EK Send Team to Victoria to help with the Fires

With the recent fires in Victoria, East Kurrajong was asked to send two people to join the Hawkesbury team 14D to Victoria on Tuesday 24th February .

We arrived at Hawkesbury Fire Control and joined others from our district for a briefing of what we were to do.  The Hawkesbury team members were Graham McCoy and David Donnelly from East Kurrajong, Paul Coluguri from Upper Colo, Dave from Oakville, Bruce from Grose Wold, Rod from and we were to be led by Deputy Group Captain (North 3) Mal Bobridge.  We set off for Sydney airport just after 2pm.  On arrival at the terminal, we dropped off our bags and were sent to the McDonalds accross the road to wait for the rest of the deploymant team - there were just over 60 people.  On arrival in Melbourne at approx 8:30pm, we were met by a couple of buses which took us to the Mantra Hotel for the night. We were seperated into Day and night crews for rooms with Day crews to get a wake up phone call at 4:45am so we could depart for the fireground at 6am.  The night crews were told they could sleep in and would be leaving at approx 2pm.  We had a few "lemonades" and went off to bed.  Unfortunately for the night crew, the hotel messed up the wake up calls and phoned everybody - oops.  We on the day crew thought that was amusing, but the night crew didn't seem to see the funny side.

I was on the day crew and we arrived at Healsville (our base camp for the next 3 nights) at approx 7am.  We were teamed up with firefighters from around the State who formed part of 14D.  I was the driver of Blaxlands Ridge 7 and had Lyle Smith (Captain of Huntingdon) and Phil Harper (Deputy Captain from Telegraph Point) in the truck.  The other Trucks in our Strike team were Glossodia 7, Beacon Hill 7, and two 9 units.

We were given another briefing and set off for the fireground.  We were to look after the O'Shannassy Sector - approx 13km trail along the fireline near the Dam.  Our task was to black out the area to ensure there was no chance of reignition.  The following Friday was expected to be a really bad fire day and we needed to ensure our sector was safe.  We also had to familiarise ourselves with the tracks and the village below called Reefton.  The countryside is very different to our local area with very steep hills and enormous Mountain Ash (the tallest trees in the world).  Thankfully we were successful with all our tasks and the Friday (danger day) was uneventful.  We spent most of that Friday with the CFA in Millgrove.

Each night we returned to Healsville Base camp and were really looked after well.  The food was great and plentyfull, and the tents were comfortable.  There are hot showers set up which was great.  One of the local companies Kanteen (a mobile coffee van) wanted to ensure the volunteers were looked after so decided to set up in the basecamp and supply coffee to us all day for nothing.  I can tell you that was appreciated - the coffee was great.  Another group of volunteers were there giving massages and chiropractic work to those in need.  There was even a bar run by the local football club and open each night for 4 hours - this was not free.

We left Basecamp on Saturday morning and were picked up at Mascott approx 5pm.  All in all it was a great experience for everyone and it was great to meet, work and become friends with fellow firefighters from other areas.

For a slideshow of photos from our trip to Victoria, Click Here 

 This is a photo of a backburn at Wilsons Promitory