Melton CFA member Cooper Rhodes spoke with Faith Macale about his experience during the Grampians bushfire.
What is your connection to the Melton CFA?
My connection to the Melton Fire brigade is that I have been around it since birth. My dad has been a member for more than 35 years, and my brother for more than 15 years, with myself being a member for more than 10 years. It’s more of a family connection than anything
What do you like about being a member of the CFA?
Being a member of the CFA is truly an incredible experience, because of the friendships you can gain along the way from around the state, the opportunities that are provided by the CFA like strike teams, flood deployments, joint task forces with other organisations, or as simple as the urban Junior and senior state championship, but mainly the feeling of knowing that on someone’s worst day we can do our part to hopefully make it that bit better for them triumph’s everything
You were one of the crews from Melton that went to the Grampians, paint us a picture of what you saw and did there.
Arriving in Halls Gaps was an eye opening experience in itself seeing the parts that had been affected already. A recent fire only weeks before was breath-taking, seeing the kilometres of burnt forest and some areas of bright green regrowth on trees already was like a painting. After arriving at our staging area, and barely being able to see 30 meters in front of you as the smoke was quickly covering the air, an understanding of how serious the fire was. Our crew all said that seeing the size on VicEmergency compared to seeing it in person really opens your eyes on what people are going through. The crew I was a part of were tasked with entering the forest to protect multiple structures. Entering the forest to complete this task gave you the ability to see the tireless efforts FFMV and CFA crews had put in to try and contain this fire.
Is there a local place you went to after coming back from the Grampians to decompress and process the experience?
After returning from the Grampians it was back to life as normal. Starting the night shift the next night and getting straight back into work life, but coming home and being able to sit on the couch and talk to mum and dad about the experiences and the massive amounts of learning experiences I received was amazing. I also talked about how impressive it was to see a community come together in a time of need and the respect and love they had for us CFA members. Dad was always engaged in the conversation, and mum was just wanting to give me a hug.
