The hidden bushfire: inside the Blue Mountains backburn

One of the most destructive bushfires of last summer was lit by the NSW Rural Fire Service after a last-minute change in strategy communicated to the local brigade captain only the day before.

The Mount Wilson backburn, which the RFS has bundled with the Gospers Mountain Fire in its damage estimates, was lit on December 14 from a point with a history of escaped fires and contrary to the advice of Mount Wilson RFS captain Beth Raines, who lost her house in the blaze. It was a windy day and the Gospers fire was 15 kilometres to the north.

Mount Wilson RFS captain Beth Raines at Du Faurs Rocks lookout, with bushland in the background that was affected by the Mount Wilson backburn during the 2019/2020 bushfires. Credit: Kate Geraghty

"To do it on that day and in those conditions was ludicrous," said Bill Shields, who captained the Bilpin RFS for 30 years. "The more fire you introduce under those conditions, the more likely you are to have an escape."

The consequences of the Mount Wilson backburn are written into the landscape. Nearly a year later, the Bells Line of Road is lined with sprouting skeletons as far as the eye can see. Much of the damage has been attributed to the Gospers fire. In truth, that blaze never came close. Some of the burned area is described as the Grose Valley fire, but that name is an administrative convenience, for the fire in the Grose burst out of the Mount Wilson backburn.

The Mount Wilson backburn burned for 53 days and destroyed 63,700 hectares, according to an analysis by the Independent Bushfire Group, if the fire grounds in the Grose and the upper Wollongambe catchment are combined. It razed orchards in Bilpin, part of the Mount Tomah Botanic Garden, ancient rainforests and the Blue Gum Forest, birthplace of the modern conservation movement.

It licked Mount Wilson, Mount Irvine, Mount Tomah, Bilpin, Berambing, Kurrajong Heights, Blackheath, Mount Victoria and Bell, and damaged 20 houses.

A few months after the fires had ended, while she was tearing down her charred house and picking up her life, Ms Raines received a letter from a resident who had a terrifying brush with the fire and lost part of her garden.

Ms Raines has received many letters from people thanking her for saving their homes. This resident wanted an explanation as to what had gone wrong. She wanted accountability.

"I just couldn't engage with it," Ms Raines said.

"People are going through their own personal journeys after these fires and they were at the lash out stage. We've got a few people, very vocal, very negative, who are convinced it was our decision and this is what we did and it was all our fault."

Indeed, many questions remain about the wisdom of the Mount Wilson backburn, not just in terms of its execution but whether it should have been done at all. Why was it done during the heat of the day? Why when the weather was predicted to deteriorate? And how did the RFS plan to contain the fire if things went wrong?

Former Bilpin RFS captain Bill Shields says the only assets that have burnt Bilpin in his lifetime were escaped backburns from Mt Wilson.Credit: Kate Geraghty

The Independent Bushfire Group, a coalition of bushfire practitioners, fire managers, fire researchers and ecologists, is pushing for the NSW Rural Fire Service to release their investigation report so the mistakes from the event are not repeated.

The RFS has declined to release its review of the burn or its advice to the NSW Bushfire Inquiry, other than to acknowledge that spot-overs from the backburn affected other communities. Its size estimate for the Gospers Mountain Fire includes the area burnt by the Mount Wilson backburn.

"It's really hard," said Ian Brown, an Independent Bushfire Group member who worked in national parks management for 20 years. "We're not saying it's easy. We've all made mistakes in fires, but there's got to be some sort of acknowledgement that these things happened so they can be improved. It's time for truth and healing."

Major threat to communities

Ms Raines got her first hint there was a change in plans about 4pm on December 13 when she saw on her Live Traffic app that the Bells Line of Road was to be closed the following day. The Gospers fire had been burning for 48 days, zigzagging south until it hit the Bungleboori Creek, when it started to curl around both ends.

The Gospers Mountain fire hits the Bilpin "Tutti Frutti" shop.Credit: Nick Moir

The RFS was in the process of burning a southern containment line from Wisemans Ferry to Lithgow – a distance of around 130 kilometres – and damp weather had held it up at Bilpin. The aim was to avoid fire getting into the Grose Valley, a notoriously wicked area to contain and a major threat to communities along the Great Western Highway.

But Ms Raines and her brother Peter, the senior deputy captain of the brigade, were looking at the western end of the fire front with increasing concern. In 2013, the State Mine fire streaked 25 kilometres from Newnes Plateau to reach Mount Wilson in one afternoon, peeling off two houses at neighbouring Mount Irvine and three others along the way. It was a study in how quickly fire could come from the north west under the right conditions.

"People were starting to get a bit toey," Ms Raines said. "It was going nuts around Newnes Plateau. People were just worried that if it did take a run with some adverse weather we were going to be in the firing line."

