36 Hours of Bushfire Fighting

by Ian White
Volunteer Bushfire Fighter


As you know I was called up on a STARG and was sent off to Warendilli about 100km south west of Sydney. There had been a rather large fire which at that stage burned out 1000's of hectares of bushland. When I arrived they had more or less contained the fire. As the fire was so large I was sent by helicopter to the communications station which was a very short 20 minute helicopter ride which was much nicer than the 4 hours it took you to get there by road. I had never been on a helicopter before and so it was rather exciting. I was supposed to be on night shift but as the fire had been completely surrounded by backburns there was little for anyone to do except monitor for breakouts. I was sent to return a vehicle to base camp on Friday night which was rather interesting as the road in many cases ran through the backburn and much of what was on either side of the road was still alight. After 2 hours of driving I was ordered back to the communications centre so I had to turn around and head back up the hill. There was not much to do so I slept in the back of the truck I was taking down. The temperature at this point was about 42 degrees Celsius.

The next morning just as the helicopter was on its way to pick up the overnight crew we got a radio message that a firefighter had been injured about 1 1/2 hours away from where I was. As I said before absolutely nothing had happened all night and then when it was my turn on the radio I had to divert incoming helicopters and ambulance crew to the injured firefighter. When we all finally got down the communications crew were interviewed regarding the diversion. Evidently diverting the helicopters had actually cost about $3000. Fire control decided in the end that we had acted in the correctly. There had been some confusion as the injured firefighter's truck radio could not reach fire control.

Saturday night when we were supposed to go back on duty it poured with rain and the helicopters could not fly. There was so much rain that most of the fire crews were sent home.

Sunday I got another flight up the top of the range. The rain had caused low cloud and we skimmed across the tops of the trees. It was rather spectacular. Even so we had to travel another hour by truck from a remote landing strip as the helicopters could not get through the cloud. When the rest of the communication crew and I finally arrived we had to pack up the vehicle. It took 8 hours to get the vehicle off the top of the mountain and back to Sydney.



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