In his more than three decades in Victoria’s Country Fire Authority, Jarrod Dark has fought plenty of major fires, including Black Saturday and the Black Summer of 2019-20.

But no fire season has left him as exhausted as this summer in the Grampians.

On January 6, fire crews gained control of the first Grampians fire of the summer, which sparked in mid-December.

Just days later, a second bushfire ignited.

The two fires burnt through more than 135,000 hectares of Grampians/Gariwerd National Park — an area larger than Hong Kong — leaving about 30,000 hectares of the park untouched.

“When you’re out in the back of your property and you can see the flames and you can hear them — it was a little bit more confronting,” Mr Dark said.

For Mr Dark, the size, ferocity and proximity of the fires, combined with his duties as captain of the Mirranatwa Fire Brigade, meant he was never truly off the clock.

He would wake in the middle of the night worrying about tasks he might not have done, neighbours he might not have checked on, or volunteers who might not have had a break.

At one point Mr Dark calculated he had 17 hours’ sleep in 10 days.

Mr Dark praised the Country Fire Authority (CFA) and Forest Fire Management crews and said the number of people offering to help the community was overwhelming.

“Humbling is the best word for it.”

After six weeks of gruelling work and little rest, the fires were brought under control and it was time to clean up.

The national park will bear the scars of the past summer for years to come, but so will some of the firefighters who battled the blazes.

Longer the fires, heavier the impact on volunteers

Curtin University’s Wavne Rikkers, who co-authored a survey of more than 4,000 emergency services personnel who worked on the Black Summer fires, said prolonged exposure to fire correlated with poorer mental health outcomes.

“Generally, the longer they fought the fires, the higher the likelihood they would develop a mental health condition such as PTSD, high psychological distress or suicidal ideation,” Dr Rikkers said.

Extended time away from work and home also led to financial stress and feelings of isolation, compounded for some local firefighters whose properties and communities were under threat from fire.

The research showed volunteers tend to spend a longer amount of time on the front lines compared to their paid counterparts.

“Firefighters will tend to keep going, mainly because if the fire is still there even if they’ve been through a traumatic event,” Dr Rikkers said.

“For them to walk away and say ‘no, I can’t do this anymore’ [they would feel] they’re letting down the team, they’re letting down their community.

“So they’ll keep going back and that cumulative trauma effect happens.”

She said while some organisations have strict guidelines around breaks and regularly rotating people away from the frontline, it cannot completely mitigate the mental health impact.

“A break makes a huge difference not just to physical fatigue but to mental fatigue,” Dr Rikkers said.

Dr Rikkers said as climate change accelerated the frequency and intensity of natural disasters, increasingly volunteers were not getting a break when the fire season ended.

“When the wet season comes around, they’re out there helping people whose homes have been flooded, so these volunteers never get a day off,” he said.

Volunteers ‘need to support each other’

Dr Rikkers’ research shows strong social support is a “huge protective factor” against developing a mental health condition, but more mental health professionals are needed in regional and remote areas.

“In regional areas, typically it’s quite hard to get an appointment with a psychologist or a psychiatrist … even telehealth can be quite challenging to get an appointment,” Dr Rikkers said.

“And it’s very hard to build a relationship with trust with someone over the phone.

“Often SWAT teams of health professionals will go out immediately after the fires, but what they need to do is go out every month after the fires for a year.”

Mirranatwa CFA captain Jarrod Dark encouraged volunteers to lean on each other and talk about their feelings.

The CFA said the health, safety, and wellbeing of members was its top priority, and it had implemented a range of measures to support the physical and mental health of volunteers, including peer support and wellbeing officers.