Fire fighters in the firing line
BY ANDREW WOODHOUSE
“Fire!” is not a scream anyone wants to hear. However, it’s not generally known that until 1884 Sydney-siders were individually responsible for extinguishing their own fires with buckets of water, unless they had private insurance. People generally ran to the fire station to raise the alarm. In those days a polished brass-helmeted fire officer with horse and cart and a bell arrived. Fire stations were the first to use telephones in Sydney.
Today’s inner-urban fire stations include magnificent, million-dollar, highly-polished red “pumper” fire engines in their equipage. They wait and sit like silent sentinels like panthers ready to pounce in the station, alert and alarmed. Each aluminium, customised, six-wheeled, 13-tonne Scania P310 truck with its crew of four is turbo-powered by a 228KW [310hp], nine-litre diesel, with extension ladder, GPS, oxygen, foam and one kilometre of hose, all pumping 3,900 litres of water per minute. Launch time: less than 45 seconds. With 80-decibel sirens and powerful klaxons it charges up inner-city streets the wrong way, every second critical: lives are at stake. “It’s hot, hard, dirty work but we love it,” says local Kings Cross Commander, adding “it’s a community service.”
And for our country cousins now in the heat and height of summer, this service is also life-saving. The NSW Rural Fire Service is the world’s largest volunteer fire fighting brigade covering an area larger than some minor European countries.
This week we learnt of 11 major bushfires within 200 km radius of Sydney all in one day.
In Kurri Kurri, population 5,712, for example, the sky rained red with amber cinders as people fled in fear. Locals remembered previous fires from the 1970s.
And in the Blue Mountains the 1957 fires destroyed 140 properties, another 30 homes in 1962, claimed three lives in 1965, 49 buildings in 1977, five homes in 1979 and 300 homes in 2013.
In 2001 Christmas dinners were abandoned, plum puddings left cold; tables and decorations deserted to the ravages of wind and flames. From the south to the north coast, Canberra to the Hunter Valley, and the central west to Sydney, tens of thousands of people experienced Christmas Day in varying degrees of terror, despair and frequent bravery.
In 2016 Fire Services NSW dealt with 22,042 fires with 90% attended to within 11 minutes and 56 seconds. This cost us $702 million dollars says their latest Annual Report.
Yes, it’s money well spent but it’s also a tremendous drain on our financial resources.
The hidden human costs are incalculable. Increased insurance premiums and rebuilding run into billions.
It’s time to rationally rethink all this I suggest. Costs can be ameliorated. Firefighters’ lives are at risk: they live and work in the line of fire. We don’t need to live in forests or mountain hideaways.
Consider these options: let’s prohibit re-building in declared bush fire prone zones; make peripheral areas subject to compulsory insurance as well; subject properties to stricter planning regimes including anti-flammable roofing; heat-resistant windows and metal shutters; introduce life-saving bunkers and a 50-metre tree clearing zone around homes; underground water tanks with emergency water spraying and on-screen mobile phone alarms for receiving emergency text messages.
It’s time to begin a serious conversation about fire prevention.
