Woodhill Rural Fire Brigade
 

	Woodhill rural fire brigade covers an area of over 580 square kilometres from south of Jimboomba, eastwards to Undullah, west to the Birnam Range and south to Kooralbyn. Taking in the areas of Allenview, Bromelton, Cedar Vale, Cedar Grove, Cedar Pocket, Gleneagle, Kagaru, Knapps Creek, Kooralbyn, Josephville, Laravale, Rocky knob, Woodhill, Undullah & Veresdale.
Click on map to enlarge	Woodhill RFB is part of the Beaudesert Group of Rural Fire Brigades

The Woodhill Rural Fire Brigade is made up of volunteers who give up their time to help the local community, they not only put out grass fires but assist at vehicle incidents and house fires they are available on-call 24 hours of the day for emergency call-outs. They also get involved with local events like Woodhill School Derby Day and others to help with thing like parking, crowd control and putting on displays. Our members also visit the local schools for fire awareness week, whereby we teach the children about the dangers of playing with matches and fire.

We have a wide range of country to cover from light to medium density housing, to grazing properties, to heavily timbered mountainous country. Our area includes the Mt. Lindesay Highway and the Boonah-Beaudesert Road, they are the main routes through our area and carry many types of vehicles from small cars to large semi-trailers. The weekends are particularly busy with tourist traffic. The main interstate rail line between Brisbane & Sydney also passes through with both high speed Passenger and freight trains.

While most of the area is either residential or farms there are some industries like Davies Gelatine, Bush's Recycling & AMH Meatworks.

The local schools in the brigade's area include Woodhill State School, Veresdale Scrub S.S, &  Gleneagle S.S.

The Brigade is funded partly by the Queensland State Government through equipment subsidies, through a fire levy collected by the Beaudesert Shire Council (currently A$20 per annum per property), through generous donations from community members and by holding raffles throughout the year. Income is also derived from the provision of risk reduction burns throughout the area.

This helps us to maintain and operate our 5 trucks which must be ready 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to be available for turn-out. It has also helped to provide a Fire Station to keep them under cover, something that has been needed for some time.

Since 2002 we have also taken over from Laravale RFB and cover their district, including Laravale School and the farming district.
 

Rural Fire Service

The Rural Fire Service provides fire management for rural and semi-rural communities (outside urban fire levy areas) across approximately 93% of the area of the State. Services include fire mitigation, prescribed burning, volunteer training, community awareness and education. Pre-fire management is administered by the volunteer Fire Warden network through the Permit to Light Fire system, whilst actual fire management is provided by volunteer Rural Fire Brigades.

The Rural Fire Service is the lead agency for rural fire management in Queensland. Public safety is of paramount importance - the protection of life and property through:

- reducing the risk of wildfire;

- managing the use of fire for hazard rreduction or land management purposes; and

- managing any unwanted fire.

The Rural Fire Service has legislative responsibility under the Fire and Rescue Service Act 1990 for “the efficiency of Rural Fire Brigades and may provide training and other assistance to them.”

As a division of the Queensland Fire and Rescue Service, the Rural Fires Service (RFS) has a proud history stretching over 50 years. The RFS is a complex organisation with full time staff, primarily accountable for the administration of the State's volunteer Fire Wardens and Rural Fire Brigades who collectively provide responsible rural fire management to the communities of Queensland. The Rural Fire Service comprises:

- 1,596 Rural Fire Brigades;

- 46,000 volunteer Rural Fire Brigade mmembers;

- 230 Chief Fire Wardens;

- 2,450 volunteer Fire Wardens;

- 72 permanent full or part time staff..