Sometimes we're just silly

Last night at training I had a good look at how to check over the BA (breathing apparatus equipment,) to make sure it's all ready to go. Most of the information goes over my head as I'm already suffering overload with my wildfire suppression course. For that reason I didn't want to try using it, though I did put it on. It was heavy but relatively comfortable.

Spent half my time laughing at some of the brigade members learning how to perform different lifts on one another. (Lifts as in how to remove a person from a burning house safely, or from a dangerous place.) Some of the girls can be quite small and some of the guys are very big, in height and sometimes in width. It can make for some great viewing.

We also did a mock search and rescue. We were blindfolded and went upstairs in pairs of two, both connected to a guide rope with a smaller rope and clip attached to the guide rope on one side and to ourselves on the other. We had to guide ourselves around the room this way until we found the hidden briefcase. It was really difficult as you become completely disorientated. It was a good little exercise to demonstrate how confusing it can be and to practice being quick and adept at moving in places with limited vision.

It's a serious business, learning to be a firefighter, and it comes with many responsibilities, but it is nice, (and important,) just to be able to bond with each other over a bit of silliness I reckon.

Last Sunday I got to use the long town branch. The long town branch can pack a wallop. It was pushing out 1100 kpa, and can push out over 1000 litres in one minute and it will knock a structure over or blast through a window. It takes two or three people to hold it. One to take control of the branch with a special hand lock. The other two hold the hose behind him and the last person leans into the middle one who leans into the branch operator. They use their weight to counteract the weight of the water, which converts the hose to something that feels like a steel rod.

Next Fire Season

Next fire season supposed to be as bad as the last.

http://www.theage.com.au/national/state-faces-worstever-fire-season-20090728-e06s.html

Almost finished basic training

I planned to submit posts to this site regularly, but life got in the way. I've forgotten about my normal neurotic fascination with dying, why I can't break through into the writer's market, how I'm getting old, and what a waste my life will all be if I can't leave something substantial behind to prove I'm here. I've forgotten these things because I'm too focused on living life. I don't even suffer anxiety attacks anymore. I'm too busy. Isn't it bizarre how being consumed with the art of survival and helping others, can remove all the fears you have surrounding those very things? You would imagine that keeping away from the things that trigger your fears would be sensible, yet it's facing them that works. This is common sense I suppose, but there is something paradoxical about it as it throws you into the very situation you fear, and the fear is not unfounded in this case at least. I may find myself in that life threatening situation one day. Suddenly everything is in clear and logical perspective, Grab life, tear a big chunk off it and chew like mad, because it's so fleeting and in the end, you really only have minimal control.

I've spent all winter shivering in turtleneck jumpers and tracksuit pants under cotton yellow turn out gear; getting wet at the ends of hoses, at the sides of hydrants, by the edges of rivers, having fun, fun, fun, (except for that bout of swine flu we all got,) knowing all the while that the day it will come when I won't be simply freezing in a mild Victorian winter, but boiling like a stuffed lobster in the next unbearable Victorian summer. The same cotton suit that barely keeps me warm now, will feel like it's suffocating me then. I've been training all winter for that day.

I've been reading my wildfire firefighting training manual, learning how to read maps, how to predict the course of a running fire over the map, how to choose safe routes to the fire, how to use two-way radio communication and memorize all the call signs, how to read army time, understand wildfire suppression theory, learn different kinds of firefighting attacks and strategies, how to protect the point of origin, chain of command, asset and property protection, pump operations, extinguishing agents, hand tools and hoses and fittings ... is that all? I think so though something tells me not quite ... working around machinery and aircraft? PPC, protecting yourself in a flashover, how to draught water from a creek or river?

On top of that I turned up to my local brigade every Sunday and when I can on Wednesday nights to practice all these things, and whatever else is going on, even when I'm not training to qualify for the other things.

