We had managed to scrape some sort of plan together, working off a sole, rudimentary road map. I had used the map the night before to piece together the track of the fire and show DFES. All the information contained on the map either came from GPS points of the fire I had recorded in the early stages – or word of mouth reports we had gathered from community members after it had run. IMAGE (left): The agricultural landscape on Wednesday morning, showing the scale and ferocity of the fire. White areas are paddocks denuded and already drifting. Photographer: Paul Carmody. IMAGE (right): The rudimentary map, that used community input to track the fire’s location. The firefighting efforts on Wednesday were planned from this map. Photographer: Will Carmody. Armed with this map, we split the surrounding area into five sections. I asked the guys to sort themselves into five even teams, using local knowledge to delineate where people went. If a person knew a certain area, or had mates in that area, they made their way to stand with that group. I briefed them as best as possible, and
concern, but it was brought under control. Our biggest
congestion. Most of the time we were reduced to using
after ending along the lines of ‘go out and be safe’, they
issue though was trying to get communications across.
UHF’s short range and utes to run messages. The
left in their respective groups. Most of the efforts went
Congestion over radios on Tuesday had been severe,
satellite phones were also intermittent and as they came
into mopping up spot fires and starting the enormous
whilst
up as a private number, there was no way to return a
clean-up. Roberts Swamp area did prove to be a bit of a
radio communication was still bad due to smoke and
on
Wednesday
the
mobiles
crashed,
and
missed call.
WILL CARMODY | pg 79