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FRIDAY MARCH 1, 2019
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MARCH 1, 2019
DONNA SMITH LLB BCM & HAMISH TERRY LLB BCom
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Paul Shaw has been fighting fires all summer – on both sides of the Tasman. By Sophie Iremonger
Waikato’s principal rural officer spends most of his time assessing risks, issuing fire permits, managing rural fires and working with communities to reduce fire risk. But in the past few weeks he’s spent time saving Australian towns from perishing, managing operations for eight massive fires covering tens of thousands of hectares in Tasmania as part of a 28-person deployment across Tasmania by Fire and Emergency New Zealand. A day after returning from two weeks in Tasmania, he was called in to join the crew which fought the mid-February Nelson fire, the country’s largest forest fire since 1955. “It was quite amazing, the scale and size of it, but it’s what we train for,” the Lakewood resident explained. Some fires have been so fierce that water would evaporate before reaching the flames. “You don’t want fires to happen, but when they do, it’s an opportunity to put into practice what you spend years training for.” “A total of 200,000 hectares in Tasmania have burned, plus they’ve got fires in New South Wales, Victoria… they were just really stretched for resources. “We get called in on these really big ones where local resources won’t be able to help.” With rescue efforts stretched thin, and raging fires sometimes impossible to extinguish, in some cases firefighters had to light their own fires to stop wildfires reaching towns. Such was the case with the 3000-hectare Lynch Hill fire, where Paul and his crews saved the town of Zeehan by burning a protective barrier under safe conditions so that it couldn’t catch fire again. Continued on page 9
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Paul Shaw is back in Cambridge after fighting thousands of hectares of fires in the past month.
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