Thread: Strike Team 12 Bravo

As some of you would be aware I headed down to Victoria to assist with the bushfires last week. I arrived home yesterday, so I thought I'd share some photos with you. It was a very humbling experience being down there. Random people would walk up and say thankyou, shake your hand or beep their horn. I had exhausted Victorian Firefighers pour their hearts out about how helpless they felt during and after '****ty Saturday'

We flew down via Essendon in a fleet of SAAB 340's



Stayed at the Mantra hotel on the first night and had to be up at 5am to go to the staging area for our first day.



Healesville staging area was pretty well organised, we got fed well and the appliances were serviced when needed.



I was the RFS Strike Team Leader for ST12B. That meant I drove a command vehicle (the crappy navara in the photo above) and was in charge of 25 firefighters + 1 communications assistnt in my rig. We manned 5 heavy tankers and were tasked to the Toolangi SF to assist in the Blowhard sector of the Murrindindi complex fires.

In the same complex of fires were Strike Teams 10B, 11B, 13A, 14A & 15A. We also had 3 NSW Ambulance service SCAT team vehicles assigned to us for the duration.

The forest down there is awesome, the trees are just amazing (and bloody scary when they fall over! )







We worked with RFS Strike Team 13A for the first 2 days until they were rotated back to NSW. At one stage we had a firefighter down sick from 13A, and I had to look after 51 firefighters and 10 vehicles for the rest of the day Let me tell you, that puts some stress on you when there's trees falling down all around them!







We left the fireground on the second day and were driving back to Healesville from Toolangi when a guy flagged me down and begged me to help with some spot fires that were threatening his property. His eyes were like dinner plates when next moment 5 heavy tankers roared over the hill behind me, turned left into his gate and proceeded to smash the 3 grassfires and 1 bushfire that had spotted into unburnt ground.



By the time the local CFA trucks arrived we'd bought them all under control



On leaving the fireground for the final time on our last day we got some photos of our strike team.



Most of the Blowhard crew



My Strike team



My assistant and I with our POS command vehicle



All my photos are at: Vic Fires 09 pictures by treads_photo - Photobucket

Cheers

Glad your ok. Choppers were still pratoling down at Labertuch (?Spelling). Some trees were still smoldering even. You could see how hot the fire was in some places and where it just raced past some fields to incinerate the next few.
They lost one house down there on the Monday after the fires due to embers.

As you said very friendly locals. Town 5km away where we camped even put on dinner for us!
Farmers even came out to thank us for all the clearing we managed. Seeing the amount of work it just didn't feel like we had done enough to help.