Dated: 20/02/09
THE Country Fire Authority has been accused of blocking city firefighters from helping fight Victoria's horrific fires.
Leaked emails accuse the CFA of blocking Metropolitan Fire Brigade management and CFA professional firefighters, and incompetently handling the fires.
The United Firefighters Union will tell the royal commission on the fires that the CFA panicked and was ill-prepared, despite knowing conditions would be the worst in Victoria's history.
The taxpayer-funded firefighters, who are better trained than volunteers, say up to 1200 of them have sat around during, and since, the blazes of February 7 — while overseas and interstate crews have been flown in to help.
The CFA and MFB deny the claims and say the firefighters and equipment were used "appropriately".
The union claims CFA managers, or incident controllers, blocked MFB crews from fighting fires in at least two areas.
Union secretary Peter Marshall claimed one incident controller told an MFB crew: "Over my dead body are we going to use you."
"The MFB commander went back and briefed the troops and said, 'This is the attitude, they don't want to use us'," he said.
At another location, an MFB taskforce was not deployed by the CFA incident controller "because of parochial issues".
"When they actually got in there the CFA said: 'Where have you been? … we've been waiting for you for ages, we needed you'.
"This is dynamite. It's hard to say it cost lives, but resources that have been paid for by the community in the form of fire appliances and personnel sat idle while people lost their houses and indeed their life."
The union has been swamped with emails from members frustrated at not being sent to fight the fires. One says: "I look at the news footage and see volunteers dead on their feet … we are sitting on our arses."A paid CFA firefighter said he was one of about six professionals who sat doing nothing at a station in Melbourne's outer north when the fire started.
"We listened to the events, including guys getting burnt out, but we were not deployed," he said. "We contacted the duty officers and said: 'We are here.' I don't think they knew.
"There are 200 (CFA) career firefighters who are disgusted about it but too fearful to put pen to paper or stand in front of a camera over it because of their careers," he said.
Another firefighter from near Geelong said professional firefighters were prevented from joining the fight.
He said CFA management wrongly thought that no professional firefighters were available.
Parochialism and politics are the worst problems, the firefighters say, with CFA managers viewing the MFB as rivals for funds, bolstering arguments for merging the two.
Some CFA volunteers also do not want outsiders fighting fires on their turf.
CFA chief officer Russell Rees said all firefighters had been used appropriately during the emergency. "There's no question the MFB were used appropriately and are still being used in specialised areas such as victim identification," he said.
MFB spokesman Simon Breer said the brigade had provided up to 1000 personnel. He said he did not believe there was a problem with its involvement.
VS 
When the bush fires caused so much damages and lives, I knew something was not right. It was all over the news that it's going to be the worst fire heat ever, which also means worst risk of bush fires ever.
With common sense, we would be deploying nearly 95% of all our available resources to tackle the issues to minimise the impact.
I suspected that this time, they're ill-prepared and underestimated the bushfires. Guess this article proves that I'm not wrong after all
Pride & politics, the divider of mankind. How pathetic!
Just because of funding and power, more than 200 lives have gone from this earth, billions of money lost.
Who are they going to blame next? God seems the more likely. Even though it was human at fault.
God have mercy upon us!!
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