The four volunteers from the New Zealand Forest Protection Services contingent disembark from their flight home / Source - File
A crew from the New Zealand Forest Protection Services returned home from Australia today. This is the fourth deployment for the team who were based in Tumut town, an evacuated area to the west of Australia's capital city of Canberra. Te Ao News spoke to four of the volunteers.
The returning volunteers arrived home to a round of applause. These volunteers are part of the Forest Protection Services who use similar methods to the traditional burning practices of the first Australians. Two returning Māori volunteers talked about whānau who had to flee.
“At times it could get pretty crazy, you see families crying because they just lost their house. It just makes you want to go there and do it even more,” says Carlos Cook-Hurinui (Tainui).
“We were witnessing families packing up all their belongings into their vehicles and leaving town. People crying, yeah it was pretty sad,” Michael Ihaka (Ngāti Kahungunu) says.
Ihaka says it was so hot the wind felt like fire on your face.
“Well, the intensity was the biggest that I've seen so far. One day their temperatures got up to 50 degrees. We got evacuated twice from our staging area and that was the day that one of the towns got hit really hard, so it was pretty scary.
Cook-Hurinui says, “It could get up to 80 meters flames some times.”
The volunteers say the gratitude they've received from Australians is humbling.
“We quite often get people coming up to us. Thanking us, hugging us, we get a lot of respect when we're in Australia,” says Ihaka.
A team of firefighters that flew out on Monday has replaced this exhausted crew who look forward to spending some quality time with whānau before they return to Australia on January 16.