SHELTER IN PLACE?HOW WE SAVED OUR HOME... | Shelter-in-Place

Shelter-In-Place Blog: HangFire

Wed, 10 Aug 2011 12:12:10 -0700

Shelter-In-Place, aka Stay-And-Defend basically means you're sticking around to save your home if there's a forest/bush fire. There's a difference between being stubborn and foolish, and being prepared. As they say: "Chance favors the prepared mind."

Black Saturday in Victoria

Recent interviews of people who battled Black Saturday’s fires have echoed a story for The Australian I wrote in aback in ’03 about my own fire-fight. Descriptions of a “hurricane of fire” made me wince in remembrance of how my five-foot tall wife, my crippled mother-in-law, my American niece and myself battled the raging fires surrounding our home in the Victorian Alps. “Sounded like a freight train” and “dark as night” were also apt. Been there. Done that.

And the sad but inevitable blame game afterwards. Phone companies, councils, even the victims themselves cop it, one way or the other. Its pretty easy to make judgments when its all over. I do it myself. We all make choices. I made several back in ’03, including staying and defending with my gals. With a different outcome, my own choices would have inevitably been questioned, challenged.

I will say this, however: there is far more to fighting a bushfire than a “plan” for once it hits. Preparation is essential. As importantly, you must pause and imagine how you are likely to react when facing the terrifying foe long before you decide whether to stay or flee.

If choosing to flee, the time to do that is when the weather reports tell you that it’s going to be the hottest, driest, and windiest in recorded history. Not when you hear the freight train barreling down the tracks.

Filling gutters with water and having a garden hose handy is no plan. Plans begin months and years in advance. A defendable property means shrubs cleared to at least thirty meters from the home, fire-retardant window coverings, sprinklers, extra water sources and pumps that don’t depend on downed electric wires. It means leaf and other flammable litter raked clear of your house and plastic water tank.

More importantly, it means you have prepared your mind to battle hell and keep a steady hand. If you cannot envision yourself choking back smoke and heat while running like a madman with hoses, staying poised as the firestorm approaches at a gallop, threatening not only your home but your life and the lives of your loved ones, then you have no business staying to defend. Likewise if you have a physical disability that prevents you doing what’s needed.

Black Saturday’s tragic fires took too many lives. It is not their fault. Looking ahead, the CFA must upgrade their already excellent fire booklets to include instruction on the fact that proper preparation is as important if not more so than having a last minute “plan”. Back in ’03, my wife and I, having prepared our property for three years for the inevitable, chose to defend our home and won. This fire was no wilder than ours. Tragically, because it was in a more inhabited area, lives were lost. Far too many lives. Landscaping, cedar cladding, and poor fuel reduction planning all have something to do with that sad outcome. Let us learn from this and move on. Review and improve the stay and defend plan to include property preparation, and emotional preparation. But for those of us who have worked diligently over the years to make our property safe to defend in the face of a raging bushfire, do not take away our hard-earned right to do so. We’ve done it before with great success, and will do it again.

You can see some video of how we were surrounded by a “hurricane of fire” at my website: www.shelter-in-place.net, or on YouTube by searching for “fire rages through Australian homestead”. Particularly look at the forest all around us, where the shrubs were thick, as opposed to our property. It tells all.

Mar 7, 2010 11:22 AM

Aug 10, 2011 12:32 PM

Prepared For Fire, or Not So Much?

"Prepared", or Not So Much?

It is one thing to say you "have a plan". Quite another to have spent the required time, energy, and money to prepare your place to be defendable. We did, and made it. As tragic as these recent fires were, and as right as some of the blame may seem, the places that went up were not defendable, period. The city councils had required in some cases intensive landscaping, exterior walls were old, weathered cedar or other soft woods, people did not have the proper tools, or petrol-powered fire pumps, or tanks of water, or or or. I know from personal experience that had they truly made their properties defendable, many if not all would have survived. The Aussie fire booklets available are excellent, tho they lack a few clarifications; to wit:

Fleeing at the last minute does not mean you will have to bear some flames like diving thru a fire-barrel for a few seconds. It means choking smoke, so thick you cannot see your own windshield, nor can you breathe from the heat searing your lungs. It means you, and everyone else, are driving blind, and fast, in a panic. Someone is going to plow into another, or go off the side. Then it's your turn. Trees and poles are falling like dominoes across the road. THAT is why you don't flee at the last minute.

