We’re for Sydney | Daily Telegraph
It's a very long article but well worth reading
The terrifying power of a fire front is something that has to be experienced to be believed, writes Daily Telegraph cartoonist and volunteer firefighter Warren Brown, who has been battling the lethal Green Wattle Creek fire.
The lethal Green Wattle Creek fire — the blaze that claimed the lives of RFS firefighters Geoffrey Keaton and Andrew O’Dwyer — has now expanded to alarming proportions, burning its way into the tortuous, tangled wilderness west of Mittagong to the Wombeyan Caves.
Normally during the holiday season, the five limestone caves at Wombeyan are a popular tourist attraction for campers and families, yet simply getting there is something of an undertaking.
Heading west from Mittagong, the caves are only accessible by negotiating a 68km-long single-lane dirt road that plummets rapidly to the Wollondilly River through a seemingly never-ending series of hairpin bends before soaring through even more alarming zigzags, the road carved precariously along near-vertical mountainsides — on one side of the track a wall of rock on the other a breathtaking drop to the valley floor.
Once the road reaches the caves’ facilities and camping area it continues to climb west, zigzagging through dense forest to link up with the Taralga/Oberon road.
To put it simply, there’s one road in and one road out — an unimaginable nightmare in a bushfire.
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Like so many other RFS brigades in the region and those from far afield, my local brigade from Middle Arm Wayo in the Southern Tablelands has been tasked with sending trucks and crews to be part of a strike team — a co-ordinated 24-hour operational force to stop the Green Wattle Creek fire from spreading further.
On Friday it was my turn to be part of the strike team.
On leaving, the captain of the Taralga brigade gives me good advice: “Always wear your helmet. A branch came down and hit a firefighter on the head — thank God he had his helmet on.”
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From here on in we can only prepare for the unexpected — it’s helmets on, jackets, gloves, boots. The truck is “under lights”, with the eerie flashing of red and blue cutting through the smoke.
We’re descending into a world that is now the sole domain of passing convoys of RFS trucks, command vehicles, National Parks 4WDs zipping about and the sound of constantly operating graders and bulldozers clearing blocked roads and creating fire breaks to short-circuit the encroaching fire.
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Radio traffic is always brief, blunt and unequivocal yet it’s through hearing other conversations that you gain a bigger picture of what’s taking place.
We hear a crew asking for advice. They’d been approached by an agitated resident who owned a shed somewhere deep within the area who wanted to make his way through the fireground to retrieve some of his gear.
The return advice is unequivocal: “Under no circumstances can this individual enter the area.”
The crew — clearly being harangued — replies: “He says he’s got a chainsaw and can cut his way along the track if trees have come down.”
The response is even clearer: “Tell him under no circumstances can he enter!”
We listen, incredulous someone was seriously intending to dash into the fire to retrieve whatever he wanted from his shed. It’s like deciding to run back into a raging war zone because you’d forgotten your glasses.
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WALKING INTO APOCALYPSE
We head along the track driving across vast sections of fire-blasted rubble that are an iridescent pink — the result of an aerial bombardment of red fire retardant. This place has quite clearly been through an inferno of apocalyptic proportions.
We stumble across what was a cattle yard and to our amazement a house still in tact that somehow survived what was clearly a catastrophic situation.
The owner comes out to greet us — he’s quite clearly been through hell, his house narrowly avoiding oblivion thanks to the brilliant work of the water bombers.
An RFS deputy captain himself, he’s particularly glad to see us and points us in the direction of where the fire front is expected to break out, at the back of what is a sanctuary for brumbies. We’re joined by two other Southern Tablelands brigade crews — from the district of Roslyn and the town of Bigga. None of us have ever met before but there’s an amazing, unspoken camaraderie and ease. I’m particularly relieved as I have nowhere near the experience of these hardened blokes from the bush.
The brumbies in the paddock are clearly nervous — the feeling of the oncoming fire is palpable to everyone and everything — and we can see the pall of grey smoke coming closer and closer.
RISKY BUSINESS
The three fire trucks are lined up in preparation for the oncoming fire to pass before us when suddenly a LandCruiser towing an overladen trailer comes bouncing flat out along the fire trail. The driver pulls up, clearly pleased with himself. He’d somehow made his way into the forest and was able to retrieve his gear from his shed before the fire arrived. He told us he’d had to chainsaw his way along the track to get there, but he’d done it. He then got out to try and reposition everything that he’d thrown in the trailer.
We stare in disbelief.
He thought he was a hero. I thought he was a thoughtless, selfish dimwit.
And sure enough the fire came, its advance foot soldiers the ever-growing heat and small flames that scorched tree bark and leaves on the ground.
Then a greater force takes hold of the scrub along the fence line and before long the main attack arrives — an inferno soaring to the full height of the trees, creating black twisters of fire and smoke spiralling into the air, burning precisely where the LandCruiser and trailer sat only half an hour before.
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Tops of towering gumtrees were ablaze and we stand waiting for the trees to begin ‘crowning’, where the whole canopy of tree tops relays fire in a sea of flame and heat. It came close, awfully close.
The three crews were operating non-stop in extinguishing whatever the fire wanted to throw our way. And then it seemed almost as quickly as the fire arrived it had rolled on through, hungry to devour more dry bushland.
What legends all you firies are
