By JESSE GRAHAM
IT WAS 11am on Thursday 26 November when Healesville SES volunteer Stephen Collins received the call to assist with an out-of-control fire in South Australia.
“I was actually still out working in the shire truck, out towards Steels Creek,” he said.
“They said ‘can you be at the airport by two in the afternoon?’, and I thought ‘yeah!’.”
In a matter of hours, Mr Collins and about 200 other volunteers from the CFA and Victorian SES had touched down in South Australia to help their counterparts fight a 82,000 hectare blaze that started the day before.
He told the Mail that his roles included clearing roads of fallen trees, assisting with staging areas and identifying hazards – and there were many.
“It was a massive impact fire,” he said.
“They were just starting to do the reaping of the wheat, so all of the machinery – multi-million dollars’ worth of machinery – was just in paddocks, burnt to the ground.
“It was a ground fire – it was a grass fire, but it was a grass fire on a humongous scale, so the trees were still standing, but they were all burning at the bottom.”
Mr Collins said it was his first deployment interstate in his 18 years with Healesville SES and that he saw many parallels with 2009’s Black Saturday bushfires in the destruction and reactions.
“We decided to do a bit of welfare checks – that was the thing where I felt talking to people from here who had been through Black Saturday was very beneficial because it was like talking to people who we spoke to six years ago,” he said.
“There were the same reactions, the same shock and we were more comfortable dealing with them because we’d experienced it, you know.
“It was around the 72-hour mark, the adrenaline has worn off, the reality had actually hit and that’s when they tend to go down – again, as we found after Black Saturday, just having somebody turn up and let them know that there are people out there, that they’re not alone, and listening to them, is massive.”
Mr Collins and the other volunteers were flown back home on Monday 30 November after working through the weekend.
And when Mr Collins met with the Mail outside Healesville SES’s Argoon Road depot on Wednesday 2 December his orange jumpsuit was still stained by the soot from the fires.
On Tuesday 1 December the Country Fire Service (CFS) issued a statement that the threat from the Pinery fire was reduced, with crews still working on the fire ground.
The fire killed two people and tens of thousands of livestock animals, destroyed 87 homes and more than 300 farm buildings.
CFA volunteers from Badger Creek, Seville and other District 13 brigades also flew over to help with the fire effort.
CFS state co-ordinator Yvette Dowling commended the work of volunteers in helping to quell the fire.
“Hundreds of volunteers across the state attended this fire and many more were active in support roles, and their work, as always, was exemplary,” she said.
Anyone concerned for people they know who may have been affected by the fire can visit register.redcross.org.au for more information.