Leaving early means leaving when you know the temp is going to be 115 and there are going to be high winds and there has been an historic drought. That is warning enough.

You have no business thinking you are going to fight a fire if you cannot picture yourself surrounded by 2 story flames, hotter than hell and burning your skin, dragging hoses this way and that, all the while staying calm. You also have no business fighting a fire with a garden hose and in flip-flops. Finally, if you have a disability, or are old or ill or too young, the same goes. Leave early.

Finally, "a plan" to defend your property means you have included the very most important aspect; which is having a defendable space.

We fought fires similar or worse. We did the right thing and prepared for 3 years prior. If you check out my website at: www.shelter-in-place.net, you can see the video and fotos, and read my story of the event. Politicians are politicians, and they may or may not try and take away my right to defend my property. I do not in any way blame the victims of the recent fires. As a matter of fact, I blame no one, including the ones that Dave blames. It was a huge act of nature, and people will be people. Blaming only makes it worse.

All I have to say is this: If anyone tries to make me leave my property the next time a fire hits, they better have a gun and be prepared to use it.

Jeffe Aronson, to Black Saturday Commission, 2009

Aug 10, 2011 12:25 PM

A Story of Fire

Jan 26, 2003, Andre Wins the Open, Australia Day

The Parks Victoria boys drive down our gravel lane, having watched the hurricane of fire engulf the forest around us. Covered in soot, typically laconic Aussies, they pull up next to Carrie and I. Mick leans an arm out the window. Looks away, then down at his lap.

“We expected smoking corpses, mate.”

They were fighting the grass fires in the open grasslands upstream, doing what they could to save farms, homes, cattle. Gerry and Anthony live in a metal shed in that same pasture, strewn with broken tools and other items in process of being repaired, or not. In the impromptu celebration of life at the Blue Duck Inn that evening, Gerry described the same fireball, raising a schooner of beer to chapped lips.

“Sounded like a 747 taking off, mate.”

The world outside is colorless. Black and white. Even the sky is gray. Bloodshot eyes, this poor sun, and pockets of burning stump or log provide the only color; reddish orange. Everyone in the valley has the eyes. Shot red with worry, stung with smoke, black soot around the goggle line. A bunch of raccoons.

That wind, which we’d been expecting for nineteen days, finally came. In a rush to get it over with already. Being over with it was what we’d been dreaming of for weeks.

Be careful what you wish for.

In the midst of the most intense half-hour, a terrified wallaby hopped past, not two feet away, moving fast and focused, and disappeared directly into the flames. We went back to the hoses, spines tingling.

I told Cathy–our tough-as-nails rancher neighbor–about it afterwards.

“Perfect, mate–rush through the front and emerge behind it where everything’s already burnt. Nothin’ but a singed arse and she’s laughin.”

Now, with smoking ruin surrounding us, trees crashing all round, we can finally sit and meditate on the passions of mother nature.

Of course, my mother in law is visiting. Five feet tall, in her seventies and lame from a recent bad break in her knee. And my niece Jill, visiting from America. My sister’s going to kill me. Jill takes photos and video and helps my wife Carrie and I battle to save the house. It’s all happening just like it says in the fire booklet. Tin covering the windows. Water in the gutters. Three years of brush control, burning and clearing. (A neighbor told someone we were creating a “moonscape”. He ended up cowering in a neighbor’s house.) Now, the earth itself is a smoking corpse as far as the eye can see. Some trees on our 12 acres remain alive, blackened trunks hoisting sooty, crisped leaves seeking an absent sun. We like to think it was from our efforts. Nevertheless, huge swaths of this two and a half million square acre fire have been burnt through to the crowns. But our little valley will have a handful of living green. Well, olive?

Mum stays inside wetting rags and covers the cracks below the doors. Jill drags hoses around corners, brings drinking water, films. In the lead up to it all, everyone in the valley came closer together, an impromptu, tribal bonding. All conscious that when the shit really hit the fan it’d be everyone for themselves, too busy saving our properties (and our asses) to help much elsewhere… still. Like a chain of islands connected by a submerged reef. Nobody anticipated having nearly 3 weeks to prepare. Frustrating as that was, it gave us precious time. I was even able to put my plastic kayaks inside the house so they wouldn’t melt.

