The RFS stood between the Blue Mountains and Armageddon

IN the Blue Mountains, Armageddon is approaching. There's a radical plan, but can a crack team of remote-area firefighters pull it off?

Simon Heemstra, the RFS's senior fire behaviour scientist, and his team of analysts had more than 150km of activ...

IT isn't such a bad day. The winds are light, it's forecast to reach a pleasant 23 degrees and there's no fire ban; a relief after weeks of unseasonal highs and evil westerlies. It's the morning of Wednesday, October 16, and a posse of army engineers is deployed to the Marrangaroo Army Camp near Lithgow, NSW. They are training to search for improvised explosive devices - the home-made bombs that have killed and disfigured so many of their comrades in Iraq and Afghanistan. Sweeping the ground with metal detectors, the sappers locate their deadly foe lurking in the dirt. The bomb disposal expert lays a demolition charge, lights the 30-second fuse and shouts "Fire on!" as they retreat to safety. Boom! A piece of white-hot shrapnel fizzes through the air, landing in a patch of parched grass, sparking a fire that spreads quickly on the live firing range.

Army fire crews are dispatched and firefighters sent from Lithgow. The first half-hour is crucial to containment - if they can reach it before it grows to a hectare in size, they'll have a chance. They arrive well within time but are unable to attack it, fearing the blaze will set off unexploded bombs. They wait for it to emerge onto safer terrain but the beast has been unleashed. The State Mine fire is on the rampage.

In his office at the Blue Mountains Fire Control Centre in Katoomba, David Jones, 57, the local Rural Fire Service (RFS) manager, sees the fire alert pop up on his computer screen at around noon. That afternoon, he and the area's police superintendent, Darryl Jobson, drive to Lithgow, 40km away. It's a neighbourly visit. They want to know how they can help and what containment strategy will be used to halt the fire's spread onto their patch in the mountains. They drive home late that night and Jones rises early the next morning; already he can hear an ominous wind howling outside. It is going to be a horrid day.

He gathers his wife and two daughters, aged 17 and 19. "Righto," he says, "what are your survival plans for today?" Same plan as always, Dad, they chorus - we'll all meet up at the Fire Control Centre. "Goodo." He hugs and kisses his girls and his wife. An almost-reformed smoker, Jones pops into a shop on the way to work, buys a packet of ciggies and sucks the smoke deep into his lungs to settle the nerves.

He and Jobson drive back to Lithgow for another briefing. The situation is grim: the fire is advancing at a phenomenal rate, so they return to the mountains to prepare. At 12.20pm, as they are pulling into the car park of his office, they hear a radio report that another fire has started at Mt York and is heading towards Mt Victoria, a town of 800 people 16km south east of Lithgow. It was ignited by a power line, downed by the 80km/h gusts. This is Jones's patch. "Oops," he says to the policeman, "here comes our first fight."

Four fire trucks are dispatched and RFS strike teams are alerted. Jones and his team move to his operations room, with its giant map of the Blue Mountains on the wall. Dozens of emergency calls flood in; so many that his staff are unable to answer them all and the overflow is diverted to RFS headquarters. The crews on the ground almost have things contained when a huge gust of wind thunders through, picking up a chunk of fire and hurling it over the firemen, who are forced to retreat. It is now heading directly towards Mt Victoria. Jones takes a call on his personal mobile - it's RFS headquarters. Two elderly people are trapped in their home in the path of the fire. He scribbles down the details and a crew is diverted to rescue them. Every available unit is dispatched to Mt Victoria.

Just as this is happening, at 1.27pm, another fire alert flashes across his screen. The high winds have downed a power line at Springwood and flames are galloping towards homes and 6000 residents at nearby Winmalee, 80km west of Sydney. Some of the trucks heading to Mt Victoria are diverted. They are now fighting a battle on two fronts, 50km apart. Jones looks around the operations room and watches the colour drain from the faces of his staff. He says to himself what everyone is thinking. "I hope we don't lose anyone. Please don't let people die."

