The coming of the Montana Smokejumpers

Sydneysider: A personal journey

September has come and gone and El Nino seems not to have arrived. Down at the Weather Bureau, they’re saying that we might have a summer of average rainfall. If so, it’s welcome news for farmers, firefighters and those who live on Sydney’s outskirts, because it was looking like we were headed for a torrid bushfire season.

Sydney’s worst bushfires in recent decades were in 1993-94, although ’96 was bad too.

In late 1993 I was doing media for the National Parks and Wildlife Service. From October onwards, in spite of a heavy program of hazard reduction burning in the previous years, things started to go sideways.

The Service, which then controlled only five per cent of NSW, had burned-off 18,000 hectares in the previous twelve months, which represented 40 per cent of all the hazard reduction done across the whole state. The majority of the organisation’s 850 staff had been involved continuously in fire fighting for almost three months when the big blow-up came on Boxing Day 1993.

On the evening of 7 January I was rushed by taxi to Katoomba, to handle media for the combined Blue Mountains fire operation. The cabbie, newly arrived from Bangladesh, had never been west of Parramatta or earned such a massive fare. From the high points on the highway, we could see the fire front, kilometres away to the north, burning towards us.

The grand strategy was to light a backburn from a continuous line of fire trail, dubbed ‘the Black Line’, north of the Blue Mountains towns, in order to burn out the fuel in the face of the southward-moving fire.

For a while – when the build-up for the operation was going on – we had one of the classic problems of big military-style operations.

Firefighters – many from interstate – were being rushed in for the coming battle. It always takes a while before all the assembled troops can be fitted into a big strategy and in the meantime they tend to get impatient. There were simply not enough exciting jobs to go around and people started to mutter that they weren’t being given roles in keeping with their finest traditions.

The crack Victorian remote area crews were desperately anxious to prove their mettle. Nothing less than a direct attack on the firefront, preferably on the edge of an escarpment seemed appropriate.

The West Australian Government had allowed only firefighters younger than 40 to volunteer for what was popularly regarded as a doomed mission to save the eastern states – a fact that no doubt increased their anticipation of desperate deeds. Perth TV news showed spouses weeping openly when their firefighters were farewelled at the airport.

From the air, the Black Line operation was a wonderful sight. There were dozens of fire tankers and hundreds of big boofy boys and girls at all the staging points – swaggering around in a multitude of colourful uniforms admiring each other’s technology. They were all anxious to get to grips with the enemy, to actually see the flames.

There were fuel dumps at all the major playing fields and roadblocks and helicopters thumping across the sky. Convoys of tankers on mysterious missions roared along the highway with sirens, flashing lights and police escorts.

A curious incident at the height of the build-up captured the spirit of profligacy and organised chaos.

A strange figure strode into the packed control room at Katoomba. He was wearing a baseball cap, cargo pants tucked into a very flash pair of high-top boots and a US Army Vietnam War-era shirt with First Air Cavalry shoulder flashes. On his back he wore a long flat pack – much covered with straps and zips – which stretched from his shoulders to below his bum. Another pack hung on his chest.

“Say, y’all, ainybody sayn thu lodge-is-ticks off’cer?” he asked the assembled company in a gen-u-ine down-home Mid-West drawl.

There was a stunned silence.

“My God, the Montana Smokejumpers have arrived”, somebody next to me muttered. Everybody thought the new arrival was one of the celebrated suicidal parachutists from the US Forest Service.

But he was only from Telecom. When he unslung his load it turned out to be packs not parachutes and they were full of mobile phones – back then a rare sight. There must have been 60 or so and they were handed out to all comers.

The influx jammed the airwaves for the next few hours. When you tried to use a mobile you got a message saying all the lines were busy.