The night before our turn, Carrie and I and a straggle of others coalesced at an elderly neighbor’s about fifteen minutes away. The night glowed at every hand, highlighting each ridgeline with pulsing, glowing rust. Our valley still maybe seven kilometers from that particular front (there are so many fronts in this fire it’s impossible to keep track). A throaty, rumbling surf of heat whips the trees along the backlit ridge, dancing like the damned. No wind at our station, it crawled along all night long while we waited (which is a lot of what firefighting turns out to be) in case it came too close to the houses. The Park and volunteer firefighters depart, shift over. We do not have that luxury. Taking advantage of this little eye-opener, breaking rules and instructions, someone sets a backburn. It works. We retire at 2 am, satisfied.

This morning, I called “The Major” up the valley, reporting some spot fires nearby. It had already burned around his place, nice and slow and without wind, a few nights ago. He was sanguine, saying the wind would blow it around “us”. I said I didn’t think so, that the wind was blowing the bastard right into us, and went off to check things out. Impossible to sit still.

Going up our little valley’s dead-end dirt road, I round the bend in my Land Cruiser–fire pump and water tank in tow. A half dozen trucks, a dozer, and most of the valley’s residents appear, leaning on their vehicles, lined up along the crest of a grassy ridge, smoking and watching spot fires across the valley. Four kilometers from home. After complaining about the way the fire crews are being mismanaged, generally letting off some steam, the spontaneous assemblage parts, just as spontaneously, as the wind rises. Still meandering, fidgety, nothing really to do yet, I come upon our nearest neighbor, Neal, watching a blaze gallop across a ridge. He has this feeling. Me too.

Spot fires multiply across the Bundara river, crawling towards it’s banks, towards the farmhouses, Helen’s horses. The wind whips grass fires like ocean breakers in a storm across the slopes. Graham from the Blue Duck comes barreling up looking for his son Jack, his helper to save the pub. “The fire’s jumped the Mitta river, it’s coming fast….where’s Jack?” … heads upstream. It appears there is a second front barreling in. His. Two minutes later he’s found Jack and they’re off in a cloud of dust. While helping put out a grass fire threatening Marty’s home, the radio in Jim’s cab crackles. He stares right at me, microphone in hand and a warrior’s steely stare. “Head back home. Quick.”

The moment of truth. At long last.

Cath’s blocking the road with her truck. It takes an elongated moment to move it off the road to let me pass. Three minutes and I’m coming down our drive, park next to the shed. Carrie sings out; “You can see fire out back.” Sure enough, to the east the forest is ablaze. “Shit, it’s upstream of us to the West too…look” Thick red smoke is billowing like an oil fire from the gully just upstream…where we did a fuel-reduction burn just a few months back. I take the video camera to the ridge and there it is, racing along the river, cornering our backburn and coming at us at a gallop.

The wind howls in our ears. Torn off branches fly by our heads, crashing onto the metal roofs and into the siding, adding to the cacophony. A horizontal snowstorm of burning embers rends the air. Red and orange cumuli Nimbi made of superheated smoke billow and tumble over our heads, darkening the noontime scene as if it were night.

“This is it!” I yell over the din. “Put the last of the tin on the windows, get mum inside. Quick!” We detach the trailer and pull the Cruiser inside the house, fumble our gear on. Game on. Carrie yells “Look! Spot fires across the river!” One, twenty, a hundred cluster bombs, tearing across the slope, a stampede from hell. In less than 60 seconds several hundred acres of mountain, the entire bloody mountain, is aflame. “Carrie! Call Donald next door and warn him it’s here!”….But it’s too late. The three neighbors downwind are a little too busy to answer the phone, are similarly surrounded.

Fire everywhere, we run around like maniacs…. “Get that bush!….look out …that tree’s on fire!…Shit, it’s coming fast…watch the wood shed!” Carrie and I try to move fast without rushing. To breathe too hard means the smoke smothers and chokes us faster. “Which way’s it coming from?…damn it…it’s all around us!” The wind’s howling from the west. “…quick…out front!” Then, Carrie yells “The fuel tank!”, and I glance up where 600 liters of petrol are sitting sixty meters away, engulfed in flames. Justtwo days ago Carrie had raked up the leaves around it. She reflexively starts up towards it and I yell “Leave it… get ready to duck if it explodes!” We’re yelling. The fire is roaring so loudly it’s hard to focus. That wallaby hops frantically by.

