Hundreds of firefighters fought against the devastating blaze on Christchurch's Port Hills this week.
Crews from rural and urban fire services worked alongside the Department of Conservation and the military in some cases without regard to their own situation.
"Our own firefighters have been impacted by this fire," says rural fire incident commander Richard McNamara.
"Some of them have lost homes, some of their friends have lost their homes. Probably most tragically, we've lost one of our own firefighters."
But some of the career firefighters are frustrated about a situation that occurred on Monday night.
They were sent away from the fire. Some even watched from the station as the fire grew bigger.
"They're very angry, very disappointed, very frustrated," says New Zealand Professional Firefighters Union secretary Derek Best.
"That is their job to protect lives and property, and they simply weren't able to in this particular case."
Local crews believe as many as 10 of the homes could have been saved if they had stayed right through.
Mr Best says it's not a blame game, but he wants an open investigation into how this failure occurred.
"It's more out of a sense of just frustration and anger as to why they weren't being used, that they've decided that it's just not good enough for it to remain some sort of secret."
Mr McNamara says it's difficult putting together a response in that initial chaos, but he has praised the work of his diverse team.
"All of the people that are working so hard out there, I'll defend to the death the work that they've put in.
"We did everything that was humanly possible to save homes and it wasn't good enough. It just wasn't good enough."
Plans to merge the country's rural and urban fire services into a single agency are currently going through Parliament.
It's aimed at improving communication and speed of response in emergencies just like this.
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