Victorian bushfires: Nunawading highway patrol members support East Gippsland communities
Melbourne police were among the many who flocked to East Gippsland to help manage the bushfire crisis. And they’re still going. Two eastern suburbs highway patrol officers share their experiences.
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They may have been small in number, but the Nunawading highway patrol officers who went to East Gippsland to help in the bushfire fight have left a massive legacy.
Sergeant Paul Egan was one of the offices who covered shifts for worn-out local police in East Gippsland, who had sacrificed their leave and rest days during the weeks of extreme fire threat.
“We’ve been helping with running the stations and getting all their books in order to take some pressure off,” Sgt Egan said.
Sgt Egan was also one of the police urgently sent up to the area on December 27 following extreme weather warnings.
He and Senior Constable Steve Donlon, also from Nunawading highway patrol, went to Orbost to help evacuations and assist with traffic as fire threatened the town.
They put in their all, working 38 hours in a 48-hour period.
After starting at 7am one day, they got to bed at 12.30am, only to be woken half an hour later.
“We were under ember attack,” Sgt Egan said.
The wind had changed and fire was headed towards the township.
Sen-Constable Donlon said in the 30 minutes they had been in the motel, the sky had completely changed.
“It had gone from a reddish to an angry purple,” he said
“I got up and there were burnt embers in my doorway.”
Sgt Egan said it sounded like hail was falling on the tin roof, but it was bits of burning bark.
They took the motel’s towels to the town’s main oval, where about 400 people and their pets and farm animals were sheltering, to put out spot fires ignited by the embers.
The main fire was said to be just an hour away, leaving no route to get out of the town.
“There were a lot of scared people,” Sen-Constable Donlon said.
“You could see the glow of the fire just over the hill.”
Fortunately, the fire only came within 1.5km of them.
The officers didn’t get to bed until 4.30am, and were up again at 6.30am to help manage the many people trying to evacuate from north of Orbost.
Sen-Constable Donlon said people were trying to get south, but the highway could only be opened for a few hours at a time, and accommodation was full, so they were left sleeping in their cars.
He said many of those escaping had lost everything.
“They rolled up to the cricket oval with the clothes on their back,” Sen-Constable Donlon said.
The officers were relieved after six days, as reinforcements from Melbourne arrived.
Sgt Egan said he wanted to pay credit to the locals, having been touched by how appreciative they were to men and women in blue from Melbourne.
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“What we did though is obviously nothing compared to what the CFA went through, and they’re doing it for nothing,” Sgt Egan said.
He said the police had a lot of admiration for the firefighters.
But the crew from the Nunawading highway patrol left their special mark — starting a legacy at a school in Marlo where many emergency personnel were initially based.
They wrote ‘Nunawading highway patrol was here’ on a whiteboard, which was quickly contributed to by subsequent crews who passed through the camp.
They were later contacted by the captain of a CFA brigade who wanted them to know how far the mural had grown and how it had been a “morale booster” for many.