Fighting fire with fire
WE were sitting in our VWS Land Rover, driving down a dark, bumpy jeep track towards our deployment spot. I couldn’t see the fire but the area was still warm and smouldering and I remember wondering to myself :“Is this where I’m going to die?”
I still couldn’t tell you where I was that day, suffice to say that we had driven from Lourensford Wine Estate in Somerset West into the nearby mountains to fight the fire ravaging the area. It was 2016 and this was my first fire as a newly qualified firefighter.
On the right of our Landy, a smouldering ashy wasteland ravaged by fire, several tree stumps still alight, the occasional tall tree – a pine? – burnt black as high as the flames had reached. It looked like a scene from an Armageddon film.
On the left – and far more worrying – were grass, bushes and trees, all unburnt.
Alarm bells were going off inside my head. My Volunteer Wildfire Services (VWS) training was kicking in and I was ticking off Watchouts in my head. Watchouts are a list of warning signs that all VWS firefighters are required to learn, along with several other things designed to keep us alive. As a firefighter, you are often going to be in harm’s way so you can’t just say: if you sense danger, evacuate. Rather, if you start ticking off too many of the 18 Watchouts you should seriously consider getting to a safer place.
The only thing keeping me from complete panic was that my crew leader, Patrick, was an extremely experienced should be calm. That’s what I told myself, anyway.
