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.