| Outside Tumbarumba's fish and chip shop, where George and Katrina Dimitropoulos are handing out free egg and bacon rolls, half a dozen tired men are chewing and counting in the smoky haze.They list the families now homeless since fires arrived on New Year's Day, the streets worst hit and the miraculous stories of properties saved. They agree on 18 homes gone or severely damaged, mostly in the town's north and surrounding areas, "and we haven't even driven around yet".
On the NSW Rural Fire Service emergency map, the old timber town of about 1800 people is a black dot pinned between two ever-expanding walls of fire drawing together across the state border."If you don't need to be here, leave now," Snowy Valleys Council officers told a "short-but-not-so-sweet" community meeting on Monday afternoon, where locals collected donated canned food, water and toiletries.
Fires large and small are burning on all sides of town and Friday, with temperatures again expected to soar, could be another terrible day. Mobile phone reception is already gone and the water is contaminated. Power has been out since the beginning of the weekend. Until a handful of generators arrived, the checkout assistant at the town's IGA was taking shoppers up and down aisles with a torch.
The trickle of news is coming in by landline or people returning from Albury and Wagga Wagga. Locals feel literally and figuratively in the dark."All we seem to hear about is the east coast. This is just as catastrophic as that," electrician Dennis Burgun says. He has spent all his 69 years in Tumbarumba and has never seen anything like it. Only 1952 comes close, he says.
There's not much to do once preparations have been made, other than leave for Wagga (an option taken up by all but about 200 locals) or yarn outside the fish and chip shop.
Rodney Shaw is there and adds his property – his childhood home – to the list of losses being tallied by the tired men. It has been unoccupied, Mr Shaw says, and was uninsured. It's gone for good now, along with the antique furniture once owned by his parents.The drive to his ruins reveals blackened grass right to the front doors of nearby properties. Everyone agrees the RFS has saved the town, at least for now.
Mr Shaw and the group outside the shop are more worried for the future of Tumba than their personal hardship. About 300 blueberry pickers have left, they say, leaving the crop to rot or burn, while the milling operations have stopped and may be damaged.
"Christ knows when the mill will come back," Mr Shaw says. "That's if there's even any timber left. It's buggered Tumbarumba. The town might never recover from this."
He pauses and adds: "No, it's a good little town. We'll come back."
Heinz Kausche, Snowy Valleys Council's acting director of infrastructure, says he has never seen a town so proactive or resourceful.When the RFS began to run low on water, community members got on excavators and made a small dam in the creek deep enough for firefighters' pumps.
Others have graded fire breaks around neighbours' homes and helped evacuate elderly residents to Wagga.
"What the community has done here is nothing short of amazing," Mr Kausche says."The way they've worked together – no power, no comms – they've just got together, got organised and got busy. There are a lot of heroes here."
There is no official word on property losses. Conditions are too dangerous for proper assessments and the priority now, as fires converge, is on saving what's left when the heat returns.
SMH A town between two giant fires
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