Shelter-In-Place Blog: HangFire | Shelter-in-Place

Black Saturday in Victoria

Wed, 10 Aug 2011 12:32:36 -0700

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.

Prepared For Fire, or Not So Much?

Wed, 10 Aug 2011 12:25:59 -0700

"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.

A Story of Fire

Wed, 10 Aug 2011 12:14:15 -0700

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.