An RFS Airview helicopter happens to be above Winmalee and streams live video footage of the fire's advance into the operations room. Jones, a 32-year veteran, has never seen a forest fire move this rapidly. At 1.50pm he strides into his office and dials the Red Phone at RFS headquarters in Homebush, in Sydney's west. Commissioner Shane Fitzsimmons and his senior staff gather to hear his call. It is now considered too late for people to flee. "Gentlemen," Jones says. "We need to issue an emergency warning for a 'stay and shelter'." Within minutes the fire has jumped Hawkesbury Road and houses in suburban streets with nice, comforting names like Sunny Ridge Road and Buena Vista Road are engulfed in a terrifying inferno.

Jane Boys, a nurse, is on a day off and is checking the web and listening to the radio, but the first she hears of imminent danger is an explosion in her backyard in Emma Parade. Out the front, an off-duty policeman is running from house to house, banging on doors, screaming, "Just get out! Just get out!" Boys and her neighbours scramble up the road to safety with pets and photos and iPads. Within a few hours the fire has raced 10km down the mountain, jumped the Nepean River and destroyed almost everything in its path.

People tell Jones they can see when he's processing information because he starts to blink rapidly. Today his lids are pumping like the shutter of a paparazzo's Canon. He's almost overloaded. Information is coming in from headquarters, from crews on the ground, from the public, from the Bureau of Meteorology, from helicopters and planes circling above, from the media. All the while he is trying to direct his resources to where they are needed most. One of the most disturbing images is relayed from a helicopter hovering above the dense smoke at Winmalee. From its thermal imaging camera, Jones can see dozens of neatly spaced blocks of red. He knows these are images of burning houses. He can only hope there are no people inside. Late in the day the RFS padre arrives. He takes one look at Jones and says, "Mate, you look like you need a coffee." He returns with a warm brew. "You look absolutely shell-shocked."

Late that night Jones walks into his house, exhausted and emotional, to be greeted by his wife Judith. "It's an absolute bloody shambles," he says. "I think I've lost 50 or 60 houses." He still doesn't know if there are any bodies in those houses. "There was just nothing we could do. If we'd had 1000 tankers lined up it still would have overrun them." Still, he can't shake the guilt he feels that so much destruction has occurred on his watch. That evening, Fitzsimmons is briefing his minister and the NSW Premier Barry O'Farrell. "I think we'll be counting bodies in the morning," he tells them bluntly. They'd had unconfirmed reports of bodies floating face down in swimming pools.

Volunteers from around the state pour in - the RFS is a giant, well-organised army of 70,000 volunteers and 4000 fire trucks - assisted by fighters from Fire and Rescue NSW and the National Parks & Wildlife Service. Come morning, 366 fire fighters in 54 trucks are battling the two fires on the mountain, assisted by eight helicopters, each dropping 1000-litre water bombs. Hundreds more volunteers are battling to contain the State Mine fire to the north.

Later that day, Friday, October 18, one of Jones's staff walks into his office and says, "Boss, I've got some numbers." He reads out his list: 195 houses destroyed at Winmalee; 10 at Mt York; 146 badly damaged. "You're joking," Jones says, stunned. Incredibly, nobody is dead.

Jones doesn't have time to dwell on it as fires are still burning uncontrolled throughout the mountains. One of his fire analysts unfurls a big map of the Blue Mountains on his desk with crayon markings all over it; the planner and his team have been predicting what might happen in the days ahead by studying wind and weather forecasts. Red lines run deep into the major population centres of Blackheath, Katoomba, Leura and Springwood. "How many houses are we talking about here?" Jones enquires. "Eight to ten thousand," the planner says. Jones pats his pocket. It might be the time for a quick durry.

