From The Guardian:
“Two volunteer firefighters were trapped in a burning ute while fighting a bushfire at a Department of Defence facility east of Perth [ in Western Australia (WA)] on Tuesday. Emergency services minister Joe Francis said the Bindoon Bushfire Brigade volunteers were forced to shelter in their LandCruiser after being surrounded by flames.
It’s one of the most potentially serious incidents survived by firefighters in a week that has seen 40 firefighters injured while fighting the Sampson Flat fire in the Adelaide Hills in South Australia, and a Victorian firefighter receive facial burns while fighting a grassfire.
Francis said he did not yet know how the volunteers had become trapped or why they were working in an area that became dangerous.
“Any fire is unfortunately very unpredictable in its behaviour,” he said.
“They were in a situation where they could not move their light tanker out of the way of the fire, the fire came towards them, and they deployed their fire protection gear.
“I can tell you they were in a situation they couldn’t get out of, otherwise they would have just driven away.”
Francis said the volunteer firefighters were “unharmed but very shaken”. The Department of Fire and Emergency Services is conducting a review into the incident.
The light tanker they were driving – a LandCruiser ute with a 600 litre tank on the back – is one of the WA fire trucks that has been fitted with extensive crew protection gear after the death of a firefighter in a burnover incident near Albany in 2012.
Wendy Bearfoot, 45, died and several other firefighters were injured after their trucks were trapped during the Black Cat Creek fire.
A Dfes review of the Albany incident found that WA was “out of step” with other states in providing crew protection in vehicles, and said all vehicles entering the fire ground should have one fire blanket per person and roll-down radiant heat shields “as a minimum requirement.”
The Barnett government committed to fulfil that recommendation at the 2013 state election. Francis said that so far all 1,200 fire trucks in WA had heat blankets, and “a few hundred” had heat shields and critical component lagging, which protects the electrical and mechanical components of the truck. He said the full fleet would be protected by the 2017 election.
The state opposition has criticised the government for the time taken to install adequate fire protection.”
