Rural firefighter Andy Simons was one of two Whanganui volunteer firefighters awarded with an Australian National Emergency Medal for their service battling Australian bushfires.
Rural firefighter Andy Simons was one of two Whanganui volunteer firefighters awarded with an Australian National Emergency Medal for their service battling Australian bushfires.
Two Whanganui volunteer firefighters have described the conditions they witnessed while battling the 2019/20 Australian bushfires as like nothing they had seen before.
Andy Simons and Jesse Simkin were among 53 firefighters from Fire and Emergency New Zealand, the Department of Conservation, forestry company partners and the New Zealand DefenceForce awarded the Australia National Emergency Medal with a Bushfires 19/20 clasp.
The fires burned through more than 18 million hectares of land from June 2019 to May 2020, killing 479 people as well as millions of animals, and destroying more than 9000 buildings.
Simons said, looking back on his time there, that what stuck out to him was how quickly and intensely the fires spread.
He had fought fires in Aotearoa and spent five weeks in Canada responding to forest fires in 2018, but none of those compared to the Australian fires.
“We go to fires in New Zealand and you’ve got a bit of time to prepare yourself and get a bit of a plan together, but there the fires [were] breaking out and spreading so quickly,” Simons said.
“I’ve done quite a lot of fires over the years but Australia was pretty intense, just the conditions and the temperatures.”
Simons did a two-week stint between December 2019 and January 2020 when the fires were at their peak.
He and two firefighters from Taranaki were part of a response crew.
“We would be told that there’s a fire broke out here, take your truck and your guys, and then we’d meet up with the Australian crews and basically help them,” he said.
Simons and his crew spent two weeks at Noosa Heads and Bundaberg in Queensland, battling fires that had broken out.
“There was a big, big fire at Noosa Heads on the reserve there, so we spent the week there,” Simons said.
“They’d had no rain for about four years, and they’d got 80km/h winds and the gum trees, yeah when they go, they burn really hot.”
Fellow volunteer firefighter Jesse Simkin flew out in late November 2019 for his two-week stint.
Whanganui rural firefighter Jesse Simkin was part of the New Zealand team that travelled to Australia to help fight bushfires. Photo / Bevan Conley
Being there gave Simkin an understanding of how much damage the fire caused in a way he didn’t get by watching it on TV.
“It was just pretty crazy to see the size of the areas they’d burnt once they’d laid some big maps out and showed you on a map... it was pretty hard to put into words the magnitude of what was going on over there at the time and how much forest and land was being burnt through.”
He was stationed outside Toowoomba in South Queensland and was tasked with dampening hot spots and occasional flare-ups to stop the fires from spreading further, as well as reopening a road with another New Zealand fire crew from Waimate.
Simkin said the job of keeping the fire contained changed throughout the day due to the weather.
“With the humidity and the cross-over period in the middle of the day... you’d go across somewhere in the morning and there were no hot spots and then by the afternoon there’d be signs of life and smoke and then on the odd occasion we’d get a different flare-up of fire as well,” he said.
His favourite part of the trip was knowing his work relieved some local firefighters so they could have some much-needed time off.
“We were relieving a few crews and sending people back to their families who may not have seen their families in a few weeks to a month or so,” he said.
Simkin received his medal at a ceremony at the Ōhakea Airforce Base and said he felt very honoured to have received it.
“I was pretty honoured to get it, it was quite formal which is not in everyday life for myself so it was a bit out of the blue,” Simkin said.
Simons said the medal had only been awarded five times in its history and never to any New Zealanders.
“It was a surprise to be honest because it’s quite rare for them to give out that medal,” he said.