Dr Simon Heemstra is watching all this unfold from RFS headquarters at Homebush. He's a worried man. On the Thursday, when Winmalee was devastated, the State Mine fire burned an incredible 35km in less than six hours through the eucalypt forests. Heemstra, the RFS's senior fire behaviour scientist, is leading a team of analysts trying to predict what may happen next. These three fires that have caused so much destruction - the State Mine fire, the Mt York fire and the Winmalee fire - were caused by three tiny sparks. They now have more than 150km of active fire front to deal with. What happens if they get another day like they've just had? Or worse?

Heemstra has an impressive array of tools in his kit bag. The entire state has been mapped for its vegetation mix. Fires will burn faster through low, shrubby country than through forests, for instance; eucalypts with loose bark are more likely to cause spotting than those with a smooth trunk. His team is examining these maps in great detail, along with the fire history in various parts of the national park to determine fuel loads. This information is being overlaid onto topographic maps - the terrain is an important factor because fires burn rapidly uphill and then slow on the downward slopes. A meteorologist from the Bureau is on hand to provide instant wind and weather information. Real-time information about the fire is provided by an aircraft flying overhead, using a multi-spectrum scanner which takes images through the smoke. And then there are pictures being emailed from helicopters, crews on the ground and the public on social media, giving them vital information about the formation of the smoke clouds. They are collating all this information with the weather predictions for the days ahead.

The data is being crunched manually by analysts to allow them to make informed predictions. At the same time it is being fed into supercomputers using the latest fire simulation modelling. The conclusions reached by both humans and machines are very, very frightening.

What troubles Heemstra most is a terrifying phenomenon known as pyrocumulus, or pyroconvective, where a large fire marries up with unstable atmospheric conditions to form giant smoke clouds. These monstrous clouds can rise to a height of 15km and cause violent winds and lightning - a firestorm. They have the potential to drop burning embers and cause lightning strikes 20km in front of the advancing fire. If the fire progresses another 35km in one day, as it has just done, tens of thousands of homes in the western suburbs of Sydney and the Blue Mountains are at grave risk and burning embers could land as far east as Parramatta, the geographic heart of Australia's largest city. This is a worst-case scenario, but a real possibility - and while the weather conditions are nowhere near as severe as Victoria's 2009 Black Saturday bushfires, where 173 people perished and 2030 houses were destroyed, these fires are threatening much larger population centres. The lesser scenarios aren't pretty either, still involving the loss of many thousands of homes.

Everything points to Wednesday, October 23, as being the horror day when unstable atmospheric conditions could lead to pyrocumulus. It is now late on Friday, October 18. Armageddon is approaching.

Heemstra seeks out his boss, Commissioner Fitzsimmons, to deliver his predictions. He explains the worst-case scenarios and works back from there - it's the RFS's creed to "plan for the worst, hope for the best". Fitzsimmons listens and then asks a series of searching questions about the likelihood of each scenario; he's overseeing this vast operation like a wartime general, making sure his troops are properly resourced and deployed to where they are most needed.

As a 15-year-old kid, Fitzsimmons joined up as a volunteer and has watched the service evolve from a disjointed, poorly funded outfit run by local councils to a professional, centrally coordinated organisation with proper training and standardised equipment. He is acutely aware of the dangers his firefighters face, having lost his father, George, in 2000 when a backburning operation went horribly wrong. A number of his volunteers have just lost their homes at Winmalee, but are refusing to stand down. He's been up to visit and they've been touched by his empathy. He's a man who's not ashamed to cry.

For a long time Fitzsimmons lived in the shadow of his charismatic former boss, Phil Koperberg. But the public has grown to know and trust him. They like him. He fronts the media with blunt warnings of the dangers, his delivery like a nightclub bouncer explaining the dress code. The pressure on him is immense. He is thinking, "None of these fires is contained, they are all burning very aggressively, and within a week we are going to see a day similar, or worse, to the day that caused all these fires to run and spread as badly as they did." Some radical decisions need to be taken and Fitzsimmons is in the mood to approve them. He knows that "tens of thousands of houses are at risk - it is that serious. We either fight, or we retreat and let them burn."

