Baptism of fire tough to process
FOR 30 years Steve Reynolds has worked in Cairns as a firefighter, but it took some serious soul searching for him to last any more than two months in the job.
Now 64, he had just seven weeks as a trainee under his belt back in 1987 when his crew was called to a gas leak on Bunda St.
A jet of flame was already shooting into the air from the stricken railway wagon when they pulled up and leapt into action, hampered by dwindling water pressure but doing what they could in the precious minutes they had.
Mr Reynolds reckons he was standing about 30m away, crouching behind a cement pipe, when the tanker exploded.
“You just knew (it was going to blow), you could feel it in your bones, it was just accelerating by the second,” he said.
“It wasn’t like a normal explosion. It was more like a big pressure wave and then a lot of heat of course.
“I remember thinking ‘oh boy’ and then rolling into a ball on the ground. I was on my knees anyway.
“I can remember putting my hands over my face and putting my head down between my knees. It just seemed to go on and on.”
He and colleague Mal Armstrong copped the brunt of it.
His hands, ears and the side of his face were burnt, some caused by the melting of the standard-issue plastic on the helmet worn at the time.
His throat was red raw, known as respiratory burns.
The pair’s injuries were so serious, they and another man, David Shailer, were flown out of Cairns to the Royal Brisbane’s burns unit that night.
Fortunately they were tended to by a guru in the treatment of burn injuries, Professor Stuart Pegg who, 10 years later would famously go on to save the life of Cairns schoolboy Jandamarra O’Shane after he was doused in petrol and set alight in a playground.
“At that time he was Australia’s foremost burns surgeon so we were just lucky,” he said.
Mr Reynolds spent a month in the unit and a further five months off work. Even when he returned he was wearing special pressure gloves on his hands for months.
So many times during that recovery he thought about walking away, but it was a desire to keep helping the community that drove him on. The effects ran deep, though.
Even with retirement looming he continues to be particularly wary on any call-out that involves a chemical spill.
The 2015 Ravenshoe cafe explosion, where two colleagues and close mates Michael Beck and Joe Torrisi were hurt, shook him to the core.
“When you see that happen to guys you’ve known for 20 years or more, that had a really deep effect,” he said. “I didn’t go out of my way to visit them because I didn’t know how I could cope with it.”