 Welcome to part three of a four-part series focusing on the CFA recruit course. Recruits are from many different backgrounds, including current CFA volunteers and come from all over the state of Victoria. Operations Officer Chris Bingham, along with some instructors and recruits from the CFA recruit course, will take you through what happens in the 18-week course. How's this materials response training? It's obviously about response to sort of chemical spills or dangerous goods spills that requires the fibregate to come in and actually deal with. And it's a really specialised field so when we have a spill of a dangerous good or a chemical that can impact either the environment or the community, it's very often called on the fibregate and those specialist skills include things like identifying what the product is, preventing the spread of the product and then more importantly recovering or mitigating the impact of the product on the people or the environment. We set up a range of scenarios where they might have to go in and seal a leak in a drum and then they'll go through the decontamination process of actually coming out of the hot zone and working their way back into the cold zone. Emergency medical response or what we know as EMR, it encompasses what we traditionally know as first aid, but then it goes a little bit further and also does some enhanced life support techniques and it allows us to be a first response to non-breathing, non-conscious patients in support of the ambulance and try to provide a bit more of a service to assist the ambulance in response to the community. We do a bit of a scenario, sort of day in the life of a firefighter and we sort of try and cover off day shift and night shift. So they'll come in and they'll do their vehicle checks as they would on station and any duties around the station we'll go through inventories and we cover off right throughout the night so we give them that exposure to working in darkness as well before they go out on station and have their first job in the dark. We went down to the mines for the whole day in pretty much darkness when we did our drills and there was a lot of tight spaces in there but we worked as a great team together and we had a really, really good and positive day. Confined spaces is quite challenging and it does test your limits to what you're capable of, very challenging but also really rewarding when you've come out the other end and you realise that you can do it and you can accomplish whatever the challenge is set in the tight spaces that you're assigned to. VA Week is when we get to learn about the breathing apparatus what's involved, the mechanics, the machinery, what we're using but also the technique on how we wear it, how we use it and the importance of it as well where it's going to assist in firefighting and hopefully help you save a life. It was around midway through the course when we did VA I think that was really where it went up a few notches and everyone sort of began to understand what was expected of them and at that point it really sort of hit home to how challenging it was going to be but also how rewarding. The driver training is quite funny for the recruits because we get a whole range of recruits and of course they all come in thinking they know how to drive but with most fire services there's expert driver trainers that come in and the recruits very quickly learn that they can't drive as much as they thought they could and so the driver training is designed to allow them to operate and drive large heavy vehicles in a safe manner in emergency response conditions. The driving side of the course is challenging a lot of bad habits to unlearn but very rewarding, realising the safer ways that you can drive a vehicle definitely applying that to when you're driving a code one with your trucks. They drive sort of the streets around just teaching to the Hendon system once they've completed that week they then have a theory exam and a practical exam where they're assessed by one of the accredited driving instructors. I personally didn't realise that the extent to which driver training was held within the CFA and the emphasis and importance that was put on it and the amount of time that we spent doing it which was sort of six days of very rigorous testing and training was well worth it, got a lot out of it.