The 22,000 liter plastic water tank is surrounded by flames. If that goes we’re left with only 1,000 liters of water. Glad I raked up the leaves and sticks yesterday. Trees explode into flame; the smoke chokes us, we persevere. The manual says that when the front comes, we should shelter inside until it’s past. Supposed to be maybe 15 minutes or so. How the hell do I know when the front is passing? It’s everywhere! We fight on, pulling hoses this way and that, choking, eyes smarting, me stupidly calling out for Jill to film this or that, grab a hose and help me pull it. The smoke alarms in the house screamthe obvious out to us, I yell to Jill to yank out the batteries. Huge flames consume the firewood and timber piles. I run the hose to stop them from torching the wooden shed and it hits me. I can’t breathe. I can’t see Carrie or Jill. I’m choking to death. My skin is burning. Drop it and go. I spray around the fire pump, turn it off, sprint into the shed.

Carrie’s not there. Mum hasn’t seen her.

I exit the back door in the lee of the tempest, round the shed, find her with the trusty backpack sprayer, (right-side up this time) attacking a tree. We go back inside, coughing and rubbing our eyes, me gripping her hand. “Everyone okay??”

Sparks are flitting inside around the doors and windows like luminescent moths seeking a candle. Carrie sprays them out. I’m kneeling on the cement floor, spitting thick mucous and guzzling juice, trying to rehydrate. “Anyone need any water??” BOOM. Carrie and I look at each other. “Donald’s gas tanks??”

The hurricane outside is unbelievable. Thank God the tin covering the skylights is holding. If I go out the back door I can see and breathe. A landscape of fire. Uphill. Downhill, across the slope. The firebreak around the shed holds. We’re okay. For now. Crash, another tree falls, close this time. Two minutes…ten, I check outside… Sure enough, I can breathe. Just enough. The wind tries to rip the door out of my hands as I exit, restart the fire pump, grab the hose, start putting out fires in drip lines, fires in garden plants, fires in trees, grass, bushes too close to the house. This continues for another short while. I can hear myself think again. I notice the wind has mellowed. We just might beat this thing.

We chainsaw 2 fallen trees off our driveway, another which is aflame and threatening the shed, then the power goes out. I go down to check the hydro. It seems fine, just some melted wires. Some half melted pipes on the greywater system. The hose melted on the petrol tank, which is dented from a falling branch. Melted drainpipe on the poly plastic water tank, but like the old match and paper cup trick, it is miraculously intact. We fire up the generator till I can fix the line to the hydro. Donald, our Scottish neighbor, saunters over, beer in hand. “Broke a window, lost me fire pump.” Sips his VB, the local brew. “Empty 55 barrel drum exploded from the heat. The lid musta been too tight.” Ah. So that was the Boom. He mentions his bloody smoke alarms. We share a laugh. Hook up the trailer and water tank, head upstream. See how everyone else is faring.

Jim Brown’s house is a twisted, hissing pile of rubble…as is Tom’s cabin. Just over the ridge, Jimmy Betts’ shed is gone, all is otherwise well. We wave to him and Issy and Lil on their verandah, soaking up life, surveying the ruin about them. Dead kangaroos, birds and possums litter the paddock, but Dinkie the mule is fine. Eighty year-old Lil has sheltered with them. Her house is gone.

“You guys okay?” I call out.

“Yep, no worries. You?”

“Yep. No worries. Sorry.”

A shrug from Lil.

Young Jack is laying on the grass at the Duck. He’s been a gopher, sent to and fro where the old ones couldn’t get to. The historic wooden bridge had started alight, they’d put it out, eyeglasses in shirt pockets melting. Jack said he’d “chucked my guts out” from the smoke. He’d watched as an old bloke saved the cabins, a garden hose in one hand, a cigarette in the other. This man had fought bush fires for 35 years. “Never seen anything like this bugger.” A leak sprang in his hose, a meter from his leg, emitting a fine mist. A wallaby appeared, sheltering there, eyeing him nervously. Refused to leave his side until the fire passed.

Trees, burnt black and leafless, sporadically crash to the earth. This will continue for weeks. Gum trees are used to this sort of thing. Cath and P.J. are anxious for their cattle, sheltered in a gully. Damned hot in there. They will have to find them tomorrow. It’s getting dark and they’re buggered. As are we.

