Fires
Thursday, February 12th, 2009I set up this site and then don’t write anything! I think I have a lot to say but seem to have a lot of difficulty getting it down on paper (well, screen really)
I’ve been somewhat galvanised by the recent events where I live.
We live in the hills east of Melbourne (about 40kms out) in Victoria, Australia. It is a beautiful place to live and we have been here for 22 years. We brought up our two children here, they went to the local primary and secondary schools and have many friends in the area. We love it here.
It is a bit of a high risk area for bushfires though, so we prepare for the summer. We rake up the leaves and twigs, cut the grass, burn off piles of stuff. I also have an old above ground swimming pool with about 40000 litres in it and a fire-fighting pump, hoses, couple of sprinklers for the yard. I never think I am well enought prepared but I try.
So, here I am last Saturday. I get the hoses out, run the pump test the hoses and setup the sprinklers. There were mud wasp nests in the sprinkler heads so cleaned them out and got it all working. We don’t have mains water, we have a tank and an electric pressure pump so in case the power goes out I can connect the petrol pump back into the house system and then still run all the garden hoses. I have a tap and hose on each side of the house. Spot fires watch out, I’ve got you covered!
And I sit back and just wait. The temperature climbs and I sit in the pool for a while. And the temperature climbs. By my thermometer it almost got to 45C which is about 113F. It got to 48.8 in Hopetoun in the west of the state, that is nearly 120F.
Melbourne peaked at 46.3C which is the hottest on record. Did you also know that only a week earlier we had 4 days of over 40C, three of them hit 43C and the fifth one was still 37C.
A cloud of smoke appeared a couple of kilometers down the valley and the local CFA (Country Fire Authority, the local volunteer brigade) sirens went off 5 minutes later. There wasn’t a lot of wind about at the time and they got that fire out after about 10 minutes. There was another larger one in Ferntree Gully and the highway was closed most of the afternoon and the trainline was out as well.
The sky was strange, to the east there were large clouds of smoke and to the west, blue sky. The smoke was from north of the city, Kilmore and Kinglake had fires and they must have been large for that amount of smoke. 
Then the cool change came. It was great! The temperature dropped from 45 to 28 in about half an hour. It was very pleasant.
Of course as most of you would have read and as I discovered later it was not so great for the people in Kinglake and Marysville, Labertouche and Churchill and many other places.
The wind change turned the fires broadside and the wind strengthened and drove the fires over the crispy dried forests and farms. The result was the loss of whole towns and the deaths of over 180 people.
I have heard and read many stories from survivors over the last 6 days. The stories about how quickly the fires appeared over the hill and how houses disappeared in the minutes.
I have always thought I was reasonably well prepared with my 40000 litres of water, pump, hoses and sprinklers. But now I realise how inadequate it is in the face of an event like last weekend.
Was it a once in a lifetime event? Serious bushfires, droughts or floods come once every 50 years so common folklore goes. That is the frequency that a farmer in the Australian climate expects to lose everything. Or so I have been told.
But of course we now get back to the reason for this blog. Perhaps this is a sign of things to come. Will we be getting more of these sort of events? Am I going to have to get used to over 40C temperatures?
I don’t think our house is built to withstand a fire of the magnitude seen in the last week. It is a cedar clad house, raised up on stumps with lots of underfloor space. So what do I do now? There are many houses like this in this area and we are all in the same predicament.
This is just one example of how climate change is going to affect us all. For some it will be drought and fire, others will get floods (Ingham in North Queensland) and some homes will just disappear under the waves.
Is there still any doubt that our excessive energy usage has and will continue to affect our climate? Doubt perhaps about how and how much but surely no more doubt about whether it will.
So now I sit here thinking about how to fireproof our house (can’t be done, but it can be improved). And I think about building a fire shelter (concrete, under the ground, between two concrete water tanks), and fire sprinklers for the house, and… who knows. None of makes a lot of sense at the moment.
I had to add the following photo as well. Taken by my son on his way up to Melbourne from Gippsland today. The photo was taken from the other side of Warragul, probably about 100kms from Melbourne. That cloud over the hills is smoke and is huge. We are somewhere under it to the left of the photo. The whole of Melbourne is covered in smoke at the moment, my eyes were watering as I was riding home. My sympathy goes out to anyone with asthma.
