Flood rescue capabilities enhanced through interagency training in Lismore

INa world that is now seemingly arranged by a budding cohort of easily offended propriety specialists, that’ll cancel you out in a flash should you dare transgress beyond their fickle and enforced sensibilities; it is ironic how the old F-word has become acceptable and even replaced by a new one – Failure.

From everyone in an 8-person race gaining ribbons to ‘celebrate’ their efforts, and scores not even being kept in junior sport events; it seems modern culture has veered down the padded rabbit hole of ensuring we’re all spared the subject position of loser. As such, we can’t all be winners, and most of the time who’d even want to be? But to make everyone (first-place getters included) part of a collective “there-there” middle ground is mind boggling.

Defeat, or dare I say failing (or just the sense of having failed) at something should never be eradicated from anyone’s experience: it is one of the most invaluable lessons we can learn, and history in every field is full of individuals that have risen from some of the toughest tumbles caused by defeat. Relatedly, Winston Churchill once enthused, “Success is not final; failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.”

Hot on the heels of Churchill’s countergrounding pearl is an even better one from his fellow Nobel Prize laureate, Samuel Beckett, who once famously expounded, “Ever tried? Ever failed? No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” The overwhelming essence and message of which is to just keep persisting, refuse to be deterred by setbacks; and what’s more, make it your motivating force and mission to improve, just keep trying – because true failure only ever occurs when we curl up and call it quits.

One of my favourite examples of defeat followed by triumph relates to Kevin Sheedy, the former Essendon coach in the AFL (and a distant relative of mine on my mother’s side). Following Sheeds’ Bombers being demolished in the 1983 Grand Final (by a then record margin of 83-points) he famously growled at his club’s official postgame function: “If I see anybody in this room with a smile on their face, I’ll throw you out!” Over the top some might say, until you learn his team won the next two premierships in a row –against Hawthorn both times, the same team that inflicted the belting of ’83. Which is easily one of the most literal embodiments of Roy T. Bennett’s notion, “Failures are the stairs we climb to reach success.”

Silver spoons and mollycoddling interactional styles aside, not having failed at something (and acknowledging it) at some stage is akin to an incurred developmental curse, and one that warps, albeit limits your very understanding of not just life, but self and overall circumstance. Or as Maya Angelo once confided, “You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated. In fact, it may be necessary to encounter the defeats, so you can know who you are, what you can rise from, and how you can still come out of it.”

The NSW State Emergency Service (SES) is enhancing its food rescue capabilities by developing the skills of volunteers through an interagency training

Pelican, a one-day training event on the Wilson’s River, which saw emergency services combine forces to simulate real-life food rescue scenarios to follows last year’s unprecedented fooding and took learnings from recent natural disasters. It simulated in-water and on-water food rescue capabilities, mass rescues exercise held on the weekend.

More than 150 people took part in Exercise improve techniques and response times during severe weather events. and evacuations during a food, and saw dummies and realvpeople pulled to safety.

An Incident Management Team was also stood up in a training environment at thevNSW SES North-Eastern Zone Headquarters in Goonellabah as part of the exercise,vfurther developing emergency management techniques and response capabilities inbthe NSW SES. As the lead agency for food rescue, the NSW SES coordinated the training exercise which involved teams from Fire and Rescue NSW, the Volunteer Rescue Association, NSW Police, NSW Rural Fire Service and Marine Rescue.