One of the most audacious plans is known as The Plug, a strategy to stop the Mt York fire advancing further into the Grose Valley with an offensive backburning operation. If it fails, those who approve it will probably end up before a coroner, having to explain their actions. But that will be nothing compared to the guilt they'll feel if more houses are lost, or worse. Fitzsimmons' overriding concern is for the safety of his firefighters. He tells his commanders that if things don't go to plan they'll all have his full backing should they later have to face the lawyers. Still, he's apprehensive.

Fitzsimmons informs Barry O'Farrell of the plans. "The option to do nothing is not an option," he tells the Premier. "If we don't do something these fires have the potential to cause incredible damage. It can't get much worse. I have extraordinary confidence in my team, but this is a high-risk strategy that has the potential to go wrong." The Premier nods and wishes him the best of luck.

The Grose Valley is only a two-hour drive from Sydney CBD yet it's one of the most rugged places in Australia. It's not all that far from where the prehistoric Wollemi Pine grew undiscovered until 1994. When Charles Darwin visited the valley in 1836 he stood atop a sandstone cliff and looked across the impressive forested valley to the other side and remarked that it was "stupendous ... magnificent". Darwin was overlooking where they now plan to put The Plug.

The idea comes from senior Parks ranger Richard Kingswood, who walks into Jones's office and says, "Have you thought about this?" Kingswood's plan requires cutting a 5km containment line across the Grose Valley, by hand, to form part of the northern strategic line, what they call the Blue Mountains "Armageddon Line". The hope is that they can backburn enough of the Grose Valley to starve the advancing fire of fuel, come Wednesday. The danger is that it could all so easily backfire and they'll have a fire on the doorstep of the urban areas of the Blue Mountains.

Just cutting the fire trail across the steep and thickly forested valley is a mammoth task. An elite team of 40 remote area firefighters, drawn from the RFS and NPWS, is assembled. Nigel Holland, 40, a Parks field officer with 20 years' firefighting experience, is part of the team. Over the weekend he and his team work day and night. They descend into the Grose Valley with the fire front 6km to the west of them; they carry chainsaws, leaf blowers, axes, rake-hoes and litres and litres of drinking water for the backbreaking task of clearing a one to two metre-wide path across the entire valley - the thin dirt line. They then wait for favourable weather to light the backburn.

That time comes late on the afternoon of Monday, October 21 - two days before the predicted Pyrocumulus Day. Holland is at home when he gets the call; it's his daughter's birthday party and he's in the garage, cooking a barbecue. He doesn't usually get nervous doing backburns but this call induces "a crook feeling in my guts". His initial reaction is, "I don't think we should be doing this." One of his mates at the barbie says, "Are you sure about this?" His wife, too, is unhappy but says she trusts his judgment. "It's up to you," she says. He reassures her and says he'll re-evaluate, "minute by minute". He gives her and their two kids a big squeeze and then drives to the nearby Parks depot, on the lip of the Grose Valley. It's just on dusk.

Holland finds that his fellow rangers and the RFS crews are equally nervous. Because the operation is being conducted at night they'll have no air support - no choppers to water-bomb should the fire get away. However, they are told an ambulance helicopter with night-vision equipment will be on standby at Blackheath. It's been specifically assigned to support Holland and his team and ordered not to attend any other jobs.

The firefighters are briefed by a Parks field officer, Mick English, a guy whom Holland trusts with his life. His briefing is sombre and direct. English reinforces that this is a voluntary mission; that anyone who doesn't want to participate is free to leave. A couple of people opt out. Holland thinks to himself, "I don't disrespect their decision. I wouldn't go down there either if I didn't know the terrain." There's no swagger; nobody is saying, "She'll be right, mate."

The remaining group discusses the mission and the consensus is that the plan is the only way to stop this fire. "There are only a few people who can pull this off," Holland says to his mates, "and so if we don't do it, who else is gonna do it?" They gear up and head off to the valley.

