WITH fires burning in northern NSW for at least seven weeks, Moama and district firefighters have joined strike teams to help where needed.
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Moama Fire and Rescue's Cam Wallace, Andrew Heriot and Phil Masters departed for northern on Sunday for seven days, and spent Monday protecting properties in the Myall Creek area.
Staff attached to the National Parks and Wildlife Service from Moama and Mathoura have also been deployed.
Mathoura’s Andy McAuliffe recently returned home from an 18-day stint in Glen Innes before last week’s catastrophic conditions, but is on stand-by to return.
A field supervisor, the 55-year-old said he was acting as a sector leader, looking after up to 30 personnel on the fire line.
‘‘We were mainly backburning for fire control, mainly on the Liberation fire. I am also a problem tree faller, so I did quite of bit of cutting down large burning trees and we did some remote work winching people into locations from the helicopter to undertake fire control,” he said.
‘‘This year fire conditions are just so dry. One of the main things that has stuck out to me is that the locals can’t believe that the rainforest and moist vegetation that normally slows or stops fire in gullies is so dry — the fire is consuming everything and not slowing down.
‘‘I think the communities affected are showing that they are real communities.
‘‘I saw everyone was pulling together to make sure everyone had a bed, food to eat and someone to talk to.
‘‘Some are tired. When my crew got there on this deployment the fire was already 50 days old.
‘‘Things have been going so long the volunteers are struggling because they can’t keep taking time off work. And everyone is talking about the lack of water.
‘‘We had to travel up to 20km to get water, so we didn’t use it unless we really had to.’’
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