Marlborough firefighter 'going in blind' to help with Australian bushfires

Sunday, 17 November 2019

A Marlborough firefighter says he's 'going in blind' as he's deployed to bushfires raging in Australia. 

Roland Mapp, who was flown to New South Wales on Sunday, was the third Marlborough firefighter deployed to Australia.

He doesn't know where he will be based, what he will be doing, or how long he will be there. All he knows is that he's going in to relieve exhausted firefighters.

Twenty-six New Zealand firefighters departed for Australia on Sunday to help fight the wild fires that have been raging in NSW since the start of September. 

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The New Zealand contingent of six four-person crews, one task force leader and a liaison officer, were due to arrive in Sydney on Sunday evening, before being deployed to fires around the state.

These crews were in addition to the around 25 New Zealand Fire and Emergency personnel already in Australia assisting with air attack, heavy machinery, safety and deployment coordination.

Large wildfires have been burning in both Queensland and NSW for the past nine weeks. As of Friday morning there were near 70 active bushfires in NSW and a state of fire emergency has been called.

Mapp is the deputy of the Northbank rural fire brigade who manage a stretch of 50 kilometres along the Wairau River and had been on the wait list for the past 10 days. 

'It will be good to finally get over there,' he said on Friday. 

'I'm just going in blind really … it's like every fire, every fire is different, you don't have any expectations. You just go and you do the best you can when you're there.'

It would be his first time fighting fires in Australia which was 'a whole different ball game' to New Zealand fires, he said. 

While his family were used to him working away, he said his 12-year-old daughter was 'a little bit anxious' about him heading over. 

Fire and Emergency principal rural fire officer John Foley said while the scale of fires was much greater, Kiwi firefighters were trained for the challenge. 

Foley said Marlborough firefighter Chris Hayles flew to NSW on Thursday to take part in 'air attacks'. He would manage a number of aircrafts and would be given a sector of the fire to manage from the air.

He said Alister Neal was deployed to Queensland last week to work as ground crew. 

They could be given any tasks from frontline firefighting, mop up, to assisting community with evacuations, Foley said. 

'We're not going to put these fires out for them, but if we can give a firefighter a break, if we can get them off the line and home to their family for a week or two, then we've probably done our job.

'Some of these firefighters have probably lost houses and they're not even aware of it.'

He said some of the fires were so big they were creating their own weather patterns and causing lighting strikes.

'It's on a scale we would never see here.'

But in the later summer months, and as Marlborough dried up, they became cautious about sending crew abroad, Foley said. 

'We start getting a little bit reluctant on sending crew as we dry out in January and February.

'Marlborough itself will probably be too dry for us to want to deploy too many people.'

He had recently been on a training program in Australia where another participant had said they had recorded 7 millimetres of rain in 5 years. 

'A lot of these places just haven't had any significant rain for a long time and looking at the next three months, there's no real significant rain for a lot of those places.

'We're only in the beginning of the fire season. It's not looking good at this stage,' Foley said.