On Wednesday, January 7, members of the local brigade were fighting a fire at Yulong when they saw the skies become grey with smoke.
“That turned out to be a 70 hectare fire that we were on, but while we were putting that out, we were watching Longwood build,” Kylie said.
“We had a direct line of sight to it.”
Bryan White, who much of the crew calls a “veteran” firefighter, was one of the only members with experience tackling a large blaze like the Longwood fire.
In comparison to Black Saturday, he said the conditions on Friday, January 9, which had a catastrophic fire danger rating, “might have been a bit worse, actually”.
Before the call-out, Peter Comte said the members were itching to turn out, but they also needed to be clever about who they were sending, in case a fire broke out nearby.
“At the same time, we were also here, and we have a responsibility for our own area,” he said.
“We sent crews to Upton and Longwood, but we also had to maintain our coverage here.
“We needed to keep crew here that can operate other appliances so we had to be mindful of who we sent out there.”
When they were on scene, the responding crew said the wind changed everything, making the billowing smoke travel at a significant speed.
“It was amazing how quick it came up on us,” Michael Giannarelli said.
“We were on the road, just a single file road, and we were parked up behind another tanker within the valley, and we could see the smoke, from a distance, but we didn’t realise how quickly it was coming up the valley.”
Brendon O’Farrell said, once the smoke cleared, the land they could see had been decimated.
“Driving up there, we were driving towards the smoke – white smoke. And we knew there were structures burning around there,” he said.
“As we were making it up to the road, the smoke swept through, and you could just see the devastation afterwards.
“Everything was black.”
While the situation was unpredictable, the volunteers’ spirit shone through.
This was evident through the group’s support of a member whose first experience turning out to a fire was to this catastrophic blaze.
Peter said the volunteer remained composed during the crew’s response.
“I think that’s a testament to our crew because we had good people,” he said.
“It was a good crew, no-one was panicking.”
In the days following the devastation, the local brigade experienced an overwhelming amount of support from community members, and have been able to spread this support to smaller, rural brigades.
“The community just rallying behind the firefighters was quite amazing to see,” Kylie said.
“The attitude was, ‘we can’t be out there fighting the fire, but we can help you guys in any way we can’.
“We had a revolving door of people dropping off things.
“We became a bit of a drop-off point because we ended up facilitating the crew change-over for our local strike team, so we were able to get stuff to the other firefighters.
“It was just amazing to see the community stop what they were doing and put firefighters at their focus.
“We were all quite humbled, we couldn’t keep up with all of the people coming through.”
Brendon said that hearing stories of gratitude from people who had been impacted, and seeing the support from the community, made volunteering all the more significant.
“It’s the small things that count, just that little bit of gratitude goes a long way,” he said.
“It gives you that inspiration to move forward.”
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