On Fire!

Rough Draft

On Fire!

By Chloe Laing

My Dad says he’s not a hero because anyone can do it if you had the right training and recourses.  “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.

Each fire looks a little different but it can look like a horizontal cyclone 2-3 meters high. The head of the fire can be 30-40 meters high and that’s as high as 2 power poles and the biggest fire he fought was 30,000 ha in area and took over three hours to drive around the perimeter. He took us for a drive around it after he had put it out. It affected six different communities. The wall of the fire was layered. The smoke is black as night with an orange glow and it’s so thick it makes your eyes feel like they are bleeding.

A fire can get so hot that you can feel the heat from 100 meters away and it can make you feel like your burning, it can make your boots start melting and your nose start running.

Once my Dad was in his red truck and the head of the fire passed over him and he said it was so loud it sounded like a freight train going past or a cyclone and you could easily hear it over the sound of the people in his truck talking, the roar of the engine, and the radio communications chatter.

Every fire can smell different depending on what its burning. It can smell nice like pine when Cypress trees are burning or like burnt rubber like tyres of a car on a hot day when there is plastic and rubbish in it but it all tastes horrible and it gets into your lungs and burns your throat no matter what type of vegetation is burning..

Once a fire took my dad 3 weeks to put it out and he needed 120 people, 6 red trucks, 8 yellow trucks, 8 personal vehicles, 4 support vehicles, 1 helicopter, 2 planes,                      2 communicator trailers, 3 bulldozers, 2 graders, and two water tankers.  He also needed police, ambulance, local councils, DERM, NP, SES, main road crews, Telstra, Ergon energy, QFS, and RFS. He had to work 27 hours straight then for 14 hours a day and only got a few hours sleep on the bonnet of his work truck while other crews watched the fire.

When putting out a fire you have to think of the weather, topography, humidity, wind speed, temperature, vegetation, and what’s at risk.

Once my dad told me one of his most dangerous moments. He was driving a red truck and the fire was right behind him and he drove up a hill. He reached the top of the road went straight down but he couldn’t see it because of the smoke but he had driven this track before and he knew the road was washed out but he couldn’t back up because the fire was behind him. He had to drive by memory and get through the smoke so he could see and he could easily have fallen of the cliff but he made it safely.

My Dad says what he’s learnt most about fire is that it’s unpredictable, it can be used as a tool and it doesn’t fit into text books because it doesn’t follow rules and he’s been fighting fires since 2002.

Some of the most funniest of stories my Dad has told were once he saw a bandicoot running around on fire and once he was in front of the fire and a fire fighter was behind it and my Dad told the fire fighter that he saw a kangaroo coming right for him but the fire fighter said that he couldn’t see any and then it hit into him and knocked him right over. Also once my Dad was on top of a hill and the fire was at the bottom of the hill and suddenly the wind picked up and the fire went up hill then he turned around and he had his plastic visor on and then the fire reached the top of the hill and went straight up his visor and a fire fighter behind my Dad said all he could see was fire coming out the side of his plastic visor and then ran to get a fire extinguisher but my dad said no don’t get it then he pulled his visor off and patted his face  with his gloves and put it  out . The fire caught my dad’s pants, beard, eyebrows, and nose hairs on fire.  

“Fire deserves your respect it is a living identity just like a human what do we need to survive. Food, heat, and oxygen. A fire needs this to survive but this is what makes it unpredictable because it will hunt for it.” This is a quote by my Dad.

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