A Portland SES volunteer has added a new string to his bow, joining a special air rescue team for three days last month.

Brad Hein was at Lake Fyans in Stawell with his catamaran for a regatta on October 28, when an urgent call for a road crash qualified SES member to join a helicopter-based road crash rescue team came through.

After a quick call to work to get the time off, and then to Portland SES unit commander Scott McFarlane, Mr Hein put his hand up for the spot, and as soon told that he had been chosen as the SES member for the crew.

Mr Hein dropped his boat off at the Bendigo SES depot to stay until he returned to Portland, then headed to the airport, where the air rescue service was based.

The air rescue service is a joint operation with CFA, should crews need to respond to an incident in an isolated location with limited access for ground crews and has been particularly important to have available recently, with many roads cut off by floodwaters in the north of the state.

The interim helicopter-based road crash rescue arrangement was first assembled in response to the 2019/20 bushfires, where many Victorian communities were isolated due to fire.

The deployment of the service began earlier in the month as a response to the flooding across Victoria.

After half a day of training and getting used to operating out of a helicopter, Mr Heine and the two Monbulk CFA volunteers he was on the crew with were ready to go for their three day stint.

“Our deployment was that we would be paged to a road crash rescue within any of the three fire districts, 20 and 22 and 23, which pretty much covered from just east of Shepperton through to almost Swan Hill, so it was quite a large area,” he said.

“For each deployment, the crew get to go to a location that's affected by floods and do like a familiarization with the local road crash rescue organization.”

“We’d planned to go Swan Hill because that’s where the water was headed, but had second thoughts because we only had about two hours of fuel, so if there had been an incident that we were c0alled for, we’d have been rendered essentially useless.”

“It took it took about eight minutes from the time we got a call to the time we're in the air. Which in the heat of the moment would seem like forever, but at least someone's getting deployed to the scene.”

All the road rescue equipment was stored on board the helicopter, but due to its weight Mr Hein said there was going to be a bit of creative problem solving involved in getting it all to the crash quickly.

The helicopter itself was usually used in bushfire response to put out fires, but had been refitted to suit the new purpose.

They only had one call out over the days that Mr Hein was on the crew, and it ended up being a false alarm, but he says it was still a worthwhile experience.

“I’ve been in SES for a long time now and I don't do it for the hype or the fun, or any accolades or anything like that.

 “I do it to help out the community especially when people are in need.

“I know that they're doing a rough up there and a lot of the SES crews and CFA crews and that up there absolutely flat out sandbagging and pumping and all that sort of stuff, so if I can be of assistance, then I’m more than happy to

“Obviously a big thanks as well to Worley Tower Services who I work for, for letting me go as well, they didn't even hesitate when I asked which is fantastic of them to do.”