On Fire

On Fire!

By Gracelyn Laing

 “We are all ordinary. We are all boring. We are all spectacular. We are all shy. We are all bold. We are all heroes. We are all helpless. It just depends on the day.” ―Brad Meltzer. My dad would agree with this quote because he says he’s not a hero, he reckons anyone could be a fire-fighter, they just need the right training and resources.

 I think he is a hero though because he has to deal with dangerous situations all the time. While he was the Team Leader of the State Land Fire Management Unit working for DERM he was driving his work vehicle and the fire was right behind him. He had to drive up a hill to try and escape it. When he reached the top of the road it went straight down but he couldn't see anything because of all the smoke. He had driven this track many times before but he knew the road had washed out since then. He couldn't back up because the fire was right behind him. He had to drive by memory to get through the smoke and he could easily have fallen of the cliff but he made it safely. He said he wasn't scared, he just knew he had to keep driving even though his two other team mates were screaming as he sped across.

A few years earlier while he was working for QFRES he was at the head of the fire in his truck and the fire went straight over the top of him. He said it made a deafening sound kind of like a freight train going passed or the roar of a cyclone heading over you. He said he could hear it easily over all the noise of his crew in the truck with him, the roaring of engine and the loud chattering of the radio above him.

Every fire is a little different according to my dad. Some are so big they can generate their own weather patterns with multiple vortexes. These draw each other to themselves making them look like horizontal cyclones, two to three meters high. Others are like massive layered walls of fire with smoke so thick you can’t breathe and it’s as black as night with a strange orange glow. It gets so hot even from 100 meters away you can still feel the burning heat and it can melt the bottom of your boots and the plastic right off the trucks.

Once my dad took us on a drive around a fire he had put out, it took four hours just to drive around it. It had affected six different communities and he remembered it got up to thirty to forty meters high and stretched for thirty thousand hectares. To put it out, it took one hundred and twenty personal, six red trucks, eight yellow trucks, eight personal vehicles, four support vehicles, one helicopter, two planes, two communication trailers, three bulldozers, two grades, and two water tankers. He also had to get road crews, police, ambulance, Telstra, Ergon energy, SES, DERM, forestry, and National Parkes to help. It took three weeks to put out and he had to work fourteen hours with only a couple hours sleep.

When assessing a fire he has to think about the weather, the humidity, topography, the wind speed, the temperature, the vegetation types and what’s at risk. Priority one is life, priority two property, priority three industry, priority four the environment.

Once he saw a bandicoot running around on fire and it lit up a paddock. There was also a cat that did the same thing but then it ran straight through the cat flap of an old lady’s house and caught that on fire too. The poor lady came running out trying to figure out what had happened to her cat. Another time he saw a kangaroo jump out of the fire and bound straight toward another crew member. Dad radioed to warn him. The fire-fighter looked around but couldn't see anything and the kangaroo bowled him straight over.

My dad has been fighting fires since 2002 and is now the Area Director for QFES in Mackay. He’s also in charge of disaster management like floods, cyclones and industrial fires as well as wild fires. He says they biggest thing he’s learnt about a fire is not to underestimate it. They can be unpredictable and that’s what makes them so dangerous. They can’t be put in a textbook because they don’t follow the rules. But can also be used as a tool.

 “Fire deserves your respect it is a living identity just like a human. What do we need to survive?  Fuel, oxygen, and heat. A fire needs this to survive and once you know this you can control it but this is what makes it so unpredictable because it will hunt for these things.” This is a direct quote from my Dad.

He says the reason he fight fires is for the satisfaction of knowing that he has helped people.

Even though my Dad doesn't think he’s a hero, I think he is because he saves people’s lives and all the things that are precious to them. The definition of a hero in the dictionary is someone who shows great courage and my Dad does just this. “Unconsciously we all have a standard by which we measure other men, and if we examine closely we find that this standard is a very simple one, and is this: we admire them, we envy them, for great qualities we ourselves lack. Hero worship consists in just that. Our heroes are men who do things which we recognize, with regret, and sometimes with a secret shame, that we cannot do. We find not much in ourselves to admire, we always privately want to be like somebody else. If everybody was satisfied with himself, there would be no heroes.”  ― Mark Twain