Professional firefighter, Darin Sullivan was featured in our “In the Spotlight” column in the last edition of the Australian Emergency Services Magazine. Get in touch if you know someone or an organisation that deserves to be “In the Spotlight”
Professional firefighter Darin Sullivan has worn many hats over the last 30 years of fighting fires in New South Wales. Volunteer, Career Firefighter, Station Officer, Protector, Activist, former Union Official and President of the Fire Brigade Employees Union, Mental Health Advocate and Climate Council Member. With so many years of experience and an obvious dedication for firefighting and emergency services we put Darin under the spotlight to find out a bit more about this man of many talents and passions.
Station Officer Darin Sullivan is celebrating his 30th year working for one of the largest urban fire and rescue services in the world, Fire and Rescue NSW. His role as station officer at Shellharbour Fire Station, south of Wollongong, is one he relishes. Not only as it seems fighting fires is in his blood, but also because of the community and camaraderie that comes with the job.
It would seem Darin was destined to become a professional career firefighter. His father, Peter Sullivan, was also a professional aviation firefighter. It was the memories of his father coming home wearing his firefighting gear, the lingering smell of smoke around him and the great stories he would tell of the day and the incredible camaraderie of the crew he worked with that really made a deep impression.
Growing up in the southern shire of Sydney, surrounded by national parks, joining the RFS as a volunteer when he was seventeen seemed an obvious choice for Darin. His then girlfriend, now wife, also had four family members in the local RFS station at Heathcote, her father eventually becoming a Life member. Interestingly prior to joining the RFS Darin had already made up his mind. At the age of fifteen he knew he wanted to become a professional firefighter. By the time he was 20 he had applied to the NSW Fire Service with 10 000 other hopefuls and made it through the rigorous training that followed.
Reflecting on the last thirty years of being in the fire service he speaks of the great career choice that it was for him and feels really lucky to have had the experiences and life it has brought. Darin began his career at the inner-city flagship station, Sydney Fire Station on Castlereigh Street. He describes himself as a fresh faced 21 year old who entered the bustling city station which housed a large firefighting crew. Darin says he “cut his teeth” there as a firefighter and asserts it was a great place to do that. The diversity of working as a city firefighter and the many varied and colourful experiences of urban firefighting really consolidated his training. From fighting fires in Kings Cross, major high-rise fires at The Rocks to the many rescues across the Sydney region at all times of the day and night.
After 6 years working in the city, he was transferred to Wollongong which he describes as another very interesting and diverse place to work in its own right due to the varied industry in the area. An example of this was an incident that occurred during his time in Wollongong where his team were called to a boat fire off Port Kembla. The crew were expecting to be dealing with a boat fire when they turned up at the dock and were quickly ushered on to a police tug. They could only fit 10 guys on the tug so they grabbed what they could in terms of equipment and supplies. They travelled 7km out from the Port and it was then that they realised it wasn’t just a boat, it was a bulk carrier coal ship that was on fire. They fought the fire for 8 hours straight until helicopters came in and were able to assist.
As a professional firefighter Darin has been deployed to all the major fire campaigns in New South Wales over the last three decades. From the 1994 bushfire season where over two million acres were burnt in New South Wales, to the Black Christmas bushfires in 2001, Canberra in 2003 and of course most recently the Black Summer of 2019-20 where he suffered the worst bout of smoke inhalation he had ever had which forced him to take a few days off to recover.
The Summer bushfires of 2019/20 stand out for Darin as the worst he has seen in his career and he is in no doubt that the climate and the inaction of a climate policy has had its affect on the bushfire season and will continue in seasons to come. He describes what firefighters are seeing and feeling on the ground is certainly backed up by the science and is a symptom of what the science has been predicting for years.
It was on New Year’s Eve that the bushfires really had a personal impact. Darin and his family had been holidaying at Lake Conjola on the NSW South Coast when he was called back home to work on New Years Eve. He wasn’t to know as he left his wife and family that morning that within hours Lake Conjola would be overrun by an inferno of fire. A firestorm that would send people fleeing to the water for safety, burn 89 homes in the area and see three people tragically lose their lives.
