Firefighting in Wollemi National Park

Sydneysider: A personal journey

The catastrophic bushfires predicted a few days ago didn’t happen, in spite of the weather, and for that you can thank the fact that there were no huge fire fronts burning near Sydney when the disastrous day arrived. Our city is surrounded by vast wilderness areas where, if unchecked,  a wildfire can burn for weeks and suddenly descend from the hills with disastrous results. That Sydney has dodged a bullet is largely down to the work on small, helicopter-borne remote area National Parks firefighters who snuffed out lightning strike fires deep in the wilderness while they were still tiny affairs.

I’ve experienced this type of operation. One fire season in the mid ‘80s, when I was a tyro National Parks firefighter, we were billeted in the Royal Hotel in Denman and operating out of the famous Widden horse stud, where there was a useful landing ground.

It had been a long hard day of mop-up, tramping around the scrub, snuffing out still-burning hollow logs, and we’d arrived back at Widden. Apparently the operation had been a success. A celebratory barbecue and light beers had been arranged. I was just starting my first can and anticipating a sausage sandwich when I noticed the fire boss speaking quietly to a couple of the guys. They detached themselves from the festivities, picked up their rake-hoes headed for the landing ground. A couple of minutes later a chopper took off.

Not long afterwards, the boss sidled up to myself and my buddy. He didn’t like to disturb the party, but a spot fire from a wind-borne ember had flared up and he’d like us to go and help the two blokes he’d already despatched.
We slipped quietly away, and headed for the choppers but not before I grabbed some sausages and threw them in a plastic bag. There were still a couple of hours of daylight but if nightfall stranded us out in the sticks it would be nice to have something for breakfast.

The helicopter was an ancient Bell 47G ‘Soloy’ – the primitive, bubble cockpit machine made famous by the movie Mash. There was just enough room for the two of us, our helmets, a couple of rake-hoes, and our belts and waterbottles.
Wollemi National Park is a bewildering grey-green maze of dry woodland ridges and deep forested gullies that stretch to the horizon but the pilot had no trouble finding the fire. An intimidating column of white smoke rose straight up, more than a thousand metres, into the still evening air. The fire was burning in thick undergrowth at the bottom of a ravine.

We could have landed on the exposed sandstone ridgetop, above the fire, but the gully sides were dangerously steep and if the spot-over got out of control it could run uphill towards us and we’d be in real trouble. The solution was to land in a tributary gully. Looking down I couldn’t understand how on earth we were going to get in. The gully was thick with blue gums that must have been 50 metres tall, but our pilot found a tiny gap in the canopy and took the Soloy down vertically, glancing from side to side to check his clearance. Rotor wash flattened the undergrowth, but you couldn’t actually see the ground. He hovered about a metre off it and indicated we’d have to jump.
We chucked our gear out the door, stepped onto the landing skids, hopped off, and watched the chopper slowly edge its way up back through the canopy. That man could fly.

We set off towards the fire, fighting our way through bracken taller than we were, and found the fire and the first crew. Frightening from the air, the blaze wasn’t much to see on the ground, it was probably no larger than a tennis court and burning fitfully outwards from its ignition point.

We worked feverishly, clearing a break about a metre and a half wide around the fire and some metres from it. A few times a chopper came over and tried to water bomb the fire but flight time to the nearest farm dam was about eight or ten minutes so we didn’t get many drops. It took us an hour to finish the containment line and then, using matches, we tried to light a backburn off the inner edge to burn out the remaining fuel between the line and the fire. Frustratingly, our counterburn was extremely reluctant to take hold but by feeding dry leaves onto it we eventually got it to trickle slowly inwards.

Suddenly, all fuel was gone and it was all over. We checked the burned ground for anything that might smoulder on and then bugged out, knowing the rising humidity of the night would finish the job.

The light was failing but fortunately the team leader had found a place a few hundred metres away where it was safe to get a chopper in. Before emplaning, I threw my cold greasy snags into the bush for whatever wildlife might find them, imagining a nice warm sausage sandwich with fried onion and barbecue sauce, and maybe even, God help me, another beer when we got back to Widden, but when we landed, the party was over and everyone had gone back to Denman.