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HomeSorted by levelB2 - Upper IntermediateWaiting for a megafire: the battle against Australia's biggest blaze

Waiting for a megafire: the battle against Australia’s biggest blaze

[Reading level: B2 – Upper Intermediate]

The fire is two kilometres away, but the heat is already beginning to warm the faces of those who wait.

 

The air is eerily still. There is no wind. There are no birds. There is no natural noise, just the distant chatter of helicopters in the sky, flying between water source and flames.

 

“When you’re still, that’s when you worry,” says Greg Hodges, a volunteer firefighter and the strike team leader. “It’s the calm before the storm.”

 

Hodges is standing on the side of a road near half a dozen trucks on the outskirts of Kurrajong Heights, a small town surrounded by dramatic bushland which sweeps off the lower Blue Mountains and down on to the fringes of greater Sydney.

 

He is both droll and a straight-talker, experienced and unfazed but still struggling to predict how the advancing flames will behave as an expected southerly wind nears the site of the inferno. It is reckoned the fire will come over the ridge, through a swamp and up to the street he is standing on in about 90 minutes – unless the southerly comes through.

 

“Fires will make their own weather and when they haven’t joined together and had the bonfire effect and there’s a distance between them, usually the main fire front will make its own weather and start driving itself. Which means it sucks all the air from the surrounding areas.”

 

“So if it’s quiet and still, that’s when the worry is.”

 

That worry for the hundreds of firefighters on the fringes of Sydney on Saturday is the Gospers Mountain “megafire”. Made up of five separate fires which joined, it has consumed more than 468,000 hectares of bushland and forest over the past few weeks.

 

It has thrown fire at thousands of people and communities, and now covers so many different regions of New South Wales that there are mountain residents, river people, and central coasters all battling the same beast.

 

Elsewhere in NSW and Victoria other fires have been just a fierce, some even making their own storms – a terrifying and uncontrollable effect of nature. But none are on the scale of Gospers.

 

Ashleigh Coskerie and Jonathon Evripidou live just down a small hill from where Hodges and his crew have assembled.

 

They and their neighbour Andrew Helwig have stayed to fight off ember attacks and spot fires on their houses.

 

“It’s looking pretty bad,” Evripidou says. “If it comes through it’s going to get 10 times worse, I know that.”

 

“It’s just a waiting game,” says Helwig.

 

Coskerie says they had heard their street name over the scanner radio and had a moment of panic, but that they feel better with so many fire crews outside. “We feel safer now, we’ve got all the guys in the street … They’re right there if … you know.”

 

Soon after, however, the crews pack up and the trucks drive out without a word. Orders have come through to move as the fire’s path has shifted.

 

The Northern Beaches strike team joins other crews, including from the Fire and Rescue metropolitan brigades, around the corner along the edge of an escarpment.

 

It’s another waiting game, as thick brown smoke billows above trees and houses, announcing the fire’s imminent arrival. Text messages come through. The wind has turned south, it’s doing 30 knots at Cronulla. It’s sticking to the coast, but it might get to you. Then it does.

 

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/dec/21/waiting-for-a-megafire-the-battle-against-australia-biggest-blaze-gospers-mountain?fbclid=IwAR35bHZ1hH-GiJmj46EM68inB2mDhftdefmRwPtUYwyR6lOHJfoDjxRpIMs

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