STATE Emergency Service crews from around the region battled it out at Mogo at the weekend in the biennial SES games, with the Kiama team emerging victorious.
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Crews from Kiama, Shellharbour, Coniston, Batemans Bay and Moruya took part in the games, held at the Rural Fire Service Training Centre over two days.
Kiama won the event, and will now go on to compete at the state competition on May 31 at Jamberoo.
The crews were rotated through five different rescue scenarios and judged on their performance with regard to teamwork, safety, initiative and use of equipment.
Scenarios included a woman who fell out of a tree and impaled her foot on a stake, extracting six people from a building damaged by a storm, rescuing a person whose foot was crushed under a container, and rescuing a man who had chased his dog under some shipping containers and became stuck.
Crews were also tasked to navigate and map 15 pieces of police evidence in bushland.
Casualties in most scenarios were played by fellow SES volunteers.
The team is familiar with glory, having made it all the way to the national competition in 2011.
Kiama SES local controller and games team leader Warren Turner said his team had trained once a week for the past month and had also undertaken fitness training, as the tasks can be physically draining on the volunteers.
Mr Turner said the unit entered the games as it was a good learning opportunity.
“What we do here we do take out on the road and use,” he said.
“We also have a lot of fun.
“It will be a privilege to represent all of the South Coast and we will do it to the best of our abilities.”
Moruya SES media liaison and community engagement officer Danielle Brice said the games were good to keep crews confident with their training and to see how others approached the different scenarios.
“It’s great too to bring together people from other areas because there is always a possibility you could be working with them somewhere down the track and it’s great to work well together and bond as a team,” she said.
“I feel it is quite competitive.
“They all put a lot of time and effort into this and they come away learning so much; from the feedback from the judges, from working together as a team, and from looking at the different ways other teams have done the jobs.”