We have our last prac session this coming Sunday and then have two weeks break to go back to our station and practice draughting and knot tying until our final practical assessment. Mapping assessment was my biggest challenge, although I did manage reasonably well, but I blitzed the wildfire suppression paper. My assessor said I'd done the best assessment paper he'd ever marked, "If I didn't know better I'd have thought you cheated .. textbook." Am I proud? Hell yeah! I threw everything into learning it. And I was encouraged to be proud by the assessor's big smile.
I know it might be considered sexist, but a lot of this stuff does come more naturally to the men and I felt I had to work very hard at it. The skills involved were not skills I exercised regularly, especially on the mechanical side of things.

Anyway, that's six months of training down and even now I sense just how green we are and how much more we have to learn on the field. What happens next? After we complete the course, our captain is issued with our pagers, and he decides when each of us are ready to begin turning out. We get our very own set of yellows with boots and helmets.

First assessment

Personal Protective Clothing, health hazards, taking refuge in a life threatening situation.
Wildfire behaviour, development and science.


I passed.

Marysville

We finally got up there: Marysville. I put it off all this time because I wasn't sure if I could cope with what I would see and my reaction to it. It had quite a substantial amount of value to me. My partner used to get up at 6:30 in the morning to wait on tables up there. I'd been going there regularly for the full seventeen years I'd lived in the Yarra Valley and used to dream of moving up there to live. In some ways, it was a kind of idealized utopia for me -a higher, almost archetypal dream place that I aspired to. A piece of heaven in the clouds.

I had already taken a few trips around the valley and the fire damage I had seen was minimal compared to what I knew Marysville to be, and even that was enough to shake me up. Although the fire was long dead, the path it had left was like the orb of a ghost. You could see where the fire had skipped and chosen its path as if it were almost a being with thought and intent. I worried that the full decimation of Marysville would be too much for me. I'd hoped to wait a full year, when the township and nature was beginning to thrive again.

I was also worried about the reaction of locals. Some local business owners were begging us to go back up, but there were hostile reactions to the idea of tourists on the news, and I could not blame some people for feeling that way. Sure enough, on the drive up we were honked off the road by a young guy in a four wheel drive who gave us a look of daggers as he passed.

But I had stayed away for so long out of respect in the first place and now I had a reason to be there. I wanted to see first hand for myself, what I may possibly find myself in one day. I do not want to be completely unprepared if that day ever happens. I wanted to look at the orb of the ghost and try and understand its movements, if that's even possible. It was study, it was understanding, it was resolution. It was imperative to my training, in my own mind, to take the advantage of seeing first hand the worst ravages of a fire before I began to fight them.

In Narbethong we saw a tree still smouldering, eleven weeks on. It astounded us.

The truth is, I dreaded siting Marysville the whole way up, but I felt nothing once I got there, because it was not Marysville anymore. My brain could not grasp that I was even looking at Marysville. Marysville was somehow still out there, with its lolly shop and beautiful church and motorbike jumping out of the cafe wall, existing in a parallel universe - perfect and complete and idyllic. I looked out my car window and did not understand, and was glad that I could not understand.

I was happy to see the hotel on the corner had survived. My partner and I often talked about going there for a honeymoon. I remember the sheets on the line out the back that would flutter in the golden light, the sound of the nearby creek and the trees we shaded ourselves under.

Now it was nothing more than a dirty, ashy, muddy field of nothing but fenced off areas. It really was as if a bomb had been dropped, "plonk" onto it.

There was no way of understanding this fire, or studying it. Some places were so burned out that they were still nothing more than bare dirt and tree trunks like giant sticks of charcoal. At training we were told how to look for wet gullies, drains, fallen trees or logs or rocks to shelter under or behind if ever caught on foot in a fire, but it was starkly apparent that there would have been no way of surviving this fire in any of those ways.

