Gismo Queen and her King

Where there's smoke, there's fire....

For those of you in other parts of the world, you may or may not be aware that a large part of the State of Victoria is on fire at the moment, and has been intensifying for the past 10 days. Several small towns are under threat and approx 10 homes have been lost so far (although the number released to the press is a lot less! - inside knowledge!). As a CFA volunteer, I got the call last week to go and do my duty. However, this time, they wanted me for my spatial skills, rather than my firefighting skills (the former probably being far more advanced than the latter anyway!). So last Tuesday I headed up to Wangaratta where the Incident Control Centre for the North East complex of fires (due to the sheer size of the fires, and inability to access much of the area, the fires have been split into three management areas) is located. It was fascinating to see the other side of firefighting - the management, the organisation, the planning of resources, meals, accommodation not to mention the stuff-ups. I was on night duty for three nights which were long, hard nights (perhaps not as strenuous as actual fire fighting, but still pretty tough!). I had a plane flying the perimeter of the fire to map it every few hours, and two ground crews who were making field observations with their GPSs and emailing me them from the field every few hours (how high-tech fire fighting is these days!) Because a lot of the planning is done at night, it is actually the more interesting shift as as the teams prepares the plan of attack for the field crews for the next morning. So I was busy updating maps, collecting data and printing vast quantities of maps for the crews each morning. Wednesday night into Thursday morning was a 16 hour shift, and I emerged from the ICC to find my car covered in ash, and the smoke so thick it made the atmosphere very yellow and hard to see (as per the picture to the right). When I started duty on Tuesday night, there were 10 fires in our complex, that had burnt an area of 6,000 hectares. By the time I went home on Friday, those fires had joined up to form 4 huge fires, that had burnt an area of 130,000 hectares. A couple of days later now, it's up to 220,000. It was a fascinating experience to see the other side of firefighting, and also eye opening to see how much money and resources is wasted in planning - on Thursday there were 50 people in the ICC and everything was stuffed by the time we came on duty at 8pm. With a talented team of 10 people over night, we fixed all the problems, re-planned sectors and attacks, drew predictions for the wind change that was due for Sunday (yesterday) and were all; on track for the crew changeover at 8am. The day was a case of too many cooks spoiling the broth - the night was a case of a talented team using their skills wisely and applying them to the tasks at hand. No doubt I'll be back there at some stage this week (as there is a real shortage of mapping skilled firefighters!) so stay tuned for the next update!

posted by Tracey @ 3:50 pm