Darin speaks of the anxiety he felt when he received a message from his wife that the fire was all around them, then all communication was cut. Power and telecommunication towers to the town were down. He was hours away doing his job.
An hour or so later his Hazardous Materials Specialist Unit were called to the bushfire disaster unfolding at Bateman’s Bay. They drove through the main fire front at great risk to themselves in convoy with a few other fire trucks. He says there were dozens and dozens of houses lost at Bateman’s Bay, all just carnage. They finished the job and drove back past the Lake Conjola area, stopping to help bystanders at the Lake Conjola exit. They made the decision to drive through the fire into Lake Conjola to help, where he managed to find his wife and discovered the rest of the family had evacuated earlier to safety.
It was a 24 hour workday for Darin, but one he remembers as the most surreal New Year’s Eve he had ever experienced after such a harrowing day. “These bushfires were the worst that I’ve seen – I’ve fought and been deployed in many of the major campaigns over the last 30 years and that was by far the worst I’ve seen. Coupled with the sheer spread of it, the whole eastern seaboard was ablaze. In 1994 it felt like Sydney was surrounded but in 2019/20 the whole state was surrounded by fire”.
The physical, emotional and mental toll of fighting fires is not lost on Darin. He credits Fire and Rescue NSW with having a great structure in place to help firefighters deal with the mental stress, but he also says it is the job. As a professional firefighter you are prepared for it, intentionally trained for it. In contrast, the volunteer firefighters were enormously overstretched and broken by this latest bushfire campaign. Darin believes that the entire organisational structure of firefighting and emergency services needs a reset. Merging the services into one would end the duplicated processes, have an allocated budget for efficiency and give the fire services who are the frontline of disaster management a clear structure. “Firefighting should be taken as seriously as police, paramedics and hospitals’, he says “We don’t have volunteer police or doctors in our regional towns, it’s all a matter of funding”.
Advocating for what is right, when it comes to protecting those who put their lives on the line, is something that is close to Darin’s heart. As the second longest serving president of the Fire Brigades Employees Union and a former director of the NSW Fire Brigades Death & Disability Super Fund, he was instrumental in the protection of workers compensation for fire fighters and ensuring that firefighters suffering cancer would have immediate insurance cover due to the nature of the job. He explains, “The greatest risk for firefighters whether it be urban or rural is the accumulative effect of smoke from different sorts of fires….it’s not just the big bad fires that cause the damage”.
Darin lost both his father and brother in law to cancer, both whom were firefighters. In an interview given to The Sunday Telegraph in 2018 Darin spoke of his brother in-law, “In 2007, I sat by his bed with my sister as his life had all but faded, no workers’ compensation or medical assistance was provided for his girls. He died in a shared public hospital ward with little to show for his service to the people of NSW”.
Darin is still just as passionate about this advocacy and proud that he was able to make a difference so that other firefighters and families going through the same thing would at the very least be financially compensated.
Darin is reluctant to call himself a protector, however he does say that his advocacy role as a union official came from being there for others. Looking after other members and families in the good times and the bad times. “It’s just what we should do”, he says. Darin balances his professional firefighting job at Shellharbour with his activism around climate inaction, mental health and protecting emergency service workers. In response to being asked if he would take on a role behind a desk in the fire service, he laughs and explains, “I’ve wanted to stay at the rank of station officer as I still like going to the fires, I still like getting in the trucks, interacting with the firies and I love the station life”. When asked what he loves about his job Darin says it might sound cliché but, “The camaraderie is fantastic, I’ve got great mates, I’ve got lifelong friendships and experiences which spread to outside the job and that’s been an absolute joy. From joining as a young bloke and to have gained lifelong friends, it’s an absolute pleasure. I’m still loving the job, more than ever”.
Thank you Darin for your continued service, dedication and contribution to the emergency services in Australia.
This article was first published in Vol 19, Issue 3 2020 of the Australian Emergency Services Magazine.
