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The thousands of volunteers out fighting the forest fires raging across parts of Australia’s New South Wales state were thanked by Prime Minister Tony Abbott yesterday as the work went on to save homes from the flames. |
The country was “lucky to have supportive employers and supportive families who allow their loved ones to go out and do this kind of work when it’s needed”, the prime minister said.
Abbott is himself a volunteer fireman. Last Sunday he was not at work running the country nor relaxing on a Sydney beach with his family, but sitting in his uniform in the driving seat of a Davidson Rural Fire Service truck waiting for a call to serve that mercifully never came.
Australians are well prepared for the vagaries of their weather.
While crews battled to restrict losses to around 100 homes in the environs of Sydney, colleagues closer to Brisbane were out dealing with flash floods brought on by 49mm of rain in three hours.
In a week when Canberra recorded its coldest October day in more than half a century, weather forecasters 300km away in Sydney were warning of the scorching heat and high winds that combined to sear more than 50,000 hectares of forest.
Sometimes the fire rushes cities. Ten years ago Canberra, the nation’s capital, lost 500 homes in 10 hours.
But mostly it is those who live in the countryside who take a beating. Four years ago, 173 died and more than 1,000 houses were lost when the forest caught alight north of Melbourne.
In that catastrophe, known as Black Saturday, 430,000 hectares went up in smoke as fire raced down hillsides, crossed roads and incinerated the vehicles of those who left it too late to give up their homes and were running for their lives.
Around half the houses lost on Thursday were in and around Springwood, in the Blue Mountains 70km west of Sydney.
Joe Moore, who runs the shop at the Springwood Golf Club, thanked the brigade that battled in vain to keep his house from the flames.
“I’ve been here all my life,” he told a local news agency. “It was my dream home.”
Like most others left homeless, he vowed to rebuild and stay in the woods.
“It’s one of those things,” he said with typical stoicism, “if you want to live up in the Blue Mountains. It’s a beautiful place to live but it has the dangers of nature’s ferocity like we had today.”
Another pledging to stay and rebuild on the ashes of his lost home is former journalist Ron Fuller.
“It’s just trying to keep those day-to-day things going, and thinking, well, OK, you know, pick yourself up, dust yourself off and get into it again,” he told national broadcaster ABC, his former employer.
Fuller, also a volunteer firefighter, said Thursday’s blaze was phenomenal - the perfect firestorm, the thankfully rare occasion when high winds, high temperatures and high levels of tinder in the forest combine to create blasts of flame that carry all before them.