“A STORY OF TWO BUSHFIRES” - WILL CARMODY - CONT. Captain of the Cascade Volunteer Bushfire Brigade. Will was Senior Fire Control Officer for Shire of Esperance West Zone 2. Incident Control Officer with Shire of Esperance at Level 1 fire.
Fire trucks were on site by seven, waiting in readiness for
Until another machine arrived, the clearing chain and
An hour later at 6pm, a second bulldozer for the chaining
backburning. An incident control van (ICV) was brought
associated bulldozer would have to sit idle.
effort finally arrived and the chain once again began to
up from town to act as the operations centre, as the scale
move, as we tried to make some sort of headway with
of efforts to halt the fire continued to build. Esperance
Early afternoon I went up for another scout, this time in
the buffer breaks that made up plan B. Originally, we had
operations were still busy with fires in Merivale.
a neighbour’s plane, taking more images and checking
wanted to back burn along these breaks as well, but with
on both the fire and bulldozer’s progress. Whilst airborne
the time, weather and machine issues the backburning
By 9am local farmers were organised into a harvest
we received aircraft to aircraft communications from the
had to be scrapped.
and plough crew. They promptly set about harvesting
chopper, who had once again come out to allow a better
boundary crops near the fire, all for good reason.
aerial view. A bit after 2pm we landed, and I jumped
The tracking bulldozer managed to work until 11.30pm
Everyone was cutting the stubble down short, in an effort
into the chopper. We also picked up officers from Parks
before poor visibility in the dangerous terrain forced it
to lower the carrying capacity of the crops in case the
and Wildlife and while in the air we all discussed what I
to knock off. The lake systems were treacherous and
fire did break free of the bush. The existing stubble was
believed we needed to do. Everyone was in agreeance.
working under lights became too dangerous, as the
then turned over, instantly creating a firebreak. In total
It was good to know we were all on the same page with
ground would suddenly turn into sharp drop offs, which
an area 300m wide by 15 kilometres in length, was
the plans.
were hidden in the darkness.
From the air, it soon became apparent that the bulldozer
With the coming day’s weather forecast weighing on
harvested and ploughed in. The efforts did not stop until 11pm Monday night.
had overshot the turning mark for where it would finally
my mind, I continued to organise things until half past
The second set of dozers, which had been organised
start cutting directly to the fire. The issue was made
midnight, getting home at about 1am. Five hours later
the day before, had hold ups getting on site. The
worse with the poor ability to have any air to ground
I was out of bed. The morning was almost ominously
clearing chain we needed also didn’t arrive. At 11am,
communications from the plane. Once back down I had
still and cool. The only sign of the fire was a few puffs of
we got hold of another chain, which was towed up with
to chase the bulldozer down via vehicle, before getting it
smoke on the horizon.
a farm tractor to where operations base was taking
back on track.
shape. With no dozers, a farm tractor and loader were hooked to the chain. They got going for about
At 5pm, the helicopter came back out again and this time
an hour before a hydraulic hose ripped off by a stick
I went up with Tom Brown and Ash Stewart, updating them
stopped operations in their tracks. By 1pm, one of the
on what was happening. The first bulldozer had only just
chaining bulldozers arrived on site, however the second
reached the fire front at 5pm, so we took the operator up
machine had some issues and had failed to materialise.
in the helicopter to show him where he needed to go.
pg 70 | WILL CARMODY