Editorial: Catastrophic Fire Concerns

THE people who protect us are worried, really worried and they need you to hear their concern.

Tonight I had a call from Stuart Daniels from the Kingdon Ponds Rural Fire Brigade asking how quickly we could get the message out to the community imploring them to help prevent any fires tomorrow because they don’t know how they would be able to contain a fire in the predicted conditions.

The forecast is the worst for fire this region has seen in living memory; we’ve had a good season with lots of feed which the dry, hot conditions has turned to tinder, we have searing temperatures and worst of all gale force winds of 55 kilometres an hour with gusts of up to 80 kilometres an hour.

What that means is a fire front could spread as fast as the wind can carry it and at 50 or 80 kilometres an hour it would outpace the local fire response.

Also factor in embers which can light new fires kilometres from the fire front and you can begin to understand their concern.

“It can be as simple as pulling over on the side of the road with a hot exhaust in long grass which can spark a fire and we will be battling if a fire was to start in the conditions tomorrow,” said Mr Daniels.

“The fire danger rating is catastrophic, we hit 46 today, but the winds tomorrow would fan a fire that within minutes it will be out of control,” he said.

“Even with a response time of 5 minutes, we could be 15 minutes too late, the fire would have burnt out so much country by then,” he said.

“We’ve just got to get through tomorrow, this is a really dangerous period, it’s so dry that it just adds fuel to the fire there is no better way of putting it,” he said.

“I’ve been listening to the rural fire service radio most of the day and the whole service is really concerned, because if anything happens I mean, I really hope it doesn’t because look it will be out of control pretty quickly,” he said.

“There was a debate earlier tonight about the Nowra show doing fireworks and someone commented that if something happens at Nowra you’ll be sending people to the Hunter Valley before you know it, we are all that worried about the conditions,” he said.

A fire strike force has been assembled at the Kingdon Ponds rural fire station due to its central location and teams from throughout the district are staying at the station ready to deploy.

Tonight the local volunteers will try and get some sleep, concerned about what they may face tomorrow.

“We’ve prepared the trucks and we’ll try and have a good night’s rest and hope to hell the pagers don’t go off during the night, because there could be a big day tomorrow,” Stuart Daniels said.

“While we try not to think about it, you also need to be prepared because it is going to be 40 degrees and on the fire line it could be 70 degrees, but hopefully residents think about that when they think about what they are doing tomorrow,” said Mr Daniels.

What they need you to do:

• Stay inside and stay cool;
• Don’t weld, grind or use machinery in a paddock;
• Don’t pull over on the side of the road in long grass;
• Don’t ride motorbikes through paddocks;
• Don’t go into bushland or fire prone areas;

“Basically don’t do anything that could cause a fire, stay inside and stay cool so we all can,” said Stuart Daniels.

The staff at the Bureau of Meteorology are fantastic people and readily take the time to give lots of detail on local weather conditions, but tonight when we called they were under the pump providing condition reports to the rural fire service.

When we said we were from scone.com.au and wanted to know wind speed conditions for tomorrow, they didn’t need to look up the forecasts, they knew them.

When the calmest, bravest people in our community voice their concerns, we really need to take heed.

Hopefully tomorrow we won’t need to report on fires and everyone will stay safe, especially our volunteer fire fighters.

Related stories: Unprecedented Fire Warning and Sir Ivan Fire Concerns.

Elizabeth Flaherty
Editor
scone.com.au