 Hello, my name is Robert Joy. I was chair of the Independent Fiskville Investigation and I welcome this opportunity just to talk briefly about the investigation and give people a bit of an overview of what we did, what we found out and what's now happening in relation to it. The investigation started up in December 2011 following concerns raised in the Melbourne media about the possibility that training at Fiskville during the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s may have led certain people to become ill much much later in the proceedings. So we were given terms of reference to focusing on what sorts of flammable materials were being used in training and how these might relate to outcomes after that and also whether there was concern arising from that in relation to possible contamination of the site at Fiskville issues such as the possibility that drums of chemicals had been buried and remained at the site, making some conclusions about levels of exposure of different working groups at Fiskville to different types of material and also evaluating what the CFA management knew about processes going on at Fiskville, what alerts there may have been raised with them and how they may have reacted to them. So just briefly I'll run through some of these key points from the investigation. At the outset I should say how grateful we were to the some 320 people who came forward past and present members of CFA and of their families and these people shared their experiences with us in a very frank and open way and without that input we certainly wouldn't have been able to generate the report which we have which I believe has reasonably comprehensively dealt with the issues which were raised. In relation to the sorts of chemicals which were the focus of concern here we're not talking so much about petrol and diesel which were materials supplied in bulk to Fiskville under normal commercial arrangements but with materials which were given as gifts or donated to Fiskville by companies outside who felt that it would be useful for these flammable materials to form part of the training regime at Fiskville and these materials often came from sources which were a bit poorly known to know exactly what was in the drums just that it was useful because they could be burnt as part of the training exercise. The concerns therefore really arise in two areas one is the fact of not being exactly sure what was in some of the drums and secondly that because they were drummed materials the materials had to be handled manually rather than going from say a bulk storage tank and being reticulated into the area where the fire training exercises were being set up. This meant that a group of employees called pad operators were handling these drums and decanting material from the drums manually into smaller containers which they then carried out to set up the fire exercises on the area called the pad. So these were the people which we concluded were the most exposed to the raw chemicals the flammable materials which were the focus of this particular investigation. So our assessment of the relative risk of their exposure that is relative to other working groups and people at Fiskville was that overall they were exposed to a high risk but principally because of the chemicals which they were using. The next group which was exposed to a high risk were those instructors who were permanently appointed to Fiskville as permanent paid instructors. On average these people were there for about three and a half years and our conclusion was that their overall exposure was high not because they were often exposed to the raw chemicals themselves which was mainly the pad operator's job but because they were exposed during the training exercises and they would be running many training exercises often several a day whilst they were running courses exposure to products of combustion in smoke also define aerosols which would have been may have contained contaminants these are aqueous aerosols coming from recycled fire water and also the products of the foam and other fire extinguishing agents. So the permanent instructors were the group who were next most significantly exposed after that exposure tended to drop off markedly through to those who were there doing training exercises because people did training exercises only for relatively short periods and relatively infrequently during their careers with CFA. So our conclusion there was that while the trainees in the live fire exercises would have been exposed to the same sorts of contaminants that is combustion products foam breakdown products and fire water as the instructors their exposure was very much less and so we've characterised their exposure overall as being low. You then have to consider people who worked at Fisfield but weren't involved with fire training exercises people who were members of families who lived at Fisville school children who attended the primary school there and overall we concluded that their exposure was far less even than the trainees and therefore we've concluded that their exposure really was negligible. So overall we've tried to look at the people who are working and around Fisfield and give a relative risk assessment in terms of their likely exposure to various sorts of potential hazard and I hope that this will be useful in any in the health study which CFA has now agreed needs to follow on from this study which we did. One of the important areas which we focused on was how in fact the various drums and the contents of the drums which were brought onto the premises and used for the fire training were then disposed of because over the years it was clear that on a number of occasions significant quantities of drums had been buried at Fisfield and the question was whether these were still there and if so whether these raised particular concerns. What we found is that there are basically two types of drum burial which have occurred. One was sort of regular burial which took place during the 70s and the 80s when drums had been emptied. These