Forestry protection supervisor Julian Armstrong's team usually looks after 400,000 hectares of native forest, protecting it from pests and managing fire.

The Narooma man knew an intense drought would affect the season's fires, but he wasn't expecting it to be quite so disastrous.

A few months before flames sparked on the South Coast, the shire's Forestry firefighters were battling North Coast blazes.

Staff were sent up for seven days at a time, while crews were also on standby in the south.

The Batemans Bay crew, "a small workforce", had 35 staff over summer: 24 permanent and 11 seasonal staff to bolster numbers.

They monitor forest between Nowra and the Victorian border, including the tablelands between Braidwood and south of Bombala.

Some Forestry staff drove out to fire tower observers - high points with a 360 degree view - in 4WDs, sometimes taking hours to get there.

There is risk being based in the middle of the bush during a bushfire period, but there were evacuation plans and procedures in place.

They had radios to communicate with other staff, but Mr Armstrong admitted it could be a lonely job sometimes: "It does take a certain person."

They used binoculars to check for smoke and took hourly weather readings.

If they spotted smoke, they would call their team and firefighters were sent out to attack.

After assisting in North Coast battles, staff returned to the South Coast for the fight that started on November 26.

They took off their Forestry badge and coordinated with other agencies.

Their normal routines were on hold, and they contributed as part of the incident management team.

"From then on, once fires in NSW get to a certain size, they are managed by RFS," Mr Armstrong said.

Jobs for Forestry included heavy plant management, mapping and running operations.

Mr Armstrong said managing bulldozers and heavy plant could be quite complex.

They worked five days on, one day off, before another five days on.

Nearly all office and field staff are trained firefighters, so after November 26, anyone who was medically fit was rostered on to the fireground.

They tried attacking the fire "but it was too big and too fast, so we helped with property protection, prepared containment lines and supervised heavy plant".

"We did a lot of backburning, mopped up backburns, got operators that use drones to find hot spots," he said.

It was the first time the drones were used for such an extended period.

My Armstrong was deputy incident controller at the Nowra and Moruya fire control centres.

After the fires over, nearly every road and fire trail was blocked by fallen trees, he said.

Over 50 timber bridges were burnt and there were many dangerous trees half burnt, waiting to fall over.

Using heavy machines and bulldozers, they cut trees down and started replacing bridges.

Most of the clean-up was funded by the Rural Fire Service, but Mr Armstrong said the funding had had started to dry up.

In response to an RFS captain's call for Forestry to tidy up trails, Mr Armstrong said the roads were already well-maintained.

He said there were many resources involved in keeping roads accessible, including small logging trails, critical fire trails and major access roads.

He said trails are not often able to be used as an adequate firebreak because embers could travel up to 15 kilometres on a bad day.

"There's no such thing as an effective firebreak in Australia," he said.

Fire burnt through 35 kilometres of terrain from the top of Clyde Mountain to Mogo between midnight and 6am on New Year's Eve, he said.

"Five kilometres an hour does not sound fast, but that's phenomenal for a fire," he said.

Usually that kind of fire behaviour would happen mid-afternoon - not in the coolest part of the night.

Forestry firefighters kept going until the fires were out in February.

Mr Armstrong said they were still coming to terms with what happened.

"We're still shell-shocked," Mr Armstrong said.

"We worked really hard on the fire.

"A lot of the things we did didn't really work because of the conditions. Things you do in a normal season to contain the fire wasn't working.

"Three of our staff lost their houses."

The forest had also been Mr Armstrong's workplace for over 27 years.

He remembered fires blackening the north of Mogo in 1994 and it was "depressing" to see it turn black again.

However, a silver lining was less hazard reduction would be needed over winter and autumn this year.

"From a forest health point of view, there are gullies that need to be burnt every now and again," he said.

"It's going to improve forest health in some places."

He said hazard reduction was very weather-dependent. If there was too much rain, the fuel would be too moist and wouldn't burn. If it was too dry, hot or windy, there was risk of the fire escaping.

"We usually plan more burns than we get done," he said.

"We would like to do more, but are constrained by resources: people, equipment and the weather."

Forestry engaged in smoke modelling, however he often heard complaints about the smoke.

Mr Armstrong said if there was anything agencies could do better to avoid a catastophe next summer, an official response would have to wait until there were outcomes from various inquiries.

However, he said large fire events have happened several times in the past and were a product of many factors including extreme drought and bad weather conditions. The South Coast was naturally prone to big fires.