Wicked Orange Lines Going For Broke
Sydney Morning Herald
Friday January 4, 2002
From the vantage point of a Rural Fire Service' Bell 206 Jet Ranger helicopter, the ``Bulga fire", burning in the Wollemi National Park and threatening to burst into the Singleton coalfields in the Hunter Valley, looked so big as to be a lost cause.
Below us, a 900-litre bucket of water carried by another helicopter for dumping on burning trees at the edge of the Putty Road looked a mere thimble against a backdrop of 64,000 hectares of charred land.
Smoke spread through trees and along valleys, and occasionally the wicked orange lines of flame came into view.
The Bulga fire, almost certainly started by an arsonist on the Hunter Main Track and the Martindale Trail in the National Park on December 21, had broken through firebreaks on Tuesday. By Wednesday night it was threatening the tiny town of Broke, and large mining complexes were exposed to its northern flank.
Tom Ragnaf, the incident controller at Bulga, said: ``If the coal dumps catch fire, it will be almost impossible to put them out. There are explosives complexes out there. There is a great deal of heavy industry. If fire gets into that, we are going to lose major infrastructure."
Jenni Farrell, deputy incident controller and a veteran of a thousand fires over the past 28 years, said there had been community consultation at Broke and Bulga townships and yesterday morning at Jerrys Plains.
A separate fire was burning 10 kilometres to the south in the Yengo National Park. It could link with the Bulga fire and it was capable of getting into the Broken Back Range and threatening Cessnock.
Winds were moderate yesterday, gusting to only about 45 kmh, but they were varying direction in extremely rugged terrain.
Ms Farrell said one individual had been identified as a suspect for causing the Bulga fire.
``It happens every year that we get fires, often as big as this," she said. ``Of all the fires I have covered, 95 per cent would be the result of arson."
A perimeter track had been bulldozed over the previous two days at the edge of the Wollemi National Park, diverting occasionally around sheds, in a move to contain the fire.
Back at the Bulga base, where about 250 personnel from a variety of emergency services had gathered, a West Australian firefighter, Russell Hayes, was busy tracking the exact position of all personnel along the fire front.
He was one of 36 West Australian firefighters who answered the call last weekend to help NSW. Of these, seven were at the Bulga base.
It was Mr Hayes's first trip to NSW at the age of 44.
He said he had accommodation at Singleton and, because of similarity in the control system, the WA firefighters had ``dovetailed in".
West Australian fires were normally bigger, but the terrain was far easier and the WA bush did not have the stringybarks prevalent in the east, which cast off burning remnants to the winds when the fires came.
``We are glad to be helping," he said. ``We look after each other. Firefighters are a worldwide brotherhood."
© 2002 Sydney Morning Herald
