Orange Rural Fire Brigade: Geoff Selwood on crews battling through Easter long weekend

"In the game" for over 50 years now, Orange Rural Fire Brigade's duty officer, Geoff Selwood says volunteers with the Rural Fire Service do a little more than dealing with just fire, especially over public holiday weekends.

"It's not just a matter of running out and putting water on fires, but that's the bit that people see," Mr Selwood said.

"The rest of what people don't see are the phone calls that people are getting, the training across the board and the scenes we're arriving to, whether that's to assist ambulance or help with rescue jobs - and some of those situations are extremely confronting."

Marking the start of the Easter break, a man in his 60s sadly died at the scene of a motorcycle accident on April 15, which Mr Selwood says can also be a very difficult time for first responders.

"We usually get [called out for] motor vehicle accidents through the night, especially over weekends and public holidays times, which are the ones we don't want ... but the accident off the Canowindra Road was later in the morning and we were warned by head office before going out," he said.

"The gentleman had unfortunately taken a corner too fast, ended up 50 metres down the road and then hitting a tree, he was deceased on site ... you've got to look at how people are turning up to those sites and making sure that they're all okay, because most of our people are farmers or that sort of thing - so they're not involved in coming across deceased people every day of the week.

"Our colleagues in fire and rescue, the police and the ambo's know what it's like, but it still doesn't matter - you've got to be looking at making sure that everyone's okay, that's just another part of the job."

Some other calls directed to the Orange Rural Fire Brigade over the recent holiday break involved a lawn mower fire and backburning jobs for winter cropping, including the heart attack of a man, who sadly died in the paddock of his property.

A car was fully ablaze in Larras Lee as well, after a woman had hit a kangaroo while driving over the weekend. This occurred in the early morning hours around 5am, which was a call off the back of another incident around midnight just some hours prior.

On Easter Monday, during the start of its training session with Clifton Grove Ophir Brigade, crews were also called out to Borenore Caves, where a woman was immobile due to suffering an ankle injury, seeing around nine of 15 volunteers travelling on trucks to the site.

"There's no standard '9 to 5' working hours when you work in this volunteer world of ours and when you're on-call, you've got to be near radios and computers, near everything," Mr Selwood said.

"So, even scheduled training days can all change with one phone call, but crews got back and they finished out their training day - filling up the training centre with make-believe smoke, exposing the newer ones to different situations, explaining where the heat levels are - it's the newer ones that are still learning to have a mind's eye about different situations, whether that's in training or out there."

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