Slovenian Firefighters

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So this entry is mainly for my dad, who is a volunteer firefighter back home in NorthEast Victoria.
Yesterday i headed out for a wonder around Ljubljanas city centre, the place was packed with people being a nice saturday morning, a brisk 11degrees C. Down by the triple bridge in front of the church to my absolute surprise was the local fire engine with a posse of fire fighters showing the admiring crowd the ins and outs, as well as letting little kids get in the cabin with a helmet on. very cute. i managed to get chatting to one of the firefighters and he knew what sort of situation we had in Australia in terms of bush fires. He explained that Slovenia has a similar system to Australia in that it has in place a network of Volunteers who are used primarily to back up the professional firefighters. Apart from the obvious issue of house fires, there being on average 3-4 per month in Ljubljana alone a city of roughly 300,000 people, there is also a risk of bush and grass fires as there are open plains and many pine forrests. He told me that 2 years ago they had a fire in one of the pine forrests which took 500 firefighters to contain, from a county of only 2 million that must have almost been their entire force of firefighters.
I was surpised by the surfistication of their equiptment and how similar it all was to back home, namily the hose joints, (how nerdy of me to noitice) and the BA gear. hopefully dad you are following all this because im pretty sure i just lost any other readers. oh well. just take a look at the photos a let me know what you think.

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