Still, to our amazement, houses stood that the mind told you shouldn't have been standing. There were little weather board houses that should have gone up, and yet survived. There was no way of comprehending how or why. Of course there was a reason, but we could not make it out. The wind changed suddenly in a pocket or peak or trough? Did someone stay and defend? Was it the deciduous trees? There was no doubt that some lines of deciduous trees clearly stood, with only a little scarring at the bases, when all the natives around them burned fiercely.

On the way home, I realized that I had did it; gone up there, and come back and been OK. We came back to our town, and the autumn trees and greenery stood testament to a place that was untouched and still beautiful in its innocence from the ravages of fire. God, I was glad to get home. I felt so sorry for those people up there who had to continuously look at that oppressive scenery, reminding them everyday of what had happened. I wish the best for them. I wait with them for the day when the scars of the fire are just a terrible memory. Even when the landscape heals itself, the trunks of the trees will keep telling the story.

First Days

They said not to sign up until April but our brigade took our names and numbers straight away. I signed up with my partner. On our first Sunday we got given spare yellows. It felt great getting into them, even if I am just a pair of boobs above britches when I have them on. We had to bring our own boots, so we said, "Oh yeah we have a pair each," then went out and bought a couple of pairs with KRudd's stimulus money, (well yes KRudd, we think it's going to a good cause, thanks.)

We have two piece jacket and pants, leather gloves and helmets with someone else's name on them. My britches are a tad too tight and so I have to strain like a constipated person when getting on and off the truck. That's OK because when we finally become qualified, we get to order a whole new wildfire outfit of our very own. They are worth a lot of money. We will also get a pager each.

Our brigade has five or six new recruits. Our area has had over 40 people sign up after Black Saturday. There seems to have been an influx of new recruits state wide after the fires. In fact there have been so many new recruits that they couldn't even send me out my induction pack.

We have training on Tuesday nights, and on Wednesday and Sunday there is brigade training. We can only make it out to Sunday brigade training at the moment, as partner is studying for his MA in editing on those nights.

On the first Sunday we went over the tankers and learned the parts of the trucks and what's in each locker. It's hard to recall it all and I had a bit of brain meltdown after about twenty minutes - not a thing got in after that. Second Sunday we did inventory of trucks (the same thing as the week before only with a list to check items off with.) Third Sunday we studied wildfire behaviour and movement. I managed a session in comms on Wednesday night the next week, and then we did our first session of draughting, (drawing water from the river to fill the truck up with.)

Febuary 2009

The days immediately preceding the fires are harder to make sense of. I know that at six o 'clock am the next morning I rang the Bushfire Information Line and tried to find out if we could go back to our town. I had no idea then, if it stood or had burned. The lady on the other end told me not to go home yet. I waited impatiently and with some strange and unknown, grating feeling in my stomach that was something like anger but not quite

My mother-in-law rang at around lunchtime and told me that it was business as usual in our town, albeit a smoky one. I did not want to go home. The feelings of the previous night were catching up with me. I was not ready yet, but found myself grudgingly following my partner back in. He drove one car, I drove the other. There were still fires burning out of control all over the state. I can't recall just when we began to understand that people had died – was it that morning, or later on

Embers littered our yard and when we opened the door to our house a raqcid smell of smoke and burning things greeted us. We listened to 77.4, and I wondered around lost. DSE and CFA websites showed up the fires burning around us. Healesville, Steels Creek and Chum creek had gone up the left, a fire burned in parkland behind us, and Bunyip Ridge burnt to the south. We used the time to fire ready our home. I put buckets of water under windows, I pulled curtains back from windows. I moved furniture away from windows. I filled up the bathtubs, the sinks, anything that held water. I watched the sky. Helicopters came and went carrying circular orange water bombs. The weather had cooled. The officials on the news said that the largest of the fires would burn for weeks and weeks on end. The death toll began to rack up. I went home to my empty shell of a house during the initial days after, but slept in a motel in a motel in Croydon that my mother had paid for.I slept there for peace because my nerves were still frayed and I needed to get good sleep to cope with the days ahead

