My brief history with the SES

Ok, for all you people interested in joining the QLD SES, this is how it goes down.

 

Firstly, you rock up to a Public Information Night. There’s about three of these a year (the next one is in May) and go for about an hour. Basically its just a run down of what the SES does and what you’ll get from being involved. Then you sign some forms, and you’re off to an illustrious career in orange!

 

After that, you attend the following two Monday night training sessions at you local group (which you find out about at the PIN) and you'll cover safety and induction training. 

 

Then, there’s the Recruitment Weekend. This is over Friday night, all of Saturday and Sunday.

 

Whilst you may feel a little resentful about losing a weekend (grumble) you learn some really cool stuff. Like CPR, using radio’s and casualty handling, plus you get to hang out with the other recruits and bond over losing your weekend to the sycophants in orange. This is also the time to knock over a bunch of pesky paperwork.

 

And that’s the hard part over!

 

After that, we meet every Monday night for about 2-3 hours. At first, there’s some admin stuff everyone has to do like getting sized for uniforms and filling out safety booklets.

 

In my 6 months with the SES, some of the things I’ve learnt include:

 

• types of building collapses and the likely locations of any casualties
• radio communication
• constructing emergency shelters
• working effectively in a Public Safety Organisation
• an overview of flood situations and the floodboat
• and oh so many knots (which are remarkably useful, especially if you like camping!) 

This week at group we learnt lashings, which are knots used to tie big things together to construct bigger things! For example, our exercise was to construct 2 tripods to support an elaborate series of ropes and pulleys that was used to carry a casualty over a creek.

 

We managed to get the 'casualty' (a gorilla dummy called Clive? Clyde?) to safety!

 

OK, thats all so far. Any other questions about joining up, feel free to ask me. Alternatively, check out:

 

The Department of Emergency Services website - www.emergency.qld.gov.au/ses/

 

Or, for when the next PIN is happening, call the Brisbane City Council on (07) 3403 8888.

 

Bye!

 

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