On the fireground in the Buffalo River Valley

‘The bushfire had been burning for around 15 days, and destroyed 100,000 hectares when our taskforce was assigned to the locality of Nug Nug in the Buffalo River Valley.

The community was spread throughout little valleys in the area, and the fire was burning into and around these little valleys within dense forests.

Each day the bushfire would take a run up over a mountain and send spot fires into a valley – and then the next day, another uphill run and it was the same again.

In the mornings, we would use bulldozers, graders and excavators to build containment lines in paddocks in the valleys, to create a firebreak between homes and the approaching fire.

Each afternoon our focus would shift as the massive column of smoke on the horizon would build, and the sky would become well and truly alive with colour, and embers would start to fall around us.

Wearing goggles and masks to protect us from the smoke, we’d fall back to the paddocks to chase these spotfires to try to contain the fire to the forest edge – at one stage we had seven aircraft waterbombing, supporting us.

Evacuation warnings were issued to residents, but it was fair to say that many of them stayed – and we worked closely with them to support their efforts to save their homes.

During this time, we also worked with CFA strike teams and local FFMV teams, and the productive relationship we had there was a key factor in the outcome.

When we left, all of the homes in the valleys had been saved. When we left, the rain moved in which is fantastic.

During our time there, the residents were incredibly thankful that we were putting the effort into to protecting their homes and animals – because certainly we did everything we could.

We were a small team, but we had a number of highly experienced personnel, which meant we were able to manage graders, bulldozers and excavators at the same time – our whole taskforce felt really valued by the community as we were able to turn up and tackle a range of important jobs that otherwise may not have been done.

For all of us it was a unique and intense experience – it is rare that you go away on a taskforce, and every day, you undertake something that is really critical, but that was the case for us every day of this deployment.

We all left the north-east better firefighters than we were when we arrived. It was a massive week, and every day we could hold our heads up high and be proud that our work had been really effective in protecting homes in the Buffalo River Valley area.’