Combining years of medical training with his experience as a volunteer firefighter, Montrose’s Peter Langridge helped revolutionise the CFA’s health monitoring practices over two decades.
It was this that led him to receiving the prestigious Australian Fire Service Medal in this year’s King’s Birthday Honours.
“It was a bit of a surprise when I first heard about it, and I’ll put it this way, I’m honoured by it and I’m a bit lost for words,” he said.
Implementing methods of counteracting dehydration, cooling firefighters on the verge of heat stress and setting up rehab teams across the state to respond to fire events has all been actioned based on the work and research Mr Langridge has conducted since 2003.
A trained ambulance officer, Mr Langridge joined the ambulance service in 1985 and worked in this field for 11 years.
He was then contracted by the CFA to help in training before being asked to attend the 2003 Eastern Victorian Alpine bushfires to assess what was happening on the ground.
“It was based around heat stress, smoke inhalation and some other things that were cropping up out there.
“We did six weeks of research up there and came back. That’s where it started with CFA, we had the answers because we were able to spend that amount of time on fire ground and be able to try things, and from there on, it just escalated.”
One of the first things assessed was the reason for the dehydration – put down to not only physical exertion but the wearing of protective clothing in addition to high temperatures.
“A lot of it was due to the heat and people sweating and losing their electrolyte balances, which can stop the absorption of fluid through the body. So we trialled some particular electrolytes, and that actually worked, “ Mr Langridge said.
From that moment on, during each fire season, Mr Langridge and team members would be out on fire grounds doing health checks and monitoring risks.
When the Hazelwood mine fires of 2004 and 2008 occurred, Mr Langridge said there were “extra risks associated with that with carbon monoxide” because the fire was smouldering underground.
By the time the 45-day Hazelwood fire happened in 2014, the CFA had a plan they enacted and had invested in a device which could read the carbon monoxide content in the blood.
In 2011-12 new structural protective clothing was introduced but because of the weight of the fabric and the heat of building fires, heat stress cases increased.
“We had to find a way to resolve that one, which we did, using a particular type of chair that we got in from the States called a cool chair.
“We just sit them in the chair and the arms on it have bags. We top those bags up with water, and they just put their arms in, and that actually cools the blood that’s going back into the core of the body and drops the core temperature.”
The introduction of volunteer based health response teams also occurred in 2012, which now sports 23 units across the state including one in Yellingbo, all under the management of Mr Langridge.
These rehab crews do the health checks for hydration, smoke inhalation and heat stress, and provide snacks, water and electrolytes, as well as the cooling chairs, to a rotation of firefighters before they return to the fire ground.
“It’s about a 20 minute period that these people are sitting in the chairs with their arms in the water, which does actually cool down the core.
“They’re going to go back in anyway, if the job is big enough and long enough, but it’s a way of interrupting the progression of heat stress to a point where it isn’t dangerous.”
Mr Langridge said his ambulance training has been invaluable to his role, not only in the medical sense but because it taught him that “we’ve got a responsibility to ensure our people are safe”.
It was also Mr Langridge’s ability to understand the stressors and challenges firefighters face, as one himself, that helped inform the strategies now embedded in the CFA.
“Having both the ambulance experience and then as a volunteer firefighter, it gave me the opportunity to look at what we’re doing, how we’re doing it, and what was causing the problems,” he said.
“Sometimes you really need to be part of it to understand how things work.”
Starting his volunteering journey first with Lilydale in 1982 and then Mooroolbark, Mr Langridge set up the District 13 Headquarters Brigade, where he was captain for seven years, a place for the first of the rehabbing teams to establish.
“I’d looked at (volunteering) over a number of years because as a young person we went through the 1962 bush fires and nearly lost our property…when I got to Lilydale, I thought, ‘Well, might as well try it’.
“It was a good decision, because I learned so much in the time…and I understood what the members went through.”
He is now a member of the Yellingbo CFA which has a dedicated rehabilitation unit servicing the outer east.
