CFA News

New Firefighters for the Apollo Bay Fire & Rescue Brigade

The brigade congratulates Tess Neal and Meg Sayers who became operational firefighters this week. Josh Keogh qualified in the last 6 months.

It’s quite a time commitment to do all the training, to turn up each Tuesday night and then attend callouts.

Therefore, you’d expect these three may have a lot of time on their hands. You be the judge. Tess, Apollo Bay born, is now doing Year 12, as well as part-time paid work. Meg is a nurse who works at the hospital and is also studying for a Masters Degree. She did a year’s placement here 8 years ago and came back to live in 2024 (that’s another story).  Josh and his family moved into the area in 2023. He runs his own business, has 3 young kids at the school yet has found the time to continue his CFA training and regularly turns out. Since becoming an operational firefighter, he’s gained his fire truck driver licence, qualified to wear Breathing Apparatus and has done Basic and Advanced First Aid (which all of us have to do).

When asked why they joined the brigade, they all wanted to contribute and felt welcomed by the brigade.

Tess said she’s always loved this community and wanted to do something to help.

Meg said she felt it would be useful to know what to do in a fire or rescue emergency and to be able to contribute her medical experience to the brigade.

Josh said initially he joined because he wanted to learn how to protect his property against fire, but now he says he’s amazed at the number of callouts and the breadth of what we do and wants to keep learning and helping.

All of them plan to qualify for Road Crash Rescue (we’re a Rescue brigade, like the SES, as well as a fire brigade).

And here we need to thank our training officer, Geoff Schmidt, who not only organises the training for the whole brigade, but gives extra time to train new recruits.

These generous people are now part of a brigade of 24 members, all of whom give an immense amount of their personal time to keeping the community safe, despite the fact most of us work full-time and have young families.

What can you do? Donate! See this post about a town protection device we need your help to buy.