Depending on the weather, or reports, or levels of smoke, in the intital days after the fire, it took varying degrees of courage to go back home. I hadn't yet processed the events of the 7th fully yet. I could not cry for the dead. They sat in the back of my mind waiting until I could deal with them. Three or four days passed and the state, the country, the world, fell into varying degrees of shock and made plans to deal with the grief and help the victims. But we could not. We could not let our guard down. We had to stay fast in our thoughts, we had to stay prepared and alert. There was no time for raw emotions which would hinder the ability to think in an emergency. The fires were still around us and with each wind change, a different fire slowly ambled in our direction. We were lucky, we had weather on our side after the cool change and fire fighting forces banded together over the next two weeks to take advantage of the cool weather to create solid containment lines between the fire and our town. Healesville still suffered the ongoing trauma of fire on its outskirts, a lot closer than the fire was to us

Over the next two or three days, the motel room slowly filled up with more bags, photo albums, paper work, my paints, Rob's chess set, some of the boy's toys and games, which then got transported to my father's in Blackburn

As the days passed, the local shire, the police and CFA formed community meetings and showed us on maps where the fires were and what their movements were. I began to understand them. Most of the littler ones had been contained, which meant they were still actively being kept within a certain space but were not moving forwards. The bigger ones kept merging together to the back of us. At one time the papers were reporting that the fires sandwiching us from either side were only eighteen kilometers apart. When we drove back into the valley, you could look on both sides of you and see the smoke from them. The Bunyip fire did not seem to move at all for several days and we slowly forgot about that one. It was the larger ones behind us that were a worry

My first night back home, I found myself laying in bed as an involuntary shuddering throughout my body began and lasted until I fell asleep. I could not sleep well at night. Many people were the same. 77.4 was left on night and day to check for weather changes, changes in temperature, humidity, wind. We became experts at reading the weather. Every little movement of the wind mattered. We had been t old to implement our stay and fight or go early fire plan. Many people left the area and did not return for three weeks. many people didn't know what to do. It was unrealistic for most people to uproot their lives that way. It all began to take on the eerie feel of a Camus book after that

Other people around me who did not have the advantage of a few nights sleep in a motel, were slowly eroding into tiredness as the stress continued day after day. The community meetings were organised for every two or three days, it became some sort of almost quasi- religious community thing. The same police men, fire men, shire council menwere always up the front and I began to trust them implicitly. At times the meetings would be full to over flowing and chairs would have to be put up outside under a loud speaker to accomdate the crowds. Many people chose not to attend the meetings. Many people though there was much ado about nothing also. This began to divide the community. A map would be tacked up and the progress of the fire charted for the community. The Healesville fire, the Marysville fire and the O'Shannasy fire were renamed the Kilmore East Murrindindi South Complex. It presented as a giant fire front on the paper, having burnt through more than 76,000 hectares eventually. You could watch it grow in size on the website. It slwoly moved towards us and I sometimes wondered, “I can't see how they are possibly going to be able to stop this thing from devouring us.”

A feeling of inevitability sank in. People argued and raised their panicked voices with officials. They asked why the sirens didn't go anymore, why they couldn't go to the oval anymore. They wanted to know when trucks delivering water would be allowed back in to fill up courrupted water tanks. They formed tree phones and took it in turns to sleep and listen to the radio to alert one another.

The community stepped out of its complacency. I'd never seen the place so clean. Everywhere you went the council was mowing grass by the sides of roads, people were cleaning up the litter on their properties. We finished plugging our gutters and went around to my mother-in-law's to help clean up her hopelessly under prepared property. It was like the place got some collective fever. Paddocks that had never been cleaned were suddenly stripped clean of excess vegetation.

