THE FIRE Brigade Employees Union says Fire and Rescue NSW (FRNSW) must guarantee trucks will not be put offline because of a lack of staff at the Orange fire station.
The union has responded to a statement from FRNSW that it is employing more retained firefighters, by saying the recruitment process is too slow and that positions have been vacant for more than 18 months.

Union organisers said the station needed five more recruits to reach its full complement of 22 retained firefighters, who are part time officers that work on call for the fire service.

The staffing situation has resulted in only one truck of permanent firefighters attending some blazes that require at least two crews.

“This appliance should be kept online 24/7, 365 days of the year,” senior firefighter and union delegate Shane Brinkworth said.

“It’s important for the community of Orange to have a fire service that can rapidly respond.”

Country union organiser Tim Anderson said the fire service was putting trucks offline for minutes, hours, or up to a day, depending on the availability of retained firefighters.

Fellow organiser Greg Mitchell said the recruitment process was taking, in some cases, between 12 and 14 months.

“For over 18 months we’ve been short retained firefighters in Orange,” he said.

“They say they’ve been recruiting, but the recruitment has been very sub standard and the turn over of retained firefighters is such that they’re not recruiting quickly enough,”

Mr Anderson said relying on back- up crews from Molong, Blayney or Kelso delayed response times and deprived other towns of their fire service.

He said the Rural Fire Service could not be guaranteed as a backup, because it relied on a roster of volunteers and was better equipped for bushfire fighting than structural firefighting.

He said FRNSW needed to give an assurance that Orange’s second truck would be available at all times and would not be taken offline.

“How they do that is up to them, they can recruit more retained firefighters, they need to adequately resource the truck,” he said.

“The concern I have is that it’s going to take a tragedy before someone says we can’t take that appliance offline.”