Without a doubt this year has tested us like no other, from the Black Summer bushfires to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. As we welcomed 2020 people on Sydney's northern beaches were fleeing from out-of-control bushfires that scorched NSW tearing away lives and livelihoods. Now, almost 12 months later, coronavirus has left many people with social, mental and financial hardships.
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Healthcare workers
In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic there was fear and thousands of people rushed to be tested, Northern Beaches Hospital nurse Cathy Morris said. In her role as a clinical nurse consultant in the emergency department she was part of the defence in keeping the community and medical staff safe.
"We put a plan together to upskill a lot of our nursing and medial staff, we trained in PPE very early on and our nurse manager was very quick to have a contingency plan. We set up a clinic and that really took a lot of resources from the emergency department," she said.
"Restricting relatives and visitors into the department has been something that we've had to do and it's not always been met with a smile from relatives," she said. "When you've got someone very unwell or someone dying and we really do have to restrict the amount of people that we can allow into the hospital and the department, that's really difficult."
When the Ruby Princess cruise docked into Sydney on March 19 with COVID-19 affected passengers on board, some of the sick ended up at Northern Beaches Hospital.
"We had a number of people who had screened at the clinic and then had to go home and self isolate because they'd had a positive swab and most of those were from the Ruby Princess," Ms Morris said.
Two cruise passengers who were "incredibly unwell" were admitted into the hospital's ICU. One of them, a 79-year-old man died, from the virus.
"My children were more worried for me than I was for myself and in all honesty I felt safer at work than I did out in the community early on. When we're here we're fully donned in PPE so we're completely protected, but not so much in the community," Ms Morris said.
These days things are much different for staff at the hospital, with just two positive tests in the past four months, however other impacts of COVID are now coming forward.
"At the moment the really sad thing is adolescents trying to harm themselves and attempted suicide, that's very difficult and we're seeing an increase in that," Ms Morris said. "I think there's a number of reasons, we can put it down to COVID, we can put it down to less personal contact, not being at school and having to do all your school work at home and low resilience, YouTube, social media, lots of things, failed role models. It's been a really tough year.
"People are very worried about their future and they're worried about their finances and they're worried about the economy. It's not just the health side of things, it's all the other implications."
In the fire fight of my life
While the northern beaches was largely unscathed during last summer's bushfire season, hundreds of local firefighters volunteered their time to help save lives and communities across NSW. Ingleside Rural Fire Brigade deputy captain Laura Marsh, 33, was among those who put work aside to help those in need.
She may have 10 years under her belt as a firefighter with the NSW Rural Fire Service, but this season was like nothing she'd ever experienced before.
"My first call out was early November [2019] to the Port Macquarie fire, we went out to Telegraph Point. I was out with a strike team for about four days," she said. "A strike team is a group of RFS vehicles that get deployed to either a fire that's already going or to areas where they think a fire might move or progress to. It's a group of trucks and firefighters from the northern beaches."
During the season she was also deployed to Mangrove Mountain to fight the Gospers Mountain fire, to fires around Hilltop in southern Sydney, as well as blazes in Adaminaby, Cooma and Rocky Plain in the Snowy Mountains.
The fire at Adaminaby is still scorched into her mind today.
"The conditions for this one were very different, the weather conditions were different, the fire conditions were different," Deputy Captain Marsh said. "There was two things that kind of stuck with me the most when I went down to Adaminaby - the colour of the sky, that real deep red colour was just something that you don't often see and when we were leaving Adaminaby it went really, really dark and then it started raining black ash.
"To see the black ash rain coming down on the truck was just something I've never seen before and hopefully I won't have to see again. It was just black raindrops coming down."
At a different fire in Port Macquarie her crew of firefighters accidentally took a wrong turn down the wrong road, but the mistake ended up saving someone's home from the inferno.
"We went down this road and the wind picked up the fire and there were greenhouses alight on the side of the road, you could see all the panels from the greenhouse flaring up and flying up across the road. The wind was quite strong and we stopped and started doing property protection there," she said.
"There was a resident's house next to it so we were there defending that property and then when we'd done that we moved onto the next one. You just do what you have to do. It was just lucky that Google sent us in the wrong direction."
Deputy Captain Marsh is the first to admit that standing face-to-face with a raging, out-of-control bushfire is confronting.
"If you're directly at the fire front it is very hot, it is very smoky, it can be chaotic at times," she said. "The low visibility with the smoke is probably one of the biggest things. Sometimes you could see 10 metres ahead, 20 metres ahead and other times you could only see a couple of metres ahead. It just depended on the wind and when the smoke was picking up."
While it can be terrifying Ms Marsh said it was important to remember that "you're well trained and you're there to do a job. You just take it slowly and you don't rush things".
Lives changed forever
As this year draws to a close Ms Morris and Ms Marsh admit they've been changed by what they've witnessed and what they've been called to do.
"You realise that anything can happen, you can't prepare for everything," Ms Morris said.
"It's a great job, it's really rewarding but it has been a tough gig this year. As a community I think we're certainly less social with each other, I think we're more cautious and there's less physical contact."
Months on from those raging fires and Deputy Captain Marsh has also felt the change.
"It made me appreciate what we have and not to take things for granted, things can change in a minute," she said. "It put things into perspective, one minute everything can be fine and the next minute things can be turned on their head."