Neal lost his water tank. Got pretty hot on his ridge. Crawled under his floorboards at one point so they could breathe. He and his son arrive at our place, sooty and red-eyed like the rest of us. We share juice and power bars, offer a shower and the couch. They’re giving warnings over the radio to people in other towns and valleys still in the beast’s path. We silently wish them well. We hope the animals that survived will stick around, find a blade of grass here and there, though there won’t be much for a long while. Hopefully the few unburnt paddocks upriver will suffice. All the mile markers along Callaghan’s Road are drooping, melted.

I dance a victory-dance around my Toyota and trailer. It is evening. I am alone, watching over PJ’s and Caths’ remaining hay bales as the grassfires trickle out. I keep an eye peeled for farmers and fire trucks, not wanting to look TOO stupid.

Now that night has fallen, the mountain across from us has countless small fires, reminding me I haven't seen stars in a long while. I think of my lovely Carrie, calmly doing her job. It strikes me that when I hugged her during the crux of the thing, she was shaking. I’ve only just realized it.

And, like a lightning bolt from heaven, the same sort that started the conflagration that nearly took us, it hits me. This.

This is what I’ve been seeking. This is the source. This, the essence. Sanctuary. This.

Later, standing there in the cool evening watching the fire-stars, wrapped in my arms, she gazes up into my eyes with hers; dark, almond-shaped, so gentle, reflecting the glow of the embers. Her loving smile. There it is again, just like that time when Pop was grasping at fireflies. It fills my bones. Reflections of my mother’s eyes. Here it is, after all.

“How’d I do?” she asks.

Aug 10, 2011 12:14 PM

Titles & Summaries

Are you prepared for Forest fires / bushfires?

Thu, 24 Jan 2008 16:19:34 -0800

... IF you've prepared your property to be "defendable"...

(This involves more than a garden hose and a pair of flip-flops. It means clearing brush around the home and planting fire-retardant plants, having siding (cladding) that is fire-retardant, no openings where burning embers can fly in (under the house or eaves), and more.)

... IF you're prepared emotionally and physically to stand and fight...

(This means you don't have a disability that would prevent you from urgent action, that you have pumps that don't require grid power (that might be down), that you have envisioned yourself being calm in a firestorm, with no-one to help, and more.)

... IF you've done your homework...

(Reading the many resources available, having a "fire-fighting" box of clothes and masks at the ready, and more.)

...and IF you have the proper tools, and they are ready and at hand...

(fire-hoses, water sprayers, window covers, gutter stoppers, and more.)

...it may be reasonable to consider our experience of staying and defending our property during a historically huge forest fire in Australia. All of us in our little valley survived uninjured, and saved our homes as well. The recent "Black Saturday" fires of February '09 were horrible, and there was a great loss of life and property. The fire in and of itself was no hotter, no windier, no larger than the one we battled in '03. What can we learn from this tragic event?

Bushfire What To Do and Links

Thu, 24 Jan 2008 14:24:48 -0800

*Should you rely on the "authorities" to be there?

*What is a "phone tree"?

*What about portable fire pumps, house water pressure?

*Backburns...scary! Do they work? Who can start one?

*When should we make the final decision to stay or go?

*What happens when it hits? What's it feel like? What about afterwards?

*What tools should I have handy?

*How should I prepare my property? My Home? Myself and my family... BEFORE it's too late?

These and other topics will be discussed at a presentation.

Read the story.

Link to the Victorian Country Fire Authority (Australia).

(Good information, downloadable booklets.)

Download CFA Bushfire Booklet. (Great stuff!)

Link to Firewise, a great U.S. based forest fire info. resource.

Contact Jeffe to arrange for a thought-provoking presentation.

Another link to a slideshow from Tasmania...

Link to the Fire Safe Council.

Link to the Bushfire Cooperative Research Center

Link to the Stay And Defend In America website.

CFA bushfire booklet

Thu, 24 Jan 2008 13:45:38 -0800

Australian Bush Family Battles Bushfire

Mon, 21 Jan 2008 21:47:59 -0800

A Community Battles Bushfire

Mon, 21 Jan 2008 20:49:42 -0800

Click any photo to begin a slideshow and see a larger view from The Great Victorian Alps fires of 2003.