The other weird thing that happened, was that I became used to emergency threat stress. I did not stop having it, I did not stop being tired, or scared, I just got used to feeling tired and scared. Being tired and scared was the new normal. At times I asked myself who I was going to be when the fires stopped? Would I even recognise myself anymore when I stopped being frightened and scared? In those weeks normal life seemed an impossibility, things had changed so irreversibly. What was beyond the fires? Nothing. My identity was tied up with running away from the fires, attending community meetings, listening to 77.4, reading websites, collecting updates, watching for smoke and ash. I did not exist apart from the fires

Some days the air would be acrid and so smoky that my lungs would collect it and when I left the area I would feel myself take it with me, inside me, into clearer air, where I would cough it up. It took a while to be able to read whether or not our town would be smoky. In the end I figured out that it was on the days that the wind was pushing north west or east. Sometimes we would take the children out of the valley only to find the smoke inescapable and over the suburbs as well. Other times we would have a lovely sunny day in the burbs and think it safe to go home only to find ourselves driving into the smoke. But most disarming were the days when you would wake to a lovely blue, clean sky. On those days the smoke was pushing away from us and down towards the city. We fell into the habit of Camus' Plague evaders of going to cafes during the day time. It made us feel normal. It gave us somewhere central to be.

Convoys of DSE and fire trucks with their head lights on through the smoke, came night and day. Sometimes three or five, sometimes thirty at a time. Helicopters flew endlessly over head. I stopped to watch them as I hung my washing on the line. We watched them pass as we sipped chai tea at the local cafes. A park ranger sat day after day out the front of the post office so you could approach him and find out what was happening. A temporary radio station was set up for those who couldnt get 77.4. 77.4 was the life line. But 77.4 couldn't always get the news to you on time, niether could the CFA who were too busy fighting fires to tell of new ones straight away. The truth was, that if a fire broke out or broke containment lines, it could be a good 20 minutes to an hour before you even knew it was happening. Fire fighters came from every part of Australia, from Tasmania, Western Australia, from New Zealand, from Canada, America. We read the names of towns we didn't know on passing trucks. 700 personnel and eight helicopters came to save our town. Hundreds and hundreds of consolidation lines were built up into the mountains between our town and the fires. Each day when the weather was cool and not windy was more time bought before the next high danger day. Our local staging area was packed to the hilt withing in rows sprung up for the people fighting the fires. Images of Black Saturday kept flicking passed my subconscious. I stopped once or twice to watch the list of the dead on TV and have a few silent minutes crying to myself.

As the horror of Black Staurday abated a little, the media turned their attnetion ontowns in the front line. We saw people we knew on TV, heard people we knew on the radio. The place was like a ghost town. No tourists, and barely any locals. Some days I was there, some days I was not. There were road blocks behind us to stop people going into fire affected areas and areas declared a crime scene, maily Marysville. We couldn't go home without being halted at a road block to give our intention. Signs of a wanted arsonist who frequented fires dressed in Queensland firefighting gear was hung up in shop windows for locals to identify and watch out for. We were not in the city, and we were not in the towns that had already burnt. We were a town in limbo

We had three high fire danger days in the end. I came down from my house on the first one, on a trip to the local shop, to find a town that looked half normal but half in panic. The smoke was already thick again and I was almost run off the road by a frightened man in a four wheel drive. People were still very spooked. We made the decision to leave eahc of those times, but it became gruelling. How many times could we do this? It was starting to wear, the endless sense of alertness and alarm, the endless packing and moving and coming back home. On the first evacuation after Black Saturday, a column of smoke rose and towered above our towns from the moutains behind and only one minor spot fire broke out but was quickly suppressed by a strike team. The second time we left we did so only out of obediance to the fire plan. We felt that if the containment lines held the first high fire danger day, they would also the second, and they did

On the very last evacuation. Brumby talked on the TV again, said they thought it was going to be as bad as Black Saturday in terms of weather: 38 degrees and 120 km winds. Mum booked me into the motel one last time. The guy at the motel said to me

“I just think the authorities are just panicking now – frightened.” I only looked at him. There was no explaining

