General News
2 October, 2024
No rest for Mount Isa's well travelled firefighter
Almost immediately after a deployment to Canada, Gaven Bunker was back helping his mates in the North West.
Mount Isa Rural Fire Brigade First Officer Gaven Bunker has not been able to spend much time reflecting on his five-week deployment to fight wildfires in Canada after facing near-constant fire incidents since he landed back in the North West.
Mr Bunker is believed to be the first Mount Isa rural firefighter to be internationally deployed when he joined more than 50 Australian firefighters to assist in the effort to contain the massive forest fires raging through Alberta, Canada since January.
Since arriving home in Mount Isa, where he was greeted with a special announcement over the plane intercom and a small procession of fire trucks on the tarmac, Mr Bunker has volunteered to battle countless local blazes including at the Mount Isa golf club and the Duchess Road industrial fire as the city has grappled with a spate of suspected intentionally lit grass fires in recent weeks.
Mr Bunker has also had to juggle firefighting responsibilities with his day job as a diesel fitter at George Fisher Mine, taking long service leave to volunteer in Canada and then being forced to spend more time away from the mine site in service to the wider Mount Isa community.
“It has been a crazy few weeks since I came home and I haven’t had much sleep,” he admits.
At 36 years old, Mr Bunker has spent half his life in the rural fire service, joining just after his 18th birthday.
Growing up in the NSW Southern Highlands to a family of firefighters, Mr Bunker was already a veteran of several interstate deployments, including the infamous Victorian Black Saturday fires in 2009, by the time he arrived in Mount Isa in 2011.
However, he said nothing could prepare him for the scale of the firefighting operation in Canada – where firefighters are forced to pull hoses through waist-deep swamplands and watch out for bears, mountain lions, cougars and moose.
He said it was a densely forested and hilly landscape where water is sourced from beaver dams and fires can smoulder and burn through root systems under the ground, making every step forward a potential fire pit that can be fallen into.
Mr Bunker said he arrived at the massive 550-man camp at Little Red River Cree Nation Indian reserve in northern Alberta at the end of July.
He said black bears had been found wandering around the camp and had to be trapped using cages attached to truck trailers.
With more than 1000 separate wildfires raging across a 700,000-hectare front, Mr Bunker was placed in charge of an incident management team, where he coordinated the logistics for up to 100 men and women from various nationalities, including Mexico, the United States and Costa Rica, to be dropped into a trouble zone to contain a section of the blaze.
Mr Bunker said he was repeatedly forced to improvise to overcome the language barriers, relying on Google Translate on his phone and a steady stream of mud maps to communicate his tasks.
He completed the planned five-week deployment and a new rotation of Australians were flown to Canada, which continues to battle the now 10-month-long fire event.
Mr Bunker told North West Weekly that he believed the experience in Canada provided a wealth of knowledge that could help fight local fires in the future.
“The fires are very different to what we have in Australia,” Mr Bunker said.
“I would definitely put my hand up to go over there again.”
