Stopcallking - which Division were you in on Thursday night, I was in the DivCom car that handed over to the incoming DivCom at around midnight - I did feel for him a bit as he had not seen the lay of the land in daylight and those tracks around the Mt Bold land are like a rabbit warren.
There is still no reason not to get people out working though, when we left the guys were waiting for the fire to come out into grassland - not sure if it ever did.
In Pocock ?Sector?
Arrived Kanga by 19:00 with express instructions to be fed & watered before arrival, for immediate tasking. (Beauty!) Sat at Kanga without tasking nor any hope (it seemed) of tasking while various officers & respected personages wandered around swearing about the complete lack of A Plan for the night. Some of whom have the direct ear of the CO, I might add.
The arrangements at Kanga were excellent by the way. An apparent surfeit of T-cards compared with appliances or strike teams, but... <shrug>
Then around 2030, a break-out up at Pocock forced something to happen.
It seemed all the 30-odd appliances at Kanga were responded to the break-out, which we could hear being controlled as we drove. Also discovered while we drove that the VHF channel allocated to us (VHF-020 I think) *as confirmed by two in my appliance who were at the "response briefing"* is in our mobiles but NOT our portables... Very useful that ! Heard later that in the rush to respond, the incoming DivCom was left behind at Kanga.
Arrived at Pocock on dusk & sat by the side of the road for about an hour. STL directed us onto VHF-055 after negotiation with Sector/Div Command (I assume).
Then we drove drove out into a paddock & waited until 0200 for a backburn that hadn't been lit to come out to us. Lovely clear skies. Lots of satelites & shooting stars.
And a few appliances just over the next rise doing useful things. Many fewer than were parked & idle within 300M of us anyway.
And we were fed. I cannot fault the logistics side of things at any stage of Wednesday or Thursday. Absolutely brilliant. Water, fuel, foam, food, repairs. Whatever. Supplied in abundance as, when, & where needed.
About 0200 we were directed to some short grass to control the northern end of the burn that was about to be lit. Nothing much happened there for a while so we had a game of cricket by headlight & light masts.
Then at 0230, a swag of DEH vehicles turned up to do the burn, & we sere sent away further north to black out whatever was left of that edge of the break-out 6 hours earlier. There wasn't much left of it - few smouldering stumps well inside the black. The crews before us had done a very good job indeed.
By 0430, that was blacked to 100M in from the edge... yes - 3 full hose lengths. DivCom couldn't give us any further work & wouldn't release us. Which was doubly frustrating because there was so much crying out to be done. So we kipped until 0645 then headed back to Kanga. The three brigade captains on my S/T (that I know of - it was a composite team) - immediately contacted their Group Officers & advised them that their brigades would not participate any further in that fire. Period.
A bit of an ati-climax after Wednesday afternoon/evening. And a shocking waste of a lot of peoples' time given that there was something like 30km of edge needing black-out, and 40km of roads needing making safe from falling trees. As I understand it, our STL offered us to do both of these things & was knocked back.
So yes, sour grapes. Was a completely useless zombie at work Friday for no good reason other than "we were there".
cheers
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