The last fire (at Wilson's Prom.) has at last been controlled; the rain helped. And now there is the worry that the rain might be too intense on the bare soil.

I can't comment (these days) on what Victorians and other places outside NSW use for hose connections. I know NSW uses Storz fittings (made famous as part of the fuelling lines for V2 rockets during WWII) because they're bisexual/hermaphroditic; either end can connect to any other of the same size. The NSW town brigades carried the biggest size (and a few of the medium size) while the RFS carried the larger of the two medium sizes and a lot of both of the small sizes, and NPWS carried the smaller of the medium sizes and mostly the two small sizes. Our brigade (RFS) made sure we carried interconnectors for everything, as well as the ability to break into polypipe lines of most sizes and still leave them "intact" after we'd gone; I kept banging on about the Tassie experience and was supported by the fact that the mother of one of our members had been a teacher trapped in a refuge on the Tasmanian coast in '67.

If you were there before '97, Bill, you arrived when every Shire council was its own separate Bushfire Service. That changed (as a result of the Coroner's report into the '94 fires) when the Rural Fire Service was formed from all the separate versions and welded into a cooperative entity. It took a few practice runs with seriously major events but I suspect there has been so much interstate cooperation that any truck that goes interstate gets as set of interconnections as they cross the border, so to speak.

Cheers, Rowan