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The Currowan fire began with a lightning strike in Currowan State Forest on 26 November 2019. It burned for about 74 days and nearly 500,000 hectares along the NSW south coast. On New Year's Eve it crossed into Conjola Park and nearby villages with little effective warning and almost no fire trucks present, so residents defended homes with garden hoses and buckets while scores of houses burned around them.
A slow-moving megafire is not one event but weeks of standing threat: repeated evacuation decisions, smoke, severed roads, lost power and communications, and constant re-reading of the fire map. The damage comes as much from sustained vigilance and decision fatigue as from the fire front, and parents bear it most as they weigh leaving against staying for their children. That cumulative toll carries on into a recovery that is often harder than the fire itself.