Pilbara firefighters ready to take on the rest of Australia

The Port Hedland Volunteer Fire and Rescue Service is gearing up to compete in the interstate championships early this year.

The competition will test its ability to respond quickly to emergency situations and volunteer Craig Westley thinks the boys are in with a good chance of winning.

"I can't wait, I've been training hard," he said.

"The last couple of years we've placed first in the B-grade, but this time we'll be competing in the A-grade, so it'll be a bit more of a challenge."

The competition is divided into a number of different tests including "dry exercises", where competitors race to assemble hoses and scale ladders, to "wet exercises" where they have to run fire hoses around obstacles and hit targets with water.

Rob Fry is a volunteer with 17 years experience who now works in a secretarial role, but knows how hard the challenge is.

"We're all volunteers here, we all have day jobs, so you have to train at night after hours," he said.

"There are volunteers from other States competing too and about 18 of us in total are going."

Fry said of the 18 attending, around a dozen would be actually competing, with the others going as support crew including team coach Ian Hubble.

"There's been a lot of fundraising, because it costs a lot of money to get across there," Fry said.

"We've been lucky Atlas Iron has contributed $5000 to help fix the lights up in our training yard so we can practise at night.

"We've also had a lot of sausage sizzles and other fundraisers and the community has been very good with helping us out."

The competition begins in the second weekend of March when the team heads to Harvey to compete with other WA volunteer fire brigades.

From there they fly to Bendigo to compete in the Victorian championships. Fry said there was no money for first place, but being the best in the country was what it was all about.

"You win the pride for being the best. It's all about the competition and status," he said.