I did a funny thing the day before I left that last time. I gave up. I pushed all my furniture back into their original places. I emptied all the buckets of water, let the curtains down, emptied the bathtubs and sinks. I knew, that if the weather fulfilled the bureau's prophecy, fighting it would be pointless. Making my house fire safe would be pointless. I made my house back to the way it should be. I wanted to be home again. I was tired of running. I could feel the end drawing near. If the fire didn't jump containment lines this time. They were not going to ... ever. If they did, there was an unspoken thought in the back of my head that I was too tired to care if the worst happened anymore anyway

That second last community meeting was packed and when we came out the road was full of endles fire trucks going out up and down the highway, trucks from all over. Some of the firemen waved at us and I waved back. I wanted to say “thank you thank you thank you” to them, to the people in the community meetings, but “thank you thank you thank you” would never have been enough. Some bonding was happening that made no sense other than the situation

That morning we woke to a cold and rainy day outside our motel window. There was only a mild breeze. I was sick of it all. I knew the authorities were only trying to protect life. I was not angry at them. I was just angry. We didn't know what to do, so we decided we'd just mosy on home slowly. It took us a day to get home on a trip which usually takes us just under an hour. We went shopping, we stopped for tea. Sometime in the early afternoon the wind began to get really crazy. The trees were whipping around. The containment lines had held all through the northerlies. We'd thought we'd be safe. I knew that the southerly wind change would whip the air around, even though I knew a fresh outbrerak if lightening strikes were more of a worry at this point

Driving back home, the trees looked so muich bigger than they usually did because of the force of the wind. It was much worse in the country than in the burbs. The wind was frantic and grown eucalypts bent and twisted like toothpicks. I cowered behind my steering wheel as I looked up them outside. The road was strewn with bark and branches.We kept stopping at towns along the way, and my partner asked me at each stop if I wanted to continue

We sat on the park bench outside the library for quite a while, not sure whether to go back or go on. We considered the relief center that had been up in Lilydale every time the evactuation call was given. Neither of us made a decision. Rob was waiting for me. In the end I said “let's just go home

The streets desperately empty of cars and people. I just kept thinking, “What the hell am I doing here? This is madness?' It seemed the only people around were the firemen and they were nowhere to be seen either, as they were off in strike teams. When we drove up our road though, there was our nieghbour's car. She had stopped evacuating too. It seemed the exhaustion was collective

As the cold change approached, the wind got worse and worse. I picked fights with my partner about why we were even there. I kind of felt as though I were a soldier being told to stand steady as the enemy approached and I was losing courage. He said I was brave to come home and I said that no I wasn't, I was just stupid

When the cold change came, it didn't bring lightening with it, it brought rain – shitloads of rain. We ran out into it with excitement. Oh my god was there ever anything so good? It rained on and off for days after that. The earth around us greened up around us as if it had never been parched, leaving hardly any trace of the fires except for a tongue of burned forest on the hills behind us. Even though the rains came, it took another week or so for the fires to die down out our way. They said it would burn for a month or so up in the mountains behind us, flaring up in the gullies. But we knew that it was no threat to our homes and lives anymore

After all this, it took time to come back to normal. I dreamed bush fires for a few weeks to come after that. In some ways it was hard to settle to normal, in others it was surprising how quickly and naturally it happened. I've had my private moments.The strange thing is how bonded I became to the place I already felt I loved so much. When we build our house, we will build here and we will build out of concrete bricks. In the meantime, we have signed up to be trained as volunteer firefighters.

There are no words to explain how your fate becomes tied to a place when something like that happens I suppose. Many people in worse circumstances chose to never go back. I can understand that also. In my case, for now, I realize that the family block of land we own here, ties us to the place as much as the spiritual connection I feel with the land, and so the choice is between staying and being as well equipped and empowered as possible, or staying and feeling the same sense of empowerment every summer that comes along from here on in. And this is the story behind why I am training to be a firefighter