By Jeremy Sollars
Last Sunday’s bushfire at Rosenthal Heights was certainly one of the more intense of the many bushfires I’ve covered while working as a journo in this region over the last 14 or so years.
Questions are being asked about the lighting of a permitted burn on the Saturday night and the wisdom around doing so is arguable, given Warwick was in the middle of what the weather bureau described as a “low intensity heatwave” over the preceding week, with no prospect of rain in the immediate future.
In any case, a fire is a fire and around two dozen urban and rural crews battled to contain it, which they did by the Sunday night, preventing it from jumping the New England Highway.
I was driving up the main street a bit after midday and spotted the smoke away to the south. It was hard to miss. At first it was all quite deceptive – I could’ve sworn it was a structure fire of some kind on the southern side of Warwick, maybe somewhere around the hospital. I ducked into the office to grab my camera and headed out to find the blaze, realising as I hit Wallace Street that it was obviously out of town and a bushfire, and a very big one.
Soon I was approaching the Ranger Road turnoff on the New England Highway and flicked on my blinker. Two vehicles were sitting on the verge at the start of Ranger Road and two more were following me turning off from the highway. It quickly became apparent that a number of local people had very little going on in their lives on a Sunday arvo other than to go fire-chasing. The situation on Ranger Road quickly became the vehicular equivalent of a three-ring circus, only most circuses are better organised. I found myself having to negotiate between parked and moving non-emergency vehicles, with some of their drivers appearing to have decided it was a better idea to turn around and get out of there. I proceeded a short distance down the road – which is rural, narrow, and gravel – and located a property on the left which seemed to be functioning as a base for fire crews. Rural fire trucks were being forced to move around the onlookers’ vehicles – which is not at all conducive to fire control – the air was thick with smoke and there was plenty of visible flame in the adjacent paddocks. Taking photos was pointless and I rapidly became concerned about the nearby flames, specifically about the potential for myself and my own vehicle to be covered in them. I made an executive editorial decision immediately authorising my own departure from the scene with haste. I’d have been out of there a lot quicker if a P-plater ute-load of ‘the boys’ hadn’t been obstructing my 180 degree turn, but they moved after I blasted the horn at them several times. Minutes later I was back on the highway heading for the relative safety of my desk.
The point is this. Don’t be a dickhead and get in the way of the emergency services during a natural disaster, whether it be fire or flood or some other act of the heavens. Our firies – both urban and rural, paid and volunteer – our ambos and our police have a difficult enough job at times of chaos as it is. What many people still don’t seem to understand about bushfires is that they are unpredictable beasts. The wind can change constantly and firies can be forced to review their strategy every 15 minutes. It’s terribly easy for them – along with idiotic rubberneckers in the vicinity – to be surrounded by flames without warning. While covering one memorable fire at Killarney some years ago I managed to lock my keys in my car while taking photos of oncoming flames. OK I was a bit younger and braver at the time, but had the young RACQ fella not been passing at the time and lent me his hammer to smash the quarter-glass window of my then vehicle I may well have ended up toasty and warm and not in a good way. Not an experience I wish to repeat in a hurry.
Anyway, next time there’s a bushfire, bloody well just stay at home, in the aircon, and keep up to date with the latest on the Free Times’ website and Facebook, with the convenience of your laptop, your smartphone, your tablet or any other ‘device of choice’. Let our emergency services do their job without obstruction – and let scaredy-cat journos like me high-tail the hell out of the disaster zone as fast as we can.
