andrewlighten.com

We had a callout this morning for some building damage. We shouldn’t really have provided assistance, because the damage was minimal (to the point of being trivial) and nothing a half competent nephew or friend of the home owner couldn’t have fixed. It was a long way from an emergency.

It got me thinking though – I haven’t actually put forward my idea of what the SES is and does and what we should be doing. We’re not a free home maintenance service, that’s for sure.

What is the SES?

The SES is a statutory body that answers to the Victorian Police and Emergency Services Minister, the Honourable Bob Cameron. Within the Victorian Government, emergency services fall under the umbrella of the Department of Justice.

To assist with emergency management in Victoria there’s a document that’s been built up by all interested parties (government – both state and local, police, CFA, MFB, SES, etc) called the Emergency Management Manual of Victoria. It’s commonly known as the EMMV (‘em-vee’).

Within the EMMV there is a list of all the different types of emergency situations that can arise, and for each one, it lists two sets of agencies – the control agency and the support agencies. The control agency is the one that’s in charge of a particular emergency, and the support agencies are those that assist the control agency in managing an emergency.

The SES is the control agency for flood, storm and wind damage and earthquakes. For lots of other emergencies we’re a supporting agency.

What does the SES do?

The SES is pretty much a general purpose rescue support agency. When it’s a weather related event we’re in control, but for pretty much any other emergency we assist other agencies in whatever way we can.

Each SES unit does different things depending on the geographic location and the other emergency services that are present in the area. A unit on the Murray River will have strong boating skills to support police in water based search and rescue operations, for example, whereas a unit based in the Alpine areas of the state (such as Mansfield) will have skills in alpine based search and rescue.

Some SES units are ‘RAIR’ rescue units – Road, Air, Industrial and Rail – but that tends to be the role of rural SES units. Metropolitan SES units usually support the MFB as they tend to be the primary rescue agency. Where the CFA is present instead of the MFB the SES will generally take over the RAIR rescue role.

The local SES here in Maryborough does a number of things. We’re a RAIR unit, so we’re an accredited road rescue unit. We also undertake the legislated role of flood control, storm and wind damage emergency repairs. Not sure that we’ve had to deal with any local earthquakes.

We provide other assistance as required by other emergency services. This can take many forms. We can provide good lighting support because we’ve got something upward of 6000 watts of light we can deploy within 5 minutes of arriving at an incident. We’ve also got manpower that can be used to assist in casualty handling, search and rescue operations, etc.

In the time I’ve been in the local SES unit (which is coming up on 2 years) I have:

• Been to countless road accidents. Some where we’ve had nothing to do, some where the casualties were already free of the damaged vehicles and we simply assisted the ambulance service with lighting and/or casualty handling, and others where we’ve had to free trapped drivers and passengers prior to the ambulance being able to treat them.
• Been on a two searches. In one we failed to find any trace of the person (and they still haven’t been found) but in the other we found the person within 2 hours.
• Provided lighting assistance to the fire investigators who were looking into an early evening house fire.
• Helped rescue a bushwalker who broke her ankle and had to be airlifted out of the steep terrain she was in.
• Been to countless requests for assistance where wind had damaged buildings and emergency repairs needed to be made.
• Spent a week away in support of the CFA during the February 2009 bushfires.

I’m sure there are a bunch of other things I’ve forgotten about. Being in the SES is such an interesting and rewarding thing because we never know what we’ll be doing next and who and how we’ll be providing assistance next.

Having said that, most of what the local unit does is road crash and storm damage. I’d say that makes up 75% of what we do.

What else should we do?

The one thing we don’t do that I’d like to see is for the SES to take more of a leadership role in educating drivers. It’s not our role right now (the Police, the TAC and VicRoads do that in various ways) but there’s no unified program used to educate young drivers about the dangers inherent in driving. We should do more there given that we get to regularly see the outcome of drivers who get it wrong.

I don’t cook much (not as much as I should) but for some reason I ended up cooking dinner both yesterday and today. Last night I made a quick chicken curry – not particularly well – but it was edible enough. Nowhere near as good as the stuff Lisa and I used to make before we had kids, but in those days you could afford to spend 4 hours grinding and roasting spices and carefully crafting something special. These days we’re on a deadline.

Tonight I threw together some pasta. The sauce had some meat in it, but instead of using the default choice of mince I bought a cheap piece of rump and cut it up really finely. The sauce had garlic, onion, bacon, tomato, the finely chopped rump, mushrooms, corn, kidney beans, chick peas and a touch of ground pepper. It was actually pretty nice.

Our big girl just loves stories. Aside from normal kid stuff (kicking a footy around, watching TV, yelling at her parents, etc) she’s either reading stories or writing them. Her favourite author (like lots of kids) is Andy Griffiths, but she’s also worked her way through a lot of classic books (The Magic Faraway Tree, The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe,  etc). I read as a child too, but I don’t remember devouring books at the rate this little one does.

Today was the annual sports day at Big Girl’s school. I think they do sport twice a week anyway, but one day a year the whole school migrates to the local football oval for a day of competition sports. The kids all wear their house colours and compete for house points.

I think for Big Girl (and in fact, most students) it’s more of a fun social day than a competition. The second disco of the year is this evening too, so it’s a big social day.

Here’s Big Girl halfway through the long jump. She loves running and jumping, and although she’s not the quickest in her class she’s always in there having fun.

In the hurdle race she clipped the top of the first hurdle, but recovered on the second and third.

They also had a bucket race, where you have to pick up small bean bags and run them back to a bucket in a relay fashion.

This afternoon they’ll be having the final competitions after the morning practice.

I had to work on a bit of software today that had an issue with an equation. The calculation in question converted from one currency to another, but it wasn’t correctly being used to convert both ways. It involved undoing a percentage change to a figure, and this wasn’t being done.

It’s actually a fairly straightforward thing to do, but rather than explain it in a private email (or add some hints in the application in question) I figured I’d write it up here and point to it.

Adding a percentage

To add a percentage to a figure is straightforward. As an example, let’s say you want to add 20% to 80. To do that, we multiply 80 by 1.2, giving us 96.

To go the other way, however, you can’t simply deduct 20%. Taking 20% of 96 gives you 19.2, and if you deduct that you get 76.8 – which is not the original figure.

So how do you do it?

Simple.

Our original equation was essentially this:

80 * 1.2 = x

We know that x worked out to 96. If we want to go the other way, our equation becomes :

x * 1.2 = 96

Remember what you learnt at school in maths? You can move a value from one side of the equation to the other as long as you change its sign. If we move the 1.2, we get:

x = 96 / 1.2

And that’s easy to work out. It gives us back our original 80. Easy!

Subtracting a percentage

Is it any harder if we’ve subtracted a percentage? Nope. Just as easy. Let’s stick with 80 and 20%. This time we’ll subtract 20%. To do that, we’ll multiply by 0.8, thus lopping off 0.2. That gives us 64. Our equation is:

80 * 0.8 = x

We know that worked out to 64. To go the other way, our equation becomes:

x * 0.8 = 64

and again, flipping the 0.8 gives us:

x = 64 / 0.8

And that’s just as easy to work out. It gives us our original 80 again!

This is a black and white processed version of a shot I published a few days back. I’m playing around with an eval copy of Nik Software’s Silver Effects Pro.