After 12 years at the helm of the Rural Fire Service leading New South Wales through some of its worst bushfires seasons, Shane Fitzsimmons will step down and move into a new, broader role.
He will now use his expertise to head a new disaster recovery agency - Resilience NSW - helping the state deal with bushfires, drought and the worsening coronavirus crisis. Speaking to Sky News on Tuesday, Mr Fitzsimmons said stepping down from his position with the Rural Fire Service was not easy, but he was passionate about the new position.
After a horror 2019 and start to 2020, Mr Fitzsimmons assured there was a lot of work to be done in his new disaster recovery role. “In NSW we’ve seen this compounding effect of disasters impacting communities, often the same communities,” he said. “We’ve had extraordinary drought conditions, water deficits right across the landscape, that were really impacting regional NSW, on top of that, we had the worst bushfire season in NSW history, with 25 lives lost, and now we’ve seen floods and storms.
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