Bushfire ‘just came alive on us’
You would think the photo 22-year-old Fergus Simpson is holding shows the sheer intensity of the Australian bushfires. Except, it actually doesn’t.
Simpson, who returned home last week after fighting bushfires in Australia, told the photo was taken during a controlled burn and ‘‘quite a quiet moment’’.
‘‘The bushfire was just on the other side of the hill. That was a controlled burn we were doing to keep it back,’’ he explained.
He sent the photos to his mum and told her he could only get pictures of the ‘‘safe things’’ – there would be no time when he was in the midst of some of the worst bushfires in Australia’s history. Simpson, a fourth-year Canterbury University forestry student, described the conditions of a bushfire as ‘‘not like anything that I thought I would be getting into’’.
‘‘It is so hot there; any part of your body that is not covered up is just scorching, like burning,’’ he said, adding that the intense fires ‘‘battered’’ his senses.
In the thick of it, breathing became difficult and the ‘‘horrible’’ taste of smoke would stick in your throat.
This was not what Simpson had in mind when he travelled to Australia in early November for a forestry internship.
He said that for a few weeks after new year, all he did was fight fires and sleep, with one firefighting shift lasting 24 hours.
Sometimes he felt powerless against the blazes. On his last day in the job, after a week of putting in control lines and doing controlled burns, the wind changed with dramatic effect.
A co-worker looked in the rear-view mirror and saw a ‘‘huge plume of smoke’’ coming out of nowhere.
‘‘The thing just came alive on us ... nature, if it wants to do something, it is going to do it.’’
During another fire, the embers began spotting on to the road, the crew’s only route out of the searing inferno.
‘‘But it was spotting over far quicker than we could put them out,’’ he said. The crew stayed for a little longer before a decision was made to leave. As they left, both sides of the road were ‘‘completely burning’’, he said.
‘‘It can turn so quickly, and if you think it is creeping up on you, it can be seconds before suddenly you think: oh no, this is bad, we have to leave.’’
Simpson explained that as he completed his final day early last week, it was a ‘‘surreal feeling’’.
‘‘Four months, that was all I had done, kind of felt like [firefighting] was my life now,’’ he said.
While his co-workers continue to fight bushfires, Simpson is back for his final year at university. After graduating, he said, he would look into rural firefighting.
‘‘It is definitely something I am going to consider.’’
‘‘Any part of your body that is not covered up is just scorching.’’