One thing with my life, it is like a magical mystery tour – you never know where I will be.
This week I am in Alice Springs as part of the South Australian deployment assisting Bushfires NT with their current bushfire situation.
With some incredible rainfalls over the past couple of years, there has been amazing growth of both mulga and grasses in the Far North of South Australia and the south and central Northern Territory.
With the warming weather curing this massive growth and a lot of dry lightning storms there have been some large fires threatening townships and station homesteads.
Assistance was offered to Northern Territory and accepted with an ongoing deployment for the past 2 weeks from South Australia.
The role of the SA crew has been to burn strategic breaks around Alice Springs and provide a rapid response to nearby fires.
My role has been that of a Planning Officer within the Incident Management Team. The amazing thing about these fires is the sheer size of them (e.g. 4000 square km just for a single fire) and the small amount of resources managing these fires.
Today started early with lightning heading through Central Australia starting a number of new fires. So apart from chasing up information on existing fires, it was a case of chase up on the new ones as well.
The temps were high today with 35 degrees and some good winds so fires were moving well. The main fires giving more interest were east and west of Alice Springs.
The day flew by quickly and I got to deploy Alice Springs first Munzee as well.
We were starting to wind down when I starting doing a scan of the latest satellite data and spotted some new fires south west near Yulara and on the Stuart Highway north of Ti Tree. Another flurry of work then it was time to head back to the hotel.
It was only 5 minutes back at the hotel and a fire started directly across the road. Our crews were out working north of town so we rang the local crew and watched them get to work.
Time for an ice cold beer to finish the day 🙂
