From CFA volunteer in country Victoria to acting deputy chief commissioner and recipient of the nation’s highest fire service honour, Newport firefighter Andy Waterson has had some career.
Mr Waterson is one of a handful of firefighters across the country to have been awarded the Australian Fire Service Medal (AFSM) in this year’s King’s Birthday honours.
“It’s a pretty big honour, there’s only a few of them given out each year, I never expected I would get one,” said Mr Waterson of the award, which comes after nearly 25 years as a full-time firefighter and 35 years in total.
Those first 10 years were spent as a volunteer firefighter with the local CFA unit in Cohuna in northern Victoria.
Despite his father being a firefighter (his two younger brothers have also since joined the service), Mr Waterson first made a living by building houses rather than saving them from burning down.
“I was a builder prior to joining the fire brigade and found that those skills provided good aptitude for being a firefighter,” said Mr Waterson, who described the work as challenging and technical, but very rewarding.
“You’re helping people out on their worst day,” he said.
“It offers a skillset and knowledge set that you need to be right on top of and you’re continually learning.”
Mr Waterson’s career progression since becoming a fulltime CFA firefighter in 2000, is testament to that.
He’s an accredited operations officer and incident controller who has been deployed to many significant emergencies including 2009 Black Saturday bushfires, 2010-2011 Queensland floods and 2019-2020 Black Summer fires.
In 2020 he transferred to Fire Rescue Victoria (FRV) following the state government’s controversial fire service reforms, and was named commander of FRV’s Emergency Management Liaison.
He has since been promoted to assistant chief fire officer of Policy, Planning and Operational Guidance and acting deputy commissioner of Operational Training.
In January he will mark 25 years as a career firefighter and having received his profession’s highest honour, no one would begrudge Mr Waterson for considering retirement.
No one except the man himself.
“No definitely not,” said Mr Waterson emphatically when asked if he was contemplating retirement.
“I’ll go for as long as I’m useful to the fire brigade.”
That might be for quite a while yet.
