Today, Good Friday, is when our specialist hospital for children, The Royal Children's Hospital, holds its yearly appeal. One aspect of this appeal is that emergency workers all over the State get involved in collecting donations from motorists (yes, can rattlers!). And that's what happened today.

0800 meet at the Station to be allocated to an intersection and a truck. At work by 0820, good intersection with a railway crossing; and I was with the pumper.

0910 - paged to an alarm operating at a local cinema complex. This was a support call for us. Thermal detector going off in the restaurant kitchen exhaust duct. False alarm. Back to collecting money.

1230 - fish and chips for lunch.

1444 - tree fire in a residential back garden. Easy to extinguish using the high pressure reel. A suggestion was made to the owners that perhaps the BBQ shouldn't be totally covered in vegetation... Back to the intersection to pack up.

1709 - support call to a car fire on the highway. Car had stalled and the owner and passersby had tried to jumpstart it, and both reversed polarity and short circuited the leads. That'll do it...

2230 - Smell of smoke in house. Another of those 'you mean heating ducts need to be cleaned?' calls. The house-sitter was embarrased, but we told her she did the right thing calling us out, and to advise the owners when they returned.

2350 - Support call to a domestic smoke alarm in an unoccupied dwelling. False alarm and another embarrased caller to be reassured that she'd done the right thing..

Five calls is more than enogh for one day! Add that to the seven hours a lot of us spent on intersections collecting money and it was a busy day. A good day too, on our two intersections we collected $14,500 for the hospital (the entire collection was around $14 million).