians. We have to wait for equipment to come up from Sydney, which obviously puts a time delay on putting our technicians in the water, the very few that we do have."
The FBEU says there's not enough professional fire fighters across the region, and they are too heavily reliant on volunteers to fill in the gap the Government has created by not having funded professionals.
"Certainly we need more resources at Port Stephens, Cessnock and Rutherford. We need more retained brigades moving into these growing areas around Medowie, Fletcher and Huntley."
“FBEU members give a guarantee
of service with 90% of calls responded to within 10 minutes, but we haven't seen an increase in professional fire fighters in the last decade, we need at least another 100 around the Hunter region."
