Foreign help was crucial in tackling summer’s devastating blazes, fire chief reveals

Tasmanian firefighters would not have been able to fight the summer’s multiple bushfires at the same time without the help of foreign crews, the state’s top firefighter says.

More than 1000 interstate and international firefighters flew in to help battle blazes across the state this summer. Picture: NIKKI DAVIS-JONES

TASMANIAN firefighters would not have been able to fight the summer’s multiple bushfires at the same time without the help of foreign crews, the state’s top firefighter has revealed.

In an exclusive interview with the Mercury, Tasmania Fire Service chief officer Chris Arnol said interstate and international assistance allowed them to allocate resources to every priority asset that needed protecting, whether infrastructure or the natural environment.

The first interstate resources, 12 remote area firefighters and two paramedics from the New South Wales Rural Fire Service, arrived in Tasmania on January 10, with final interstate crews returning home in the last week of March.

Across the summer more than 1000 personnel from NSW, ACT, Queensland, WA, South Australia, Victoria and New Zealand were deployed to help local teams.

Tasmania Fire Service chief officer Chris Arnol. Picture: LUKE BOWDEN

Mr Arnol said the TFS was well-resourced across the summer in terms of tanker-based urban firefighting, but was “maxed out” on remote area specialists and incident management teams.

“The remote area firefighting is the one where we ran out of capacity,” he said.

“We predicted that, we knew that was coming. We were able to get everything, all [interstate and international] resource requests were filled until about two months later when Victoria and New South Wales got busy.”

When asked what would have happened without this help, the fire chief said: “we wouldn’t have been able to tackle them all simultaneously like we have, we would have had to just prioritise them.”

“We did leave some fires that weren’t going to do any harm, and didn’t do any harm, we just left them because they were burning on the West Coast in button grass.

“We don’t want to be in a position where it’s one or the other, because you lose an asset.”

Close-up look at bushfire damage

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Mr Arnol said the fire service would continue to weigh up whether sending personnel into Tasmania’s rugged, remote and dangerous terrain was even the right tactic.

“While it’s a remote fire — and, yes, you can access them and that’s a viable tactic quite often — sometimes you’ve got to think about the safety of the fireys,” he said.

Mr Arnol said very early, while the fires were still raging, he had asked the Australasian Fire and Emergency Service Authorities Council for a peer review of the summer’s events, which had now turned into a government review.

He said he hoped the review would provide meaningful recommendations they could implement to help make the TFS better and Tasmania safer.

Mr Arnol said they were now in patrol mode — the Central Highlands fire was out and all the edges of the Gell River and Riveaux Rd blazes had been secured.

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