On Tuesday January 14th 2014 during our 5 day heatwave a series of dry thunderstoms headed across South Australia starting around 250 fires in about 4 hours. Most of them were put out fairly quickly due to the lack of wind. The fires that were in inaccessible areas ended up being larger fires (about 15 of them around the State) and with some follow up thunderstorms with strong winds on the Friday took out 450000 hectares.
The Crystal Brook Fire Station eventually became the base of operations for the Bangor Fire which burnt 23000 hectares and a number of houses as well. Originally Incident Control was located in Melrose but was relocated here after most of the Operations were occuring on the western side of the Flinders Ranges. Staging was located at the Memorial Oval in Port Pirie with the crews being accomodated in Pt Pirie.
I spent 5 days here as the "Black Team" Incident Controller on a second deployment and got to classify the fire contained on my 2nd day and then controlled on my 5th and last day. Control was passed over to the locals and National Parks the following day to patrol