drums were crushed and put into one of two old landfills which at that time existed up at the back of Fisfield. This is in the southwest corner of the property and so this was quite regular practice once the drums of contents had been emptied and used the drums were crushed and put into one or other of these landfills. But in addition periodically there was a build-up of drums and people became concerned about the contents of these drums and because of the fact that there was a very limited opportunity to dispose safely of them off-site they tended to get buried periodically in large numbers at Fisfield and we identified probably four distinct periods of burial. We're convinced that two of these burials which took place during the 1980s were subsequently exhumed under appropriate controls from EPA and the drums and the contaminated soil were disposed of. So in two cases one which the exhumation took place in 1991 the other took place in 2002 we're confident that a very large quantity of contaminated soil and drums were removed from two sites and that those sites are certainly no longer an issue for people who might be concerned about gases coming off from the soil. There is one smaller drum burial which we are not sure absolutely where it is and are reasonably confident it's still in the ground and this occurred some probably 20 over 20 years ago and we are confident that again because of the duration even though material still would have been in these drums that it's not likely to cause any problem at the surface. Any volatile material in the drums would long since have gassed off however the report which we've written does raise the question that there may be contamination of groundwater and one of our recommendations is that this possibility be further investigated and CFA has agreed to that recommendation along with all of the other recommendations which we've made. Just briefly the other recommendations which we've made really like this one which I've just mentioned about possibility of residual buried drums really addressing residual issues not any current issues at Fiskville. They're addressing these past practices which took place maybe 30 or 20 years ago and making sure that there isn't residual contamination in the water treatment system or in the soil that would pose any significant risk to people on site. Our conclusion certainly was that that's not the case but there is a need for some further work and as I say CFA has agreed to do this. The final area that I'll comment on was the area in relation to what CFA management over the years knew about the practices at Fiskville particularly practices which nowadays would be looked on as quite unsafe and which certainly wouldn't take place and haven't taken place for at least a decade and a half and what we found is that Fiskville throughout the 70s and 80s did tend to operate pretty much on its own and not that it was without control from the center but things which went on at Fiskville tended to stay at Fiskville unless there was a good reason for them to be raised at head office and so in an area of the 70s and the early 80s when there really wasn't a great deal of regulation in the state in terms of handling hazardous materials and safety in terms of waste disposal of these sorts of materials Fiskville like a lot of the industries and other agencies operated without the sorts of controls which nowadays would be taken as automatically expected however by the late 80s and early 90s that situation was changing new regulations had been brought in in relation to dangerous good storage and management and occupational hazard hazards and safety management and what we concluded was as a result of the various interviews that we did and looking at reports and audits which were commissioned in the main because of people at the grassroots level expressing concern was that by the early 90s in particular management at head office had really I think not caught up with many of the changes that were taking place in terms of societal concerns about hazardous chemicals and the risks and also the regulations and their requirements and so it was during the early 90s that a number of concerned staff dangerous goods trained staff in the human resources area and instructors at Fiskville started to raise concerns started to initiate audits and reports on storage of dangerous goods and practices at Fiskville and tried to push a real reappraisal of what was going on here our criticism of management was that they were slow to react to these people at grassroots level who are pushing for change change did eventually occur and it was a major change in that the training area was completely redeveloped and the most important shift was to move away from any use of material or virtually any use of material in drums particularly unknown material from unknown sources and significant manual handling of this material a shift over to a much greater reliance upon LPG as the fuel which was used in training exercises the advantage of this is it didn't require manual handling and it's a much cleaner burning fuel so not only did it reduce the risk of exposure to the raw chemicals themselves but it also reduced significantly the risks associated with the products of combustion because there's a much cleaner burning fuel far less problems associated with the sorts of pollutants which might have been released in the combustion process so what in summary we've done is we've looked at the historical practices we found reasons for them we found that the current situation at Fiskville is that these legacy issues need to be further investigated but there's no good reason to conclude that they pose any significant risk to anyone on the site at present certainly further work needs to be done CFA have agreed to do that and certainly we are emphasizing that what we've described in the report is not current practice at Fiskville or any of the regional training grounds it's historical practice practice which drew to a close during the 1990s thanks very much for your attention