Peter Raines lobbied the Hawkesbury divisional command, which was managing the Gospers fire, to run a perimeter burn around Mount Wilson, starting at Mount Irvine and running west towards Bell. But he did not have a personal relationship with anybody in that command as he was used to working with the Katoomba office, and it was difficult to get people on the phone.

"I'm going through the RFS and every time it was, 'Sorry, they're in meetings'," Mr Raines said.

"They're trying to deal with all the different people in their district, whereas I'm a nobody from a different district. It's never going to end well for us."

So the suggestion that backburning operations were to commence in their area the next day came as a surprise. A phone hook-up with Hawkesbury yielded two more surprises: the anchor point for the backburn was the corner of Mount Wilson Road and the Bells Line of Road - almost the same location a fire started in 1994 with disastrous results - and it was to be lit during the day.

"They reckoned they had a three-day window that was good and then the weather was coming again," Mr Raines said. "We weren't opposed to it. But it needed to be really well managed and it wasn't. We like to light it at night, because if you get a bad day you can't hold it."

Ms Raines suggested some alternative locations. "And it was like, 'No no no'," she said. "It wasn't a good plan. There were better spots, but they just didn't want to know about it."

A sign stands among trees that show signs of regrowth after the Mt Wilson backburn in December. Credit: Kate Geraghty

When Mr Raines informed residents of the plan that night at a dinner in the community hall, some of the locals were taken aback. There was very little time to prepare for what seemed like a risky burn. Was the risk of lighting up at that time and place worth the potential consequences?

At 9.51am on December 14, three strike teams met at the designated anchor point and started burning in two directions. Radio communications obtained by the Herald indicates the temperature was 19.5 degrees, with very little wind. At 2pm, a south-westerly picked up. And at 2.54pm, the crew reported the first spot-over.

Ms Raines: "Within half an hour, we were doing property protection."

'Lighting a bushfire'

The Gospers Mountain Fire never did cross the Bungleboori Creek. According to the Independent Bushfire Group, the active end at Newnes was burning slowly through bush that had been incinerated in 2013 when the Mount Wilson backburn was lit.

"They weren't doing hazard reduction and they weren't doing a backburn," one resident said. "They were lighting a bushfire."

It was the Mount Wilson backburn that raced towards the Gospers when an easterly change came through that evening, and both fires became tangled in backburns around Clarence and Dargan, destroying 30 houses. The next day the weather deteriorated, with intense runs of fire towards Bilpin, Mount Tomah and Berambing burning more houses, and within two days the fire crossed into the Grose Valley. It destroyed road, rail and electricity infrastructure and tied up resources for weeks that might have been directed elsewhere.

"It was a total failure," Mr Brown said. The backburn might have been an appropriate strategy under the right circumstances, but there was no imminent threat to justify it, he said.

"Human psychology comes into this hugely. There's an urgency to do something. But there have been many occasions since then where common sense has prevailed and people haven't lit up such dangerous backburns."

The local forecast from the Bureau of Meteorology predicted the temperature would rise and winds would pick up in the afternoon, Mr Brown said.

Ms Raines' home was lost on the second day, engulfed by a wall of flames so intense the crew - a professional team - fled and never returned. It is this more than anything that she struggles to reconcile against those who would blame her for the loss of their gardens.

"I don't have a problem with them bailing," she said. "It's the fact they didn't come back."

There was no time to take stock. Back at the station, somebody had dislocated their knee and somebody else was vomiting from dehydration. And even after the fire moved on, she would wake in the night and smell it, hunched in the rainforests.

"We knew it was there, just trickling around. I was petrified still."

A spokesman for the NSW Rural Fire Service said the southern containment strategy of the Gospers fire was the result of careful planning with input from local brigades and the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service, but the weather deteriorated beyond what was predicted.

"The NSW RFS is committed to thoroughly investigating incidents such as this and ensuring that it incorporates the learnings from those scenarios into its practices and procedures," the spokesman said.

But there are those who believe a transparent autopsy of the backburn will help them to move on. Heidi Irwin, whose property on Mount Wilson Road was among the first to be hit, still feels physically ill when she drives through the blighted country. "So many things went wrong that day, it's going to take a long time to heal," she said.

And then there are those who are taking matters into their own hands. Mount Wilson RFS brigade has seen a spike in membership, with 17 new firefighters trained this year and 10 lined up for 2021.

Mount Irvine resident Allen Hyde has founded the Rainforest Conservancy, with plans to reanimate rainforest in the gullies and then put a buffer around it. Mount Victoria and Bell are also interested in becoming involved.

"This is the last bit, literally in Australia, of basalt rainforest," Mr Hyde said. "There's no more like it. That's why it's somewhat precious."

One evening in the midst of the fires last year, Ms Raines walked into those rainforests to check that the containment line was holding, imagining all wildlife to have perished, and stumbled upon hundreds upon hundreds of fireflies lighting up the bush.

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