Day 3-Yarck patrol and mop up.

It was so nice to sleep in a real bed, even if we were in a shared rooms and people snored... ear plugs are the best, though the airconditioner was on all night, so it ended up being another cold night.
I got up at 05:50 after almost 7 hours sleep, showered and went for breakfast. We were due at the Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning depot by 08:20 for the 08:30 briefing and tasking. We fueled the truck and were the first ones to arrive. Briefing, tasking and we were on the road by just after 09:00.
We were tasked to travel to Yarck and had a region to patrol, looking out for smokers, hotspots and just to be a visible presence for the community, giving the local CFA crews a break. This was one of the townships we travelled through that had been devastated by fires almost 2 weeks ago. We staged at the CFA shed in the main street of Yarck, and each unit were given their areas of patrol and off we went again.
It turns out we took a wrong turn, and ended up going off in the wrong direction, but still managed to find some problems, a damaged bridge on one of the rail trails and some smokers. We were also tasked with being the go to crew if any specific tasks were called through. It wasn't long before we got a job.
By this time we were out of water, so we went to get water and stopped at the CFA shed in Yarck for lunch.
It amazes me just how generous and appreciative the small communities are. From the service station in Alexandra giving us a roll of paper towel because ours on the truck had become saturated after a Windex leak to SES giving us free run of supplies of electrolyte drinks, snack packs, tool, equipment, etc. and members of the community insisting we not pay for a coffee to families fronting up with meals they had made; they were just extremely grateful for us just being there to help in any small way.
We were sent to a tree that was down over one of the bush tracks, and I managed to put my chainsaw training into action; the tree had a fire burning within it and it needed to be cut up so it could be controled and so it could be removed from the fence it had damaged when it had come down.
After the tree, we moved on to more patroling the devastation. The main area we spent the remainer of the day working on had been particularly hard hit. Multiple properties, houses and sheds had been reduced to piles of melted metal and ash, with the oweners and occupants clearly having very little opportunity to do much more than get out.
Once we had done all we could we had run out of water again, so we headed the 10km back in to Yarck and by that stage it was getting close to dinner.
We filled up at the Koala Cherries factory, which is where we had been filling up all day and the manager on duty gave us a pallet box full of bags of cherries, close to 12 kg in all. We gave them out back at staging as there were way too many cherries for us to eat on our own.
We headed back to the camp absolutely filthy, tired and sore but feeling like we had a productive day.
There was going to be a group going to swim in the river after dinner and I was planning to join them, but after some issues with the group who went down yesterday, the Strike Team Leader was not thrilled so we didn't end up going.
So I blogged, watched a group play Cards Against Humanity (I was too busy blogging), Then showered and went to bed about 22:30.Read more