Fire Rescue Victoria endured three separate outages in the past week, for up to seven hours at a time.
Technology outages are still forcing Fire Rescue Victoria to turn to pen, paper and pagers for hours at a time, 2½ years after a cyberattack damaged the emergency service systems.
The Fastcard system – which tracks crews attending jobs and is used to determine when they should receive follow-up testing for chemical exposure – went down. The Station Turn Out system experienced an outage, and Firecom began reporting 20-minute lags, meaning staff did not have real-time access to information.
“Lack of information and having to go back to those manual systems, it’s just another layer that you know is just more pressure on the members.” Responding to delays at the start of May, the spokesperson said public safety was not compromised and that Fire Rescue Victoria had worked swiftly to fix the situation.
Firefighters have not responded to structure fires within the target timeframe – which is 90 per cent of structure fires within 7.7 minutes – since quarter one in 2020-21. Fire Rescue Victoria reached 86.4 per cent on target in the most recent reporting period, quarter two of 2024-25.“FRV attributes its challenges in meeting response targets to three main factors, including location accessibility, limited resource coverage, and turnout times.
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