Where angels fear to tread

Many’s the hero who later explains they just acted on instinct. Mind you, the same could be said about many a charred corpse. Nicole Barnes, left, deserves acknowledgement for the bravery she showed when she came across a burning campervan in the Lindis Pass.

She also richly deserves the no doubt diligent and thorough telling-off her mum later delivered. Because her judgment was way off.

There’s no great need for those of us who aren’t her mother to pile on with further chastisements but we do need to be clear among ourselves that instinctive actions – even when they speak volumes about a person’s capacity for selflessness – aren’t always our highest calling.

Ultimately, the Cromwell woman hazarded her life for possessions.

That they were other people’s rather than her own doesn’t really mitigate the wrongheadedness of the call.

She accepts that it was dumb. We can certainly take her at her word that ‘‘All I could think was how awful to be in a different country and lose all their stuff’’.

But among the many things she wasn’t thinking was how unspeakably worse it would have been for the tourists had they then seen her be seriously injured, or killed in an attempt to rescue their electronics gear, documents and travel tat. How could they then comfort themselves? She gave her life so their iPhone could live?

It’s entirely understandable that in their gratitude for her deeds on their behalf, the couple called her their angel.

But their own instincts at the time were the right ones – they called out to her to get away, warning her that their vehicle was going to blow up. As cellphone footage showed, it certainly ended up blazing furiously.

Barnes and another man had both been carrying fire extinguishers – kudos for that level of preparation – in their own vehicles, and used these. Then she reached into the front seat to grab their smartphones and iPad, then climbed in the back, as smoke and fire came up through the air vents, to haul out other ‘‘stuff’’.

Some will read much into the fact that, by her account, it was a couple of minutes later that the campervan was engulfed in flames.

That doesn’t mean she made a clear-headed and correct calculation that she had enough time.

It’s really distraction to get tangled up in the details of how likely cars are to explode like a bomb as opposed to merely (merely?) roaring into flame.

And about how common it is for campervans to have LPG cylinders, and how flammable that stuff is, but how easy it is or isn’t to get a cylinder itself to erupt. It turns out James Bond movies should not be our guide on this point.

Nobody at the scene knew how many minutes, or moments, they were from a life-scarring or lifeending conflagration, during which they’d also be potentially imperilling anyone who might then be tempted – perhaps through misplaced guilt – to attempt to rescue them.

The urgent and compelling imperative at such times is to do all we reasonably can to keep one another safe. Never to put lives at risk for any lesser purpose.

How unspeakably worse it would have been for the tourists had they then seen her be seriously injured, or killed in an attempt to rescue their electronic gear, documents and travel tat.