CFA's new logistics centre has risen to every challenge thrown at it during its first year of operation after moving to double its capacity from 3200 square metres to 8000 square metres.
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Its staff were in the middle of the move from Knoxfield to a new site in Scoresby, right alongside EastLink, when the Bunyip State Forest fire broke out last year. But the staff didn't miss a beat.
They successfully completed the move (with support from the Infrastructure Services team) while supplying firefighters and incident management teams with everything they needed to set up a staging area and manage and respond to the biggest fire of the 2018-19 bushfire season.
This season State Logistics Centre staff were put further to the test as the state experienced an unprecedented fire season where more than 1.5 million hectares burned across Victoria, mainly in East Gippsland and the north-east.
Eighty-five per cent of CFA's firefighters' needs can be supplied by the State Logistics Centre, which carries more than 1,900 line items to support CFA's 55,000 members across more than 1,200 sites. It planned all stocks at 2009 levels for the summer season, which proved to be a wise strategy to meet the unexpected demand.
Between 1 December 2019 and 31 January 2020 the centre distributed:
- more than 120,000 litres of drinking water and more than 154,000 sachets of hydrating powder
- more than 2,300 pieces of wildfire PPC, 3,800 pairs of wildfire gloves, 1,000 pairs of boots, 650 wildfire helmets and 4,600 goggles
- 1,000 hoses (which would reach from Melbourne's CBD to Werribee if rolled out)
- more than 33,000 litres of foam concentrate that would make 39 million litres of foam
- more than 46,000 P2 firefighting masks and an additional request for 450,000 community masks distributed on behalf of the federal government.
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