What you feel afterwards.

I imagine most of my readers (I mean, there's maybe two of you) are aware of the fires currently cutting a swathe through New South Wales.  It might be expected that such an event would lead to a certain amount of stupid politics.  Today the politics became, however, brainlessly malevolent.  An 'activist' named Sherele Moody, appearing at a Greens-sponsored event, had this to say -

"After a cataclysmic event like this, domestic violence peaks. … Women become extremely unsafe, when generally the men return home from the fires and subject them to domestic violence."

Now, I've never served in the fire services.  Perhaps our friends in the gold uniforms are made from different stuff to State Emergency Service or Red Cross volunteers, but I suspect not.  So I think I can speak with some authority as to what happens when an emergency responder returns home after a difficult job.

I've responded to God-knows-how-many severe storm events where I've spent a night patching roofs and cutting up trees.  Afterwards, I haven't had a yen for violence.  I've had a yen to wash my skin clean of sweat and oil and rain and mud and to get the smell of two-stroke off my hands.

With Red Cross, I responded in the wake of the Melbourne stabbing attack in 2018.  After a day of talking to deeply upset people in Bourke Street I was starting to lose it myself.  I messaged my ex-wife to ask her if she could give our daughters an extra kiss for me before she put them to bed, because they seemed like the last half-decent things left in an otherwise utterly fucked-up world.

As an SES Peer, I've spoken to crews that were deeply distressed after turning out to provide scene protection for the body of a man who tried to cross the road ahead of a B-Double and failed.  These good people had smelled bits of him slowly frying on the hot asphalt of an Australian summer's day.  When that job was done all I wanted was to go for a walk beside the sea and clear my own head of the images it was carrying.

I've responded to riverine flooding where I've spent a night laying sandbags on a levee that was in danger of failing.  When I went home all I wanted was to rest an aching back and shoulders.

I've gone home after a rescue that went wrong, where the extrication took twice as long as it should have or where our command-structure fell over, and spent days asking myself what I should have done differently.

I've sat in a staging area on a major land search after the news came through that the body of the subject had been found.  Every member present from every agency was sitting there with aching feet and a grubby uniform thinking "well, fuck".

I've finished my shift in a relief centre after an evacuation of the residents of four city blocks following an incident and thought "yes: this really is worth doing".

I've come back to LHQ after a road crash callout where everything went to plan, when every member of the team from veterans to someone just out of fundamentals had done what they were trained to do and extricated the casualty and placed them in the care of paramedics without a single misstep.  I've driven home feeling eight feet tall and bullet-proof.

I've looked at a pager as it blurted out a storm warning and thought "no.  Just no.  I'm not up to it tonight" and begged God to send the storm cell into someone else's patch (this usually seemed to be that of Cobram SES.  Sorry Cobram)

Despite some of the more breathless media reportage, not many emergency services people are heroes.  We're not made of steel or iron or even copper.  For the most part, we're very ordinary people who sometimes find ourselves in extraordinary situations.  All of us from time to time discover more intense emotions than we knew we could experience.  Wife-beaters?  Maybe.  Any organization is liable to contain a few pieces of human garbage.  Firies coming out of the event in New South Wales will have experienced things well outside the range of ordinary emotions.  Few of these emotions will have been pleasant.  Next time Ms Moody wants to translate that into "by the way, these guys are probably going to go home and clobber their girlfriends", maybe she should do it in the privacy of her own skull.