More than 80,000 people helped battle the 2019-20 bushfires. Five years on one remembers the blur of daysFollow our Australia news live blog for latest updatesGet our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcastBernie O’Rourke can vividly recall flying out from Newcastle in September 2019 on one of the first catastrophic fire days of a season now known as black summer.It was 1.30 in the morning and, as the navy helicopter zigzagged over the bushland between Armidale and Taree, O’Rourke could see up to five fires blazing bright in the darkness. While night fires usually resemble “dots of colour” across a black landscape, this time O’Rourke saw something “very weird”.Sign up for Guardian Australia’s breaking news email Continue reading…More than 80,000 people helped battle the 2019-20 bushfires. Five years on one remembers the blur of daysFollow our Australia news live blog for latest updatesGet our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcastBernie O’Rourke can vividly recall flying out from Newcastle in September 2019 on one of the first catastrophic fire days of a season now known as black summer.It was 1.30 in the morning and, as the navy helicopter zigzagged over the bushland between Armidale and Taree, O’Rourke could see up to five fires blazing bright in the darkness. While night fires usually resemble “dots of colour” across a black landscape, this time O’Rourke saw something “very weird”.Sign up for Guardian Australia’s breaking news email Continue reading…
Bernie O’Rourke can vividly recall flying out from Newcastle in September 2019 on one of the first catastrophic fire days of a season now known as black summer.
It was 1.30 in the morning and, as the navy helicopter zigzagged over the bushland between Armidale and Taree, O’Rourke could see up to five fires blazing bright in the darkness. While night fires usually resemble “dots of colour” across a black landscape, this time O’Rourke saw something “very weird”.
“The glow,” he says. “The intensity of the glow.
“Ideally at night things cool down, so you can take the opportunity to do some more work with the fire, or build some containment, or try to get the upper hand a little bit.
“But this was in forest and vegetation where it was just going. Really big heads of fire, with high flame heights.”
O’Rourke is one of an estimated 82,480 black summer responders. Some joined volunteer crews, battling raging fires and clearing fuel loads. Others, like O’Rourke, were support workers and coordinators whose decisions carried potentially life-changing consequences for those on the frontline.
O’Rourke joined the New South Wales rural fire service as a volunteer in 2009 but by 2019 was working on staff at the state air desk in Sydney’s State Control Centre. This comfortable air-conditioned city office would soon become a high-stakes pressure cooker. Multiple agencies worked around the clock to make sense of a stream of data and allocate often-stretched resources across nearly 800,000 sq km of a state on fire.
“[They’re] considering the whole state’s need at that point in time,” O’Rourke explains with cool, procedural clarity. “Sometimes you’re looking at houses in towns in direct threat – they’re the priority compared to another fire that’s still fairly remote. [Maybe] it’s got potential to run to a town tomorrow but right now we need to do what we can to protect that immediate threat.”
That year the marathon shifts, high-stakes decisions and alarming scenes from around the country soon became a new normal.
“A lot of it was a blur,” O’Rourke says. “Because it just became a normal day.”
But it was clear this was anything but normal. “You leave your office and then you just feel the heat of the day, because you’ve been in air conditioning all day … it was just that smoke in the air constantly. I wasn’t seeing blue sky.”
Charged by an extended period of drought, the fire season forced O’Rourke and his colleagues to rethink their strategies in the face of an unpredictable and seemingly endless run of outbreaks.
“The first house we lost, that was bad. Then the numbers just kept growing, and it became the season we knew we just couldn’t stop everything.”
By October the pressure was taking a toll.
“I did comment to people that, ‘I don’t know how we’re going to survive doing this through to March.’
“Because at that stage, we’d been going for two months, three months, and it was just like, ‘We’re not even at Christmas yet.’”
Often the most effective aerial measure O’Rourke and his colleagues on the state air desk can deploy comes in the form of chemical retardant, a crimson-coloured substance that can stop a fire in its tracks.
But in 2019 embers would often skip right over these red lines. There were other challenges, too: they were running out of retardant, the farmers’ dams that would usually supply air tankers with water were often dry and, as smoke blanketed the countryside and city alike, it became difficult to get the planes in the air.
“I remember talking to pilots and saying, ‘Look, you know, if you can’t fly, don’t fly.’ It is what it is – if you can’t see, you can’t fly,” O’Rourke says. “Because nobody wants an accident, or a crash.”
That dreaded scenario became a reality in January 2020, just as the fire season seemed to be relenting.
“There were still fires going, they were still bad, [but] the sheer number slowed down, or you got a bit more of a handle on them in different places.”
Then, in the early afternoon of 23 January, a report came in from a fire ground north of Cooma in the Snowy Mountains.
“‘I took the call that day,” O’Rourke says. “Saying an aircraft crashed.
“I remember questioning, going, ‘Are you sure? They drop into valleys really low all the time.’ They said, ‘No, no, there’s flames.’”
Bomber 134, a privately owned Hercules C-130 tanker with a US crew, had been asked to drop a load of retardant on a site in Adaminaby, where another tanker had turned back out of safety concerns. Judging the conditions at Adaminaby too risky, Bomber 134 was rerouted to another job nearby at Good Good – an area subject to similarly hazardous winds and turbulence.
An inquiry by the NSW coroner heard that the 45-year-old pilot, a veteran of Afghanistan and Iraq, had deemed it safe to continue flying after first undertaking three laps of the area. Bomber 134 proceeded to drop a partial load of retardant before crashing about 1.15pm. The three crew onboard died.
“That was a really bad day,’ O’Rourke says. “I was off for a few days after it. I think about two weeks later it was the ramp ceremonies to send the bodies home.
“A lot of changes since then have come into play to try to improve things, and make things safer.”
O’Rourke is now an aviation supervisor with the rural fire service and has since taken similar calls. While none of those accidents were fatal, the memory of 23 January lingers.
“The crash was a huge one – still is,” he says. “It’s still a very hard one to deal with,” he says, before catching himself. “Not deal with … but you think about it.
“Certainly for me, there is still that worry of that phone call of an aircraft, like 134, going down.”
The intensity and duration of the black summer fires still affects many involved in fighting them. According to Curtin University’s After the Fires report, more than 5,000 personnel required additional mental health support in the 12 months after the fires – double the usual rate.
“I think there’s a lot of people that push through, or try to push through,” O’Rourke says. “A number of people have left since then. And I guess in my own mind, I think if we have another one of [those] seasons … oh, my god, I can’t deal with that again, you know?”
He says improvements have been made to stop responders becoming overwhelmed or burning out.
“The team that we’ve got at the office now can look after those things so someone can step away, have a break. It’s not about one person, it’s about the team working together to make it work.”
O’Rourke might dread another black summer but the inevitability of similarly extreme conditions makes finding that balance all the more important.
“We will get another bad season,” he says. “Hopefully not like that one … but it will get bad.”
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