The Ewingar Fire Brigade has 13 new recruits
who today are being put through their paces.
We've been here two and a half years, and we've burnt out three times so far.
So, we thought we'd better do something to if not learn to save ourselves,
help the community.
Our place got burnt out quite significantly
so it just seemed like the sensible thing to do.
You need it, especially with the way that last fire season was
and the way it is looking like it's going to continue ongoing.
So yeah.
With a normal fire season predicted for the next few months,
these fledgling firefighters hope they'll get
the time they need to prepare.
It's a very different outlook to the one faced by this brigade
during the nightmare bushfire season of 2019
It was really, scary time for a lot of people
and we'd had the fire come through this part of ewingar
and we thought we had it under control. And, then a month passed
and it flared up again.
And then we got it under control again and then another month passed
and then that's when the monster came.
A fire emergency is unfolding in the state’s north
where it’s too late to leave for some residents.
It’s a huge fire, over 66,000 hectares in size
and listed as out of control. The fire has crossed Ewingar road
When I got to the turn off to my road, I can't even explain the smoke
that was there. I've never seen anything like it.
It was so frightening.
And the way it looked was that nothing up there
would survive, including my dad, my neighbours and houses.
The Long Gully Fire claimed two lives,
destroyed 44-homes and burned through more than
74,000 hectares of bush and farmland
Quite a few people lost houses and if they didn't lose houses,
they lost fencing, cattle, sheds machinery,
and a lot of people weren't insured.
There’s the saw.
Literally lost everything and didn't know how
that would pick up again.
I was almost finished building my dream home.
It was a log cabin that I built out of railway sleepers
and timber that i cut out of the bush.
Not one single sleeper out of the 270 odd
railway sleepers, not one bit left.
It became one giant big oven inside. So yeah, just being so close
is the hard thing.
This was a four bay shed, used to keep a lot of stuff in here.
That was a water tank that fed the house
but obviously we can't use that now.
When the fire roared through Paul's property,
he was off helping neighbours not knowing his wife Ruth
was home alone.
There was so much smoke that I really had no idea
what's going on outside of my own little sphere but I could hear
trees crashing and some explosions and things.
So, I knew there was something going on but didn't really know how bad it was
until after. The fact that the shed was
totally gone and that all these trees are like this I mean.
Yeah, I had no idea it was as widespread and as bad as this.
We had sheds out the back that went up. Tanks burned out.
Almost lost the house in a couple of different spots.
I thought I was safe, but you just can't stop something
like that. It’s impossible.
As bad as it gets. That is the stark warning this morning
from the rural fire service as New South Wales brace itself
for a potentially catastrophic day.
With fires burning across New South Wales
this isolated community didn't think much help was on its way,
so they took their recovery into their own hands.
Hi Michaela. This is Hayley calling from Ewingar.
How you going? Good.
Michaela, I'm after some sponsorship, we’re having a music festival.
It's how our community is trying to recover. Did you hear about it?
In an ambitious plan, they decided to stage a music festival
to be held in the black and ashen landscape. The promotion for the festival
had an unexpected outcome.
People started coming from nowhere and we just started getting contacted
from all these different groups on Facebook and one of them
was the bush fliers. They'd raised all this money
and they landed and brought us lunch and we had a truck full of feed
for animals and water and all sorts of things.
Thank you everyone. This is absolutely fantastic.
And, then we had the Governor General turn up
in black hawk helicopters which was a real hoot.
That actually made us feel like “wow”, somebody cares about us.
At the moment’s it’s clean up.
And, a lot of people started coming forward and really helping us
and letting us know what's available and they just kept coming,
and even though it was overwhelming for us at the time,
because we were just so emotional about the loss.
And, to then have to go and talk to people about it,
it was just too much in some in some ways, but they were
so consistently there. And they just kept coming back
and coming back and coming back, and that felt amazing.
All this exposure led to a number of large grants to fund the festival,
combined with the generosity of sponsors and 24 bands,
this tiny community realised their vision.
We created this three-day festival, but just blew all of our minds,
I think.
All up this community raised a massive $75,000. But that presented
a new challenge, who gets the money.
Former legal academic and Ewingar local Hayley Katzen, took on the role
of facilitator at a public meeting.
What surprised me most was how complex and tricky
charitable giving really is. When a donor gives,
their intention is usually to give for people who've lost their homes,
they've lost everything. But of course, what happens in a rural community
is that it's often your infrastructure that's gone too.
Because you've suddenly got no septic, you've got no sewage happening,
you've got no power, you've got no water infrastructure.
And a number of our community members were also not insured.
So, we started off thinking,
“okay, we're going to give 80% to people who have lost everything.
And then gradually, we shifted that percentage, so that we actually
gave 50% to the people who lost everything,
and 50% went to people who lost infrastructure.
Jeremy Hillman, from the New South Wales Office of
Emergency Management has watched communities struggle
with getting charity right.
It is a bigger challenge often than people realise, when they start up
a donation drive. For example,
it can happen through websites like Gofundme, Facebook allows that.
And, then there does become a challenge of how you distribute
those funds fairly, and you make sure they get
into the community. There is a fair bit of time and a fair bit of effort
required to get that right, because of course, if you end up giving donations
to some and not to others, it can cause other challenges.
We, as a group, who raised the money, decided that we didn't want to be the
people who make the decisions and send the money out.
And we wanted it to be completely aboveboard and we were advised
to get a charity involved and the rotary kindly accepted,
which was just, they were fantastic. So, we decided on the criteria and
so they had set guidelines to go by, and then people would apply direct
to them, so we didn't even know who was applying.
They would make the decision.
I got $3,000 which bought a water tank and water pump and stuff so
we had water back on which we desperately needed because we had none.
I think we got about $2,500 and we decided to go for two containers
rather than a four-bay shed that burnt down. It really helped, honestly
it really, really helped. Yeah, it's helped get us back on our feet.
At this stage I'm just setting up a room in my shed to make an office
getting some solar power on with the help of the funds that my community
here at Ewingar raised.
So yes, it's taken yeah,12 months and it's hard to believe
it's been 12 months but for me it was like losing the love of my life.
But I own a block of dirt. So, it's my little shell that this crab
crawls into now and again, you know.
Really learnt the power of people coming together for a common goal
and using each other's strengths to create something.
Yeah, we're definitely blown away by the power of that and yeah,
incredibly proud.