 I'm Rhonda Day and I'm Libby Simons and we're from the Volunteer Support Programme. We're looking at Volunteer Sustainability, Volunteer Development and Volunteer Support. Together three streams that we're working towards and each of those streams have a range of different projects that we're working on. Within the Volunteer Sustainability Project we're looking at growth and decline, engaging diverse communities, recruitment, retention and recognition and the Membership Sustainability Project. And under the development stream we're looking at leadership, well-being and training and assessment. If you'd like to find out more just contact us or check out the website. My name is Leading Firefighter Daniel Torres from Dandenong Fire Station. I've been working with Leading Firefighter Greg Anderson on a project on high-rise firefighting and multi-story firefighting. We've been working on it for about four or five years now. Doing a fair bit of research including myself. I've travelled around the states to New York and Boston having a look at what they do and Denver. We've basically from our research come out with some equipment, tactics and strategies that CFA can use to better handle firefighting in high-rise and multi-story environments. The benefit to firefighters within CFA is that they'll be safer if they encounter fires in high-rise or multi-story environment. But also just in our general structural firefighting it will hopefully, the tactics and techniques that we're talking about will raise the skills of our firefighters across the organization generally. And obviously the benefit to the community is that as our community tends to move towards living in high-density living, we will be better able to keep them safe. Hi, I'm Pamela Mitchell. I'm part of the Career Firefighter Recruitment Team. We're very excited to be invited along to the project expo today. The Career Firefighter Recruitment Team does sit alongside Project 2016. Very exciting opportunities are increasing our workforce, tapping into those that are in the organization already, be a volunteering capacity or within the organization. Looking forward to making a transition over to operational work. Career Firefighter Recruitment are very busy this year. Just currently closed off a recruitment campaign and about to get underway with recruitment. This is for hiring for positions for 2014. There's lots of work to be done and looking forward to being part of it. Hello there. Hi, I'm Ian Stevenson. I'm the vegetation project manager for what we call fire ecology as the term we now use. And I'd like to introduce my colleague, Mike McSteven. The fire ecology project started three years ago. It's endeavoured to bring in objectives of the natural environment, how fire interacts with the natural environment in the CFA's business. It's been a challenge. Eventually we have a number of publications that we've produced. But then it was a matter of getting a bit of traction out there in the community. So we trialled a pilot which we call Firescape based on a New South Wales model of hot spots. Mike, tell us a bit about that, could you? Well Firescape is a two workshop model which looks at teaching landowners about fire ecology. So fire planning from two perspectives. One's a fire ecology perspective and the other is a fire risk perspective. So getting them to look for native vegetation that's on their properties and even on their neighbours' properties and planning what the best use of fire is to take their assets but also to bring in appropriate levels of fire into the native vegetation which keeps the native vegetation regenerating, keeps it healthy which improves the native vegetation as well as giving them some asset protection. We've found that a lot of landowners have been very happy about that and have been quite happy to consider using fire and the properties that they otherwise could fire away from. So it's been a good community engagement program. Also naturally resource management groups like Landcare and Trust and Nature are very interested in this area as well. They haven't done a lot of private land building before but they're certainly very interested and very willing to engage in our specific projects. Hi I'm Danielle Martin and I'm with the Grassland Curing Project at the CFA and I'm a Satellite Remote Sensing Analyst. Now the Grassland Curing Project involves the collection of field observations from across the state and these observations are telling us how dry the grass is, which is what curing is. And these observations feed into the calculation for the Grassland Fire Danger Index which helps determine the fire danger rating of Victoria throughout the fire season. Now this season we've got a new satellite and field data product. So this new product combines both field observations with satellite observations. Now the satellite data we're getting is from the Weather Bureau. They've got a direct feed of satellite data from the NASA satellite and this satellite orbits the Earth every 90 minutes. So we've actually got an updated satellite image every day but we're just using a new satellite image once a week. So every Sunday we use a satellite map and we use a map derived from field observations and we produce a Grassland Curing map by Monday every week throughout the fire season. So this is basically a more accurate way of presenting Grassland Curing data so it's going to provide a more accurate calculation of the Grassland Fire Danger Index. So currently we've got over 150 volunteers making these observations every week but there are some pockets of Victoria where we're needing more observations. So we do welcome anybody out in the rural communities to volunteer, put their hands up and volunteer to make these observations every Sunday for a Monday map throughout the fire season.