Feeding Firefighters, Then and Now

There was an amusing incident in the otherwise ghastly affair of the 2016 Yarloop bushfire (in which a whole town was burned). A crew of  firefighters found themselves hungry and thirsty, and nobody coming to their aid, despite having worked nearly a 12-hour shift. In desperation, they complained (by mobile phone), to their local Member of Parliament.  The concerned MP tried to phone the control point, the Fire and Emergency Service, the minister, the shire, and Parks and Wildlife, all without success. So he dialled the triple-0 emergency number … with the result that the problem was almost instantly resolved, the crew getting a special delivery within the hour.  Hearing about this, the minister did his block, fulminating against inappropriate use of the emergency number, and suggesting, amongst other things, that the MP should have gone out and purchased the crew a pizza.

This was all pretty trivial stuff, to my mind, but it occupied the media for about two days, getting…