Terip Terip Fire Brigade endured burnovers in fire fight

SHANNON Roach, Captain of the Terip Terip Fire Brigade, spoke about the experiences of the brigade during the recent fire event.

She explained, “The Terip Fire Brigade turned out to the initial ‘Make Takers 20’ on Wednesday at the Longwood Fire.”

From that time, “We had essentially manned the truck pretty much the whole way through, except for an hour and a half, in which we tried to go to sleep back at home, but we got paged back out again. Every other hour we were pretty much on the truck.”

Most of the brigade members got up at 6am on the Wednesday morning, so by Thursday afternoon, they were running on adrenaline.

After Longwood, they got called back. “We were working up at Ruffy on the Wednesday night and then ended back up in Longwood doing asset protection. Then we got to a point where we knew the sun was starting to come up and we knew that Thursday was going to probably be a difficult day for Ruffy and Terip. We made a decision to head back up into Terip.

“We wanted to try and get a bit of rest and set the station up ready for asset protection as best we could, making sure we had everything we needed and that’s what we did.

We headed back up the hill and then from there we were back in Terip. We were just waiting at the station a little bit, just trying to get some rest as best we could.

And then on Thursday, midday-ish, we headed in to start protecting Ruffy, which is where we essentially ended up getting caught in a burnover in Ruffy, and everything went downhill from there for us really because there was..