Ash on the car in the morning, the smell of burning Eucalypt, it must be bushfire season again. Just when I thought a lazy Sunday afternoon by the beach might be on the cards, the call came in: “Bush fires are threatening homes north of Sydney”. I had, earlier in the day, suspected a bushfire emergency might emerge, as the outside conditions were very hot, very dry, and very windy, kind of like standing inside a hair dryer.

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Step one was to pack the car with water, lots of it, and my regulation bush fire fighting protective clothing consitsing of fire resistant jacket, trousers, gloves, helmet, goggles and boots. Basically the same as the Rural Fire Service uses, but with a luminescent “MEDIA” patch emblazoned on the back.

Next was to pinpoint the fire front on a map, and try to get to it. Australian bushfires, whilst burning vast areas of land, are extremely tricky to get to, usually because they are burning in pretty inaccessable terrain. I had heard on the radio that families had been evacuated from the popular picnic area of Bobbin Head, so that’s where I was headed. Police had set up roadblocks around the Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park to prevent rubberneckers, tourists, and media from entering. Only residents who wanted to get home to defend their properties were allowed into the restricted area. My way forward barred, I drove in a loop around the national park, to find another roadblock but this one was attended by the Rural Fire Service (RFS) instead of the police. The RFS media officer Rebel Talbert gathered together some of the assembled media for a quick briefing, and then herded us into her 4×4 for a trip to see what was happening on the fire ground.

We found several crews from many districts of Sydney with their fire tenders, conducting a back-burning excercise in the national park. Stepping through the brittle undergrowth, it’s little wonder how this material provides fire with potentially explosive raw fuel. The leaf litter on the ground is ankle deep and bone dry. The back burning operation seems to me like a tightrope walking exercise. the RFS are deliberately lighting fires in these conditions, and trying to keep them controlled, so that when the firefront eventually reaches the area, the backburning has depleted much of the fuel and the fire is easier to control.

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With alarming speed huge flames rear up from a tree that has caught fire in the canopy nearby, and the firefighters rush to hose it down before it can leap over the road and escape into the bush beyond. They succeed, with glowing embers and ash raining down from the force of the high-pressure hose on the burining tree trunk. Eyes are peeled for evidence of an ember attack over the road, where a fire can suddendly burst back into life. A water-bombing aircraft is audible overhead, huge sky cranes that can carry a payload of 9,000 litres of water to dump directly on the firefront. Smoke renders everything beyond a few metres invisible though, and the chopper comes and goes. Time for a drink of water, and the backburning continues down into the valley.

Ian Waldie/Getty Images

On a different edge of the Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park a couple of hours later, I arrive to see streets crowded with people who have come out of their homes to watch a spectacle that is awesome. The ridge of the national park beyond this small enclave of homes is ablaze, and the entire sky is orange in the dusk. “I’m going to go and get the hose again” says a resident as the sight fills her with worry for her home, and hurries away to hose down her house roof and guttering.

In all, the RFS save all the homes that were threatened, and controlled the fire within a couple of days, with the help of some friendlier weather. Disaster averted, this time.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 30th, 2007 at 8:55 pm and is filed under Australia, Fire, Pictures. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.