A couple of fire hoses, several kilometres long, run down the cliff face from the southern Blackheath side. A pump has been dropped down to the Grose River to supply water to the northern side. It pumps water up to a bladder where another pump forces the water further up the hill to another bladder, and so on. However, it only reaches so far up the northern slope. Holland has been assigned to this section at the end of the containment line, where the fire hoses don't reach. A place where, if things go tragically wrong, there will be no escape.

At around 8pm he sets off for the two-hour, 5km walk, descending a vertical 700m through the blue gum and turpentine forests to the river below. He then scales the other side. One section is so steep that he has to use a rope. He is armed with a drip torch, packets of matches, a back-up lighter and a rake-hoe. All he can hear is the crunch of his boots, his own breathing and the chirping of the night forest as his helmet-torch lights up the track ahead. At around 10pm he scrambles up the last shaley section to be halted by a giant sandstone cliff.

Holland catches his breath for a moment before radioing his supervisor. "Boss," he says. "Are you sure you want me to do this?" Go ahead, comes the reply. He asks again, and then a third time. He then checks the wind direction one final time. If it jumps the break, he'll fight it with his rake-hoe, or flee. Holland has a drip torch, but doesn't want the fire to spread too quickly and so opts for a single match. He strikes it and flicks it into a patch of grass. The fire takes hold, spreading slowly westward, the right direction, away from the containment line. For a minute or more he stands, enchanted by the incredible beauty of it all, as it flickers and flows across the forest floor like a dancer, illuminating the giant eucalypts and the sandstone cliff in a soft, warm glow. A few minutes after that he thinks, "This just might work."

He then begins his descent to the valley floor, flicking matches at intervals as he goes. The fire burns slowly through the undergrowth, behaving just as they had hoped. All night he and his team patrol up and down the containment line, making sure it doesn't jump. After dawn helicopters arrive to drop aerial incendiaries - small fireballs - to deepen the backburn, to reinforce The Plug.

At 8am on Tuesday, Holland begins the long trudge out of the valley. Two hours later he and his team arrive back at the depot where someone has put several cases of beer and soft drinks on ice. Holland cracks one open and sits down on the ground, exhausted, allowing himself a moment to feel very proud of what he has just been involved in. He thinks to himself, "This strategy has never been used before - a 5km hand-line that's been lit by a small group of guys in the middle of the night. Normally a backburning operation has vehicles and helicopter support and all those other things and we didn't have any of that." He thought it had about a 30 per cent chance of success, but it held. He takes a long swig and it barely touches the sides. Someone tosses him another can. They've organised drivers to ferry them all home.

As Wednesday, October 23 unfolds, Shane Fitzsimmons is allowing himself to think he may soon get to sleep in his own bed again. The Plug appears to be holding. Other aggressive backburns to halt the State Mine fire also appear to have worked. And the weather - so vengeful the week before - has, overnight, delivered some relief. Fitzsimmons arrives at RFS headquarters to the news that 5mm of rain has fallen across much of the fire ground. If the fire is going to spread rapidly it will need to be up and running by mid-morning, but at 11am he is looking at live video feeds showing "fire dormancy across large areas of the fire ground". By mid-afternoon, Fitzsimmons is feeling like he dodged a bullet. It worked!

Heemstra is in his office on this day, clicking his heels each time he pulls up a new piece of data on his computer. The unstable atmospheric conditions the Bureau predicted are not quite as bad. The wind is not quite as strong - a drop of just 10km/h can mean the difference between a fire advancing 5km a day rather than 40km. The rain was a godsend and he smiles as he looks at the measurements from each and every gauge. He knows that the work of the firefighters has been heroic but it could so easily have gone the other way. It was a case of good management combining with an enormous dollop of good luck. He turns to one of his colleagues and says, "We just kept a tiger in a cage with paper walls."