They were just a small team but together they clambered into bush near the Blue Gum Forest in the dead of night to save the Mountains.
Carrying chainsaws, rake hoes and brush cutters, they negotiated their way down almost vertical drops into some of the most inhospitable terrain to ensure that fire in the upper Grose Valley could not spread to vulnerable villages lower down the hill.
By the time they were airlifted out at 10am last Tuesday morning, many of them had been on duty for 28 straight hours.
The drama began at lunchtime on Monday, October 21, after the State Mine fire crossed the Darling Causeway and it became apparent that desperate efforts to keep it out of the Grose Valley were proving fruitless.
Kim de Govrik, deputy operations manager overseeing the National Parks crews on the fire ground, decided his men should pull out and other options be considered.
“We didn’t think we could rein it in... We wanted to see if we could keep it west of Victoria Creek but it had an active edge of about 12 kilometres.”
Mr de Govrik told the Gazette previous experience showed the importance of keeping the fire under control.
“Historically, if you get ignitions in the upper Grose, they tend to head from west to east with the potential to move right down the Grose Valley and impact on villages down the Mountains,” he said.
By late afternoon — less than 36 hours before the Wednesday that RFS commissioner Shane Fitzsimmons had warned would be “as bad as it gets” — authorities gave the go-ahead to start a backburn behind the villages of Blackheath and Mt Victoria.
“The RFS was burning on top of the cliff edge on fire trails from Perrys [Lookdown] up Hat Hill [Road] to Mt Victoria,” said Mr de Govrik. “But this was the missing link.”
It was a two-kilometre stretch from Perrys Lookdown, around the Blue Gum Forest to Frank Hurley Head. The only way to tackle it was on foot. And it had to be done that night.
Mr de Govrik asked for volunteers “because it was quite a risky night operation”. He put a piece of paper on the table and 20 men wrote their names down. One left his baby daughter’s birthday party to join in. Another had finished his shift “but he knew what we were up to, he got a whiff and said I want to be a part of it,” Mr de Govrik said.
“As you can appreciate, those people have families and basically they were given an hour or two to make up their minds. They obviously were torn between their own safety and the safety of the Blue Mountains, particularly the villages, and the national park.
“We had a really good range of experienced people and less experienced ones. They are all arduous level of fitness, which means they have to have a fitness test each year. They also had a range of qualifications, like senior first aid or chainsaw skills.”
They were to be joined by 19 men from the RFS’s Remote Area Firefighting Team.
With little time to spare, it was fairly hectic at the NPWS office at Blackheath, Mr de Govrik said.
“All sorts of things had to be organised quickly to insert that many men into the Grose Valley.”
Backpacks, food, water, chainsaws, hoes, rakes, fire lighting gear and hoses were assembled. Some equipment was airlifted in to a helipad at Acacia Flat, south of the Blue Gum; other stuff was carried on the men’s backs.
Mr de Govrik insisted on having an air ambulance nearby in case anyone was injured and had to be evacuated. A chopper was duly dispatched and the pilot and three paramedic crew waited that night at the NPWS helipad. In the event smoke or weather conditions grounded the chopper, two remote area paramedics who could walk in to difficult areas were also on standby.
The men needed water in case the wind took the fire over their heads and behind their line so a kilometre of hose was trailed from Perrys Lookdown into the valley, with an RFS tanker up the top pumping water into it all night.
At the other end of the operation, pumps which had been dropped down by chopper were sucking water from Govetts Creek to supply those on the western edge.
Mr de Govrik spent the night between the NPWS at Blackheath and the top of Perrys Lookdown. As his team worked from the top of the ridge down into the valley, he sat and watched the fire line travel.
“It looked like a big, fiery red snake, just slowly making its way down. It was quite amazing to see.”
Scott Colefax, one of the ground support crew, asked the team before they left how they felt. “They said, ‘well, not great, but we need to do it.’”
By morning, after all of the men had been airlifted out, they wound down with some liquid refreshments at the NPWS workshop in Blackheath.
Mick English, who was in charge of the Hurley sector, said the Perrys Lookdown trek had been “particularly dangerous but our side was relatively straightforward. And if you’ve got experienced people, you’re OK.”
Mr de Govrik said: “When the bosses rang that morning saying ‘how did it go, how did it go’, I said, considering the short time frame to get that operation going, it was pretty much a text-book exercise.”
He continued: “There is a camaraderie in the Blue Mountains National Park, that we are a can-do region and we felt it was important in the big picture to do that to protect the townships of the Mountains. We all live up here, we know fire but we know the issues, we know people and we felt it was a response that we were happy to commit to.”
