 What's transpired tonight is four crews getting together in a mock structure fire which has actually occurred here back in the 80s and it's very rare that we get the opportunity to do that sort of exercise in a major asset which is so important to us in this district. So tonight's been a multiple-purpose exercise, pre-season, pre-planning and camaraderie. While there's multiple reasons, one is interoperability with the other brigades. We do this reasonably frequently just so we know each other's equipment and we also just recently updated the pre-plan for the structure. Basically this is like a live test of the pre-plan. We first sat down in April this year, we met with Andrew Judkin the owner in May and from there on we compiled an organizing committee of nine people and all had specific duties to do and what we've seen tonight is the culmination of nine people's work and now then in the milpond effect the brigades are actually you know bringing it to fruition. It's absolutely brilliant. Yeah the brigades are Callista the Patch, Sassafrasse, Montbalk and Bayeswater BA. So it's sort of working with that and having multiple BA crews in the building and then changing over with other crews. And also Ranges FOV has also been running the two sector radio command channels. Yeah communication went really well especially now because we used some of the digital channels and basically we're sort of using the FOV more and more for these even just for exercises. Approximately the last count and I've seen some more faces than I was expecting it's just on 60 volunteers have given up their time tonight on this one exercise so it's just been brilliant. Look you'd only you would probably come near to probably two-thirds of this number in a summer season group training exercise but in winter or off season or outside the summer season this is the first. This is the largest that even our older veterans can ever recall that this has been done so this has been quite exciting from that perspective. What we've had is four anonymous assessors all with a clipboard and a series of questions and a scale rating. What I've seen of that so far it's been ranging between seven and eight and six six seven and eight in terms of various skill levels coordination crew cohesiveness in terms of radio use commands and so forth but right now to what we first started as our timing we're five minutes ahead so we're pretty spot on. Well one of the other focuses tonight was to capture as many pre-season minimum skills to be signed off by all brigade members. There are 12 12 disciplines the only one we didn't do tonight were burnovers but we've usually done that back at our brigades but tonight we've done two dual sectors a sector command on pumping and a sector command on BA and search and rescue. Running that parallel with this number of people was an enormous task and then also basically pump operations with various different appliances different pumps different houses branches all that sort of thing so kept everyone pretty much on that top. In terms of other areas of focus of skills we've got a lot of new recruits here tonight now what we've done is scripted a lot of the activities for the purpose of giving them confidence because sometimes when you run an exercise and you've got new recruits and veterans the veterans will take over and rightly so and the new recruits are lost. What we've done is reverse that so the new recruits weren't about their business with purpose knowledge skills and be able to adapt to what is a semi pressure pressure situation so that's been one of the real pluses. The owner here Andrew Judkin and his wife have been nothing short of unbelievable totally opening this property up to us. This is their peak season of the year their wedding season so every single day there's been one wedding on weekends there's even multiple weddings so they're shut down tonight for the purposes of us being able to to be able to do our to our stuff here. He was able to pinpoint this night back in May so he committed right from the get-go but I encourage every brigade to look at your fellow brigade see if you can team up as a multi brigade look at a major asset get them on board and you just don't know what you can achieve. This has really done a lot for us as brigade members so when we go to the fire ground a real good day is a good day you know so it's built that but also it's tied as more into the community. 30 homes were letterbox dropped around here so they wouldn't panic and that just gets gives them a knowledge that we're around for them so there's so much in this.