Shadow spokesperson for emergency services Brad Battin and Ripon MP Louise Staley spoke to media at Ballarat Airport on Thursday.

“Daniel Andrews has made a fairly conscious decision to remove 7500 litres of water from getting to a fire ground to protect volunteers and the communities, we’re calling on him to reverse that decision,” Mr Battin said.

Ms Staley said a number of brigade groups in the western region had expressed concern over the removal of fire fighting equipment in one of the most fire prone regions facing an above average fire risk this season.

“The fire risk has been assessed by the emergency management commissioner and the map has it starting at Ballarat and it goes west with elevated fire risk.

“This is what you would expect given we’ve had such a wet winter and there is so much grass around, it won’t take very long for that to dry off.

“I raised an adjournment (in parliament) last sitting week asking about this...the Royal Commission recommendations make some comments about meeting air support with smaller helicopters that can get into the air faster, but they certainly did not recommend removing the large scale air support.”

But Emergency Services Commissioner Craig Lapsley maintained the key issue was initial response to stop small local fires from getting out of control. 

He said the water bombing helicopter, which will be based in Ballarat for the first time this summer, could fight these fires, while the aircrane would still travel to Ballarat when needed. 

“Ballarat was one of the only places we weren’t running (the water bombing helicopter) and now we will run it. We’ve proved that in other parts of Victoria it’s extremely effective to keep a small fire small,” he said.

“We don’t run the orange crane for initial response because it takes too long to start up and it needs a whole lot of support.

“We’ve parked the cranes in locations (Essendon and Moorabbin) where they can respond to the whole state. 

“But if we have really bad weather in the west and not in the east, we’ll pick them up and park them at Stawell or Ballarat or Bendigo depending on where the weather is.”

He said the crane often serviced different parts of the state during fire season and spent at least two weeks in Wye River last year, which meant Ballarat had no air equipment. Now it would with the water bombing helicopter.

Volunteer Fire Brigades Victoria board member Mick Nunweek said the decision would compromise community safety. 

“The water bombing helicopter is great, and the crews will work with whatever they’ve got, but the aircrane has been instrumental in the quick suppression of those major fires,” he said.