Lynne Mowbray |

As temperatures soared around the country last week, the Clarence Valley District Rural Fire Service (RFS) began preparations to put together ‘strike (force) teams’ as a pre-emptive move, should they be needed for deployment to assist with fires burning elsewhere throughout the state. 

RFS District Manager Stuart Watts said last week that this was an initiative of the district RFS as a precautionary measure, heading into the weekend. 

“At this point in time, the north east corner of the state has been spared (from the extremely high temperatures), so we possibly have crews available to go out of our area if the request is put to us,” Mr Watts said.

“We anticipated that the weather would get hotter over the weekend and we were just getting prepared,” he said.

Heading into the weekend, the Clarence Valley RFS had 18 fire fighters and six tankers, on standby.

At the time of going to print (on Monday), 96 fires were burning around the state, 35 of those were burning in the northern region (north of Kempsey to the boarder and west to Moree).

Mr Watts said (on Monday) that the standby crew at that time had not been deployed and they would stand them down for a few days and re-assess the situation at the end of the week.