It has been said time and time again, but events of recent weeks have only rammed home even further how amazing the people in our emergency services are.
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Whether it be police, ambulance, firies, rural firefighters, or the volunteers from the rescue squad, there is little doubt they are the unsung heroes of our community.
If you sit back and think of the things that have gone on within our wider community, even since the middle of January, you get an idea of what situations these people put themselves directly in to.
On January 16 we had the horrific seven-vehicle pile-up near Dubbo that tragically claimed the lives of 19-year-old Hannah Ferguson and her 21-year-old boyfriend Reagen Skinner.
Every emergency service group known to man attended that. There were countless cops, firefighters and ambos out at the crash scene, which most of them described as among the worst they have come across.
Just two days later, cops from Dubbo and Mudgee engaged in a pursuit with a wanted man.
On February 3, police and ambulance officers were called to a property near Geurie after a young man had been pulled unconscious from the Macquarie River.
And just yesterday, a 27-year-old Dubbo man crashed into a tree on the Golden Highway, and again the various emergency service workers were there.
That is a small cross-section of the kinds of serious incidents our emergency service personnel have to respond to.
And it is also without mentioning the firefighters who attended a bushfire out past Brocklehurst a couple of weeks ago that burned out a section of the Goonoo Forest or those from various brigades, including Dubbo, that have been tasked to work at the Mount Canobolas fire that has burned since Saturday.
Of course, some of these people do these jobs for a living and others are volunteers.
Some people say they know what they’re up for when they get into these organisations, but that doesn’t change the fact that what they come up against can be confronting.
Given the sadness of the past few weeks it might be a good time to pull aside someone you know who is involved with any of these groups and just thank them for the work they do.
Our communities wouldn’t function properly without them.
