When a grass fire breaks out on a scorching February afternoon west of Bendigo, the people who arrive first are almost always unpaid volunteers — neighbours, farmers, tradespeople and retirees who have trained for years for exactly that moment. Understanding how the Country Fire Authority marshals that enormous volunteer workforce is essential to understanding how regional and rural Victoria defends itself against one of its most persistent natural threats.
This explainer draws on publicly available CFA operational documents, the Country Fire Authority Act 1958 (Vic), and material published by Emergency Management Victoria to walk through the structure, the 2020 reform that reshaped the sector, and the seasonal preparation cycle that begins well before the first hot day of summer.
The scale of the volunteer model #
The CFA operates across roughly 60 per cent of Victoria’s land mass — the parts of the state not covered by Fire Rescue Victoria’s (FRV) metropolitan district. Within that footprint, CFA brigades serve communities ranging from outer-suburban growth corridors in Cardinia and Wyndham to isolated alpine hamlets in the Victorian High Country.
According to CFA’s own published figures, approximately 53,000 volunteers are registered with the organisation, spread across more than 1,200 brigades. That number includes operational firefighters, but also support members who handle communications, catering, administration and mental health support at incident staging areas. Not every volunteer climbs off a truck; the organisation relies on a wide ecosystem of roles to sustain prolonged incidents that can run for days or weeks.
CFA also employs a smaller cohort of career staff — roughly 1,600 people — who work primarily in operational support, training, community education and management roles. The distinction between paid and volunteer staffing sits at the centre of the 2020 reform that fundamentally altered how fire services are structured in this state.
The FRV/CFA split: what changed in 2020 #
On 1 July 2020, the Firefighters’ Presumptive Rights Compensation and Fire Services Legislation Amendment (Reform) Act 2019 (Vic) came into effect, splitting what had been a unified CFA into two distinct bodies.
Fire Rescue Victoria absorbed responsibility for fire response in Melbourne and thirty-five major regional centres — including Ballarat, Bendigo, Geelong, Shepparton and Warrnambool — as well as the career firefighters who had previously been employed by CFA at those stations. The new FRV is a fully career, unionised service modelled broadly on metropolitan fire services in other Australian states.
The CFA, meanwhile, was reconstituted as an organisation comprising almost entirely volunteers, supported by a smaller group of paid staff who do not perform operational firefighting. The stated intention, as outlined in the Cain government’s reform documentation and later endorsed by the Andrews government, was to resolve longstanding industrial tensions between the United Firefighters Union and CFA management over staffing arrangements at co-located stations, while preserving the volunteer ethos across country Victoria.
The reform has not been without controversy. Some volunteer advocates argued it undermined the integrated model that had seen career and volunteer firefighters work side-by-side; others welcomed the cleaner organisational separation. What is not disputed is that CFA today is, structurally, a volunteer-dominated organisation in a way it was not before 2020.
Under the current arrangements, CFA and FRV operate under a formal operational alignment framework administered by Emergency Management Victoria, which coordinates multi-agency responses during major fire events. The two services regularly conduct joint exercises and share infrastructure, including the state’s computer-aided dispatch system.
How brigades are structured #
The basic unit of CFA is the local brigade. Each brigade is affiliated with one of CFA’s geographic groups, and groups in turn sit within one of the organisation’s twenty-one districts. Above districts sits the state headquarters in Burwood East.
Individual brigades vary enormously in size, capability and resourcing. A well-resourced brigade in a large regional town might have fifty active operational members, several tankers and a pumper, its own training officers, and a dedicated brigade secretary who manages administrative functions. A small bush brigade in a sparsely settled area might muster eight or ten members and operate a single slip-on unit mounted on a utility vehicle.
Within each brigade, the operational hierarchy runs from the captain — who is elected by brigade members and holds overall command responsibility — through first lieutenant, second lieutenant and leading firefighter ranks. The captain answers to the group officer, who in turn reports to the district operations manager, a CFA staff position.
CFA publishes a competency framework that sets out the minimum qualifications required at each level. Entry-level volunteers complete a Recruit Firefighter program before being qualified to attend structure or vegetation fires. More advanced roles — including breathing apparatus operation, hazardous materials response, swift water rescue and aerial operations — require additional endorsed training modules that volunteers complete over months or years.
Seasonal preparation: the fire readiness cycle #
In Victoria, the formal fire danger period typically begins in November and runs through to April or May, though the timing varies by district and has been shifting in recent decades as the climate changes. CFA’s preparation cycle begins considerably earlier than the season itself.
From around June each year, brigades are expected to audit their equipment, complete certification checks on tankers and pumpers, and ensure their member qualifications are current. Breathing apparatus sets are pressure-tested, hose couplings are inspected, and personal protective equipment is reviewed. Brigades that identify gaps in either equipment or personnel numbers are expected to report these upward through their group.
From August, the focus shifts toward training exercises. Groups run scenario-based exercises — tabletop and in-field — that test brigade responses to realistic fire behaviour scenarios drawn from historical events. CFA’s Learning and Development branch coordinates statewide training calendars, but much of the exercise design is done at group level, tailored to local terrain and vegetation type.
By October, pre-season briefings are underway across the state. District staff brief group officers on updated fuel load assessments prepared by the Department of Energy, Environment and Climate Action (DEECA), seasonal fire risk outlooks from the Bureau of Meteorology, and any changes to the Emergency Management Commissioner’s operational guidelines. Volunteers at brigade level receive this information through their captains and group officers.
CFA also participates in the statewide Total Fire Ban declaration process. The Emergency Management Commissioner, advised by the Bureau of Meteorology and agency fire managers, declares total fire ban days for each of Victoria’s fire districts. On those days, CFA brigades move to heightened readiness — members are expected to be reachable, vehicles are checked, and duty officer arrangements are activated.
Dispatch and response: how a call becomes a deployment #
When a triple-zero call reports a fire in CFA country, it routes through Emergency Communications Victoria (ECV), the joint dispatch centre shared by CFA and FRV. Dispatchers use the computer-aided dispatch system to identify the nearest available brigade or brigades based on incident location, resource availability and incident type.
Volunteers are alerted through pagers — still the dominant technology for brigade alerting across regional Victoria — as well as smartphone applications and, in some brigades, station sirens. On receipt of the alert, members respond either directly to the incident or to the fire station to board an appliance, depending on the brigade’s standard operating procedures and the distance involved.
For larger or escalating incidents, the incident management structure follows the Australasian Inter-service Incident Management System (AIIMS), a standardised framework that allows personnel from multiple agencies — CFA, FRV, DEECA’s forest firefighting arm, Victoria Police, Ambulance Victoria and others — to integrate under a single incident control structure.
The human reality behind the structure #
What the organisational charts do not capture is the social fabric that holds the volunteer model together. In many small Victorian communities, the fire brigade is also the most visible community institution — the place where people gather not just in emergencies but for working bees, fundraisers and the quiet maintenance of civic life. Volunteer retention is a perennial challenge for CFA, particularly as agricultural employment patterns change and more residents commute long distances to work, making themselves unavailable for daytime responses.
CFA and Emergency Management Victoria have in recent years invested in volunteer support programs that address fatigue, psychological injury and the practical costs — lost income, childcare, travel — that volunteers absorb when they attend prolonged incidents. The 2019–20 fire season, which saw CFA volunteers deployed for weeks in East Gippsland and the north-east, underlined how significant those costs can be.
The volunteer model works because hundreds of thousands of Victorians have, year after year, chosen to make it work. Understanding its structure is the first step toward understanding what is at stake when that commitment is tested.
