When volunteer firefighter Rohan Scott woke up at his home in West Belconnen before midday on January 18, 2003, he had a feeling something was very wrong.
He'd only been asleep three or four hours because he'd worked the night shift with another Molonglo RFS volunteer down at the Tidbinbilla Nature Reserve, putting out spot fires and assessing what property might need protection.
"We'd been dealing with this fire on and off since about January 7," he said.
"We had already been up in the Brindabellas quite a few times in the previous week, or two weeks really, and we had a little bit [of fire] starting to encroach on the nature reserve.
"To be honest, it wasn't until the next day, just after lunch, was when we got that feeling that things hadn't gone to plan."
He wasn't sure what woke him earlier that Saturday, despite being "dog tired".
"Maybe it was all the air traffic flying around," he said. "As soon as I stuck my head outside, that feeling got worse."
Relative humidity was in the single digits, winds were high, and the temperature was in the high 20s and climbing.
'That particular day, if you had to write down what is the worst case scenario [for a fire run], then that ticks all the boxes," he said.
Things, he said, "got intense very quickly". His volunteer tanker crew were deployed directly into the Duffy and Mt Stromlo areas. This was as the sky was turning pitch black, and the strong west-northwesterly winds drove smoke and embers toward them.
The volunteers headed into the forestry depot just off the Cotter Rd. Ahead of them, ringed with pine trees burning like Roman candles, the whole depot was on fire.
"We drove in, then realised we couldn't get any further in, when one of the crew in the back seat said he'd seen two people," he said. The whole area was fiercely hot, and thick with smoke and swirling embers.
"We called bullshit, to be honest, because there was no way there could be people still there, but he was totally sure. So we pushed on and sure enough, the two people were there, clinging together under a water hydrant.
"If it wasn't for that water hydrant, they would have perished; it was pretty intense in there."
The two very thankful people were conveyed out and dropped off to the former AFP facility at Weston, a location thought safe at the time but also came under threat an hour or two later as the fire took hold in the suburbs and began to march west.
The five-person volunteer crew turned their tanker around and headed back into the fray as the residents streamed out in their cars, taking what little they could. There were houses fully engulfed in flame the volunteers knew they couldn't save, so they worked to protect those they could.
"We, as a crew, knew what we could physically do and what we couldn't," he said.
"Typically in most fire situations you work with other crews but the sheer scale of that fire ... it was sort-of self-tasking."
In the 20 years since then, Rohan Scott has risen through the fire ranks and is now the ACT's Chief Officer of the Rural Fire Service.
He said there were "so many massive lessons learned" from that 2003 fire event. An advantage of heading up a large body of volunteers is that they generally don't retire and disappear; many of those in the RFS who fought the '03 fires are still around and active in their respective brigades.
"That knowledge and experience is still there and it's important that the lessons of those intense fires gets passed on to the young people coming through;" he said.
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