FRS not FESA

[observer]

Unfortunately there are alot of peole on this site who persist with calling FRS personal FESA. To put it simply, firefighters take offence to been call FESA.

It is clear that many people who take photos of FRS vehicles, who claim to know all about the FRS procedures and operations, have never spoken to a firefighter. On the off chance that some of you have spoken to a f/f, I would safely bet that you have never called them a FESA f/f, or spoken to them about the "major" issues they are having with FESA.

FESA is an umbrella management orginisation which was established to administer certian emergency services, such as FRS, BFB, SES, Marine Rescue. Surf Life Saving has been recently added to suite. Early on FESA decided it needed to raise the public awareness of its identity, so it basically hijack the FRS and replaced and reference to the FRS with FESA. If you look at early media releases from FESA, all FRS references was replaced with FESA, yet other services (SES, BFB etc) were still called by their proper title. This tactic proved successful for FESA in that it raised public awareness of FESA. However it had the opposite effect on the FRS, in that people now associate FRS personal as FESA, which is incorect.

I know several career FRS personal and have spoken to them about this issue. There is a current push from these people to re-educate the media into correctly reporting their presence at incidents. The media would always refer to FRS as FESA, due to the early tatics of FESA. When ever this now happens, f/f are ringing the media and making them aware of their errors, explaining the history of the FRS and explaining where FESA fit into the equation. This appears to be having success, with media reports now refering to FRS personal as FRS or firefighters.

It irritates me that the subject matter that alot of you like to write about, take photos off, discuss, and claim to have great knowedge of, call them by the one name with DEEPLY OFFENDS THEM. To them it is like calling the police a certian 4 legged, pink animial. How about having some respect and understanding of your subject matter, and refer to them by their proper title FRS.

[realfirie]

=D> Very well said. It cant be more simple than that. Unfortunatly a lot of people including several from this site just cant seem to see the issue and dont want to or cant be re - educated

[Zebedee]

People have used the term FESA on this site since the day it began, and I think that for now, people will continue to use the term. Whether it's strictly correct or not isn't the issue, it's the term that people associate in their minds. If a new term comes along that's more popular, people will start to use that one instead, but until this new (or new-but-old) term becomes more widespread then some people are likely to see the term FESA used where they think it shouldn't.

If people feel strongly enough that the term is incorrect, that's one thing. But this site isn't going to become the "FESA vs FRS Battleground", nor is it a place for forum members to start upsetting each other over a matter of semantics.

LOCKED.