Volunteer rural fire fighters, from left, Lee Beloe, Steve Packer, Graham Staples, Nathan Palmer and Dean Hewitt left Nelson on Monday to help fight the bushfires in Australia. Photo: Simon Bloomberg.

Locals to fight Aussie blaze

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One crew of Nelson firefighters is already helping to battle the most dangerous bushfire threat in Australia since the Black Saturday inferno that raged across Victoria in February 2009 and a second crew is on its way, leaving Nelson to join the ANZAC fire fighting force this week.

Colin Eggers and his team of Peter Henderson, Rex Mitchell, Daniel Pearless and Bruce Hampton arrived in Victoria on February 3, when they joined a contingent of 42 New Zealand fire fighters based at Orbost, about four hours drive north of Melbourne. The Waimea Rural Fire Authority volunteers are helping combat a series of bushfires that have burned across 333,000 hectares of Victoria and Colin says it’s been “hard yakka” battling the fires, heat, smoke and steep terrain.

“These fires are so huge they’re unbelievable. The destruction is so widespread it looks like an atomic bomb has gone off.

“We’ve been putting in containment lines around the Cann River and Bonang Highway. It’s been hard yakka because it’s been so hot and smoky and we are working with hand tools on steep country. Last Sunday the temperature was around 45 degrees and the smoke is thick, it’s like being in Nelson on a really foggy winter’s morning. The boys have been doing the hard yards.”

Colin says conditions last Sunday were “so scary” they weren’t allowed to go into the bush to fight fires. Instead they were placed on asset protection looking out for spot fires that threatened homes in Orbost. “The wind was getting up to 90 kilometres an hour and spot fires from the main fire line were travelling more than 10 kilometres through the air. The main fire came within 10 kilometres of Orbost which was really scary.”

Although it’s hot and potentially dangerous work, Colin says the team are happy to help out.

“All the guys except one have been over here fighting fires before and we’re happy to be back giving them a hand. The Australians really appreciate our help too. “People come up to us and want to shake our hands and thank us. They love us.”

On Monday, a second Waimea Rural Fire Authority crew of Graham Staples, Dean Hewitt, Steven Packer, Nathan Palmer and Lee Beloe left Nelson to join the massive fire-fighting effort. Graham, who celebrated his 50th birthday on Monday, says they all volunteered because they wanted to help out and gain experience fighting large scale fires.

“It’s going to be a good learning experience because it’s so different from fires in New Zealand,” Graham says. “One of the fires over there has 580 fire fighters working on it in each shift – that’s difficult to comprehend.”