Friday 30th May - The Newlands Volunteer Fire Brigade are pleased to announce their association with the Newlands Volunteer Emergency Resource Centre Trust in their project to construct a community emergency resource centre. It is proposed that a new purpose built centre would house the NVFB along with other community emergency groups.

Planning is well underway and further information will be posted as it comes to hand.

Following the tragic events of 5th April 2008 at Tamahere, Hamilton, the Newlands Brigade organised a collection at the Bellevue School fair. An amount of $200 was donated by the Newlands community and dutifully deposited into the bank account of the Tamahere Firefighters Families Fund.

Photo by Jacob Quinn

17th December 2007

17th December was the final training night for 2007. As has been recent tradition, a 'fun run' was held and this year we reverted to the traditional 2 man challenge.

The challenge was for a 2 man crew to supply water to the appliance via a screw down hydrant then run out a 45mm delivery. Once the delivery was established the branchman had to knock over a target. To add variety and excitement we race against the clock with time penalties added for tasks or procedures that are not correctly carried out. The crew with the best time claims the honour of being the #1 crew, although protests were lodged and continued to be debated all night.

The winners for 2007 were SFF Tim Cook and newly qualified FF Gareth Selby.

For more pictures of the evening please visit Derek Quinn's 111emergency web site.

Newlands Road Scrub Fire - 11th March 2006

Saturday 11th March saw the Newlands brigade attend one of the largest scrub fires in our area in recent times.

At approximately 9.50pm Newlands Station were turned out to a vegetation fire (multiple 111 calls) in Newlands Road behind the bus depot. Upon arrival, the Newlands OIC, SSO Tony Swain found a large area of gorse and pine trees behind the industrial area in Hurring Place well involved and spreading up and over the hill through to Spenmoor Street. A call was made for the second responding appliance (Tawa Volunteers) to attack the fire from Spenmoor Street while Newlands commenced firefighting in Hurring Place.

The gallant efforts of the crews from the first responding appliances (Newlands in Hurring Place and Tawa in Spenmoor Street) prevented the quickly escalating fire from reaching nearby properties.

A short time after arrival, the incident was made up to a Second Alarm and subsequently upgraded to a Third Alarm requiring more resources. At this stage a number of additional Newlands brigade members, who were at the station, responded to provid man-power assistance.

In all, 85% of the Newlands brigade attended this incident which led to the unusual sight of a number of tired and bleary eyed firefighters walking back to the Newlands station at 2am when they were released from the incident. (They were subsequently picked up and didn't have to walk the entire way).

Rural fire forces took over at the incident and where still patrolling the fire ground the following Monday morning. Newlands returned to the fire ground late on Sunday afternoon to assist with dealing to a re-ignition but were only required for a short time.

For high resolution pictures of the scrub fire please visit www.111emergency.co.nz

Open Day - October 2005

For pictures from our open day held in October 2005 please click on the picture below

Please note that due to server space constraints this links to the Emergency 111 site run by Derek Quinn.There are more photo's in our photo gallery

Site Last Updated 21 August 2008