Two firefighters arrived in Queenstown yesterday after spending eight days fighting the Australian bush fires.
Southern District principal rural fire officer Timo Bierlin, of Invercargill, was based in a camp at Glen Innes, New South Wales, with about 120 others, working as a heavy plant supervisor while deputy principal rural fire officer Hamish Angus, of Te Anau, was about 350km away, in Port Macquarie, near the Hastings River working in the incident management team (IMT) and also around safety in the field.
A cheese roll was the only thing — other than sleep and, in Angus' case a hug from his daughters — they wanted when they got home.
Bierlin, working 14-hour days, said it would take some time to process the experience which was, at times, heartbreaking. "It's like street fighting, you're pretty much going from incident to incident."
