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Bushfire evacuees, glorious hospitality and dodgy supervisors

During the bushfire season so far this year, we have left home on three occasions when a fire was in our suburb or in the suburb next door. On each occassion our very good friends have managed to put us up at short notice. All 11 heartbeats of us.

If I haven't mentioned it before, we live in a "wildfire zone" in the Yarra Ranges, and rather than that being an abstract concept, we now understand what it means.

The first bushfire in our area was on Quarry Rd in Upper Ferntree Gully and burnt about 5 hectares and was threatening the Dandenong Ranges National Park. The second was about 800 metres from our house on Sandells Rd in Tecoma and again burnt about 5 hectares of the very dense Dandenong Ranges National Park near us.

The third time was a doosy. That was the 350 hectare fire which had all in Upwey, Tecoma, Belgrave and Belgrave Heights worried. Leaving alone with all the animals and our one year old while D was in Queensland was truly scary. People were panicking on the roads. The plume of smoke from our back deck and when I got on the road was menacing. I hope I don't experience that feeling again for a long time.

People all over Victoria welcomed evacuees and I reckon they all deserve something for putting up with the disruption, the messes potentially left behind, the extra food cooked at short notice, their amicability to alter their existence for the sake of their friends and family.

In our case our friends were surprisingly calm about us bringing the chooks as well as the two cats and two dogs. They had been at a wedding in Healesville the night that Victoria burned and far too close for comfort to some major fires so they knew how it felt.

I think I was a bit dazed the first time we rocked up on their doorstep. We felt all helter skelter. They went into action mode and took over, bathing our daughter, feeding us, while we concentrated on settling the animals in and answering worried phone calls from rellies all over Australia.

I had thought of course that this would never happen to me. Who would have thought that we'd be fleeing with all our most important possessions. Feels positively war time or something.

It's quite alarming and consolidating deciding on your most important possessions. Try it sometime. Then imagine the stress of a fire nearby and picture what happened at Kinglake and Marysville and see how you feel.

Nature is truly letting us know who is boss around our neck of the woods.

Which brings me to wondering if those in the city really get how this feels - evacuating that is and truly feeling threatened by bushfire.

Very few of us can really imagine the horror of losing loved ones and homes to this, as so many in Victoria have done. But we perhaps get a glimpse of it in some of the more ethical and in-depth stories that emerged after the fires.

But how have city folk who were untouched by this (and who took no evacuees in), viewed this event?

In our back-to-normal day-to-day lives what concessions have been made for those who have had to leave homes, if even for only a few days? Have work colleagues or clients been supportive or just publicly supportive? Or maybe, they've even publicly said no concessions are deserved for evacuees. "No, I simply cannot change my appointment just because you've had to pack up your family and leave your home. That's not my business!"

We were recently shocked when D's supervisor was REALLY not happy about D working from home on Tuesday, the last extreme fire day. He actually said to D "So does that mean you're not going to be coming to work on days when it's a bit hot outside?" Speechless, when D told me.

It was not as though D was going to miss an important meeting. He works unsupervised inside the office all the time and is at a level at which this is expected. His supervisor has this impression that work just doesn't happen in home spaces. Don't get me started on that little sub-topic or the issue of micro-management...

D didn't feel comfortable leaving me alone with our one year old and the animals to pack up and leave if the situation went the way it had gone three other times in the last three weeks. "Well why don't you just pack up tonight and come to work tomorrow as per normal" his supervisor said on Monday night.

Perhaps he was about to offer us his couch and backyard for 8 animals while we ate him outta house and home. Fat chance.

And the reprimand continued at 8am on Tuesday morning. "Well D, I think I've been flexible enough", he said, "now it's your turn to show some flexibility and come into work. The weather looks fine. It's not even hot". 

Moron. Ever heard of gale force winds and bushfire threat? D was reprimanded yet again about it today. I am beyond pissed off. It has just occurred to him to check to see if the company has a policy... yadda yadda yadda

We all got the VIC Police text messages  on Monday night telling us to be super alert for storm and fire related dangers. Thank goodness the weather that day as well as the preventative planning meant that Tuesday was not as bad as first thought. But I'm sure D's supervisor will take credit.

I am hard pressed to think of an employer who would expect their employees to put work ahead of the safety of their family. But perhaps someone out there can enlighten me...

11 heartbeats seek shelter

On Sunday afternoon our menagerie increased by 4. We picked up chooks and were putting the finishing touches on the chook shed when we heard the Upwey, Tecoma and Upper Ferntree Gully CFA Fire sirens ring. It was hot and blustery: bad bush fire weather.

Despite our single-minded focus on "operation install chooks", I went inside to check the CFA website. There was an Urgent Alert message for residents of Tecoma, Belgrave, Ferny Creek, Kallista and Monbulk to be aware of possible falling embers. Despite Upwey not being named, I guestimated that the fire was no more than about 800 metres away. No brainer... we activated our fire plan.

Not sure why Upwey residents weren't named in the alert given the proximity to the fire...

Anyway, our already packed bags were loaded into the car, laptops and external hard drives, wedding photos and then our family of three plus two dogs, 2 cats and now 4 chooks (still not out of the crates we picked them up in) were all loaded in.

Our good friends who took us in that night didn't know what they were getting themselves in for! As J said, 11 heartbeats arrived for shelter. A lovely meal and jokes about being refugees with credit cards and we were just glad we weren't watching for falling embers.

And the new, now happily settling in chooks, didn't know what they were getting themselves in for either!

A trip to Bunnings to buy a backyard bunker or the Sarah Connor Chronicles of bushfire warfare

DH went to a local fire meeting up here in the Melbourne Dandenongs and came back armed with new information for our fire plan. So we sat down and went over the plan again last night. We realise now that we had not read the CFA “living in the bush” info kit closely enough. Nor had we taken the threat of bushfire quite seriously enough.

We thought our fire plan had to detail either our plan to defend or our plan to leave. And because we live in a multi-level cedar house on the side of a hill with a massive deck we call “the fire platform”, we have always planned to leave and leave early. Our plan is now much more detailed about what our triggers to leave are and we have rules we’ve now set about what we do on Total Fire Ban days.

What we now also realise however, is that a thorough fire plan has to take into account every eventuality, and therefore we have to plan how we would defend the house if we had to. And when I say ‘defend the house’, I really mean how would we use the house and what we have on hand to protect ourselves.

So while we’ll attempt to leave early, we now realise we have to have everything ready to go in case we can’t get out of here in time. This scares me so much that I have to joke around a little… but I’ll get to that.

So to have this house ready to go to fight a fire we need to install at least three water tanks. That’s OK, we wanted them anyway to be able to keep our vegie patch and garden alive.

We’ll also need a water pump that has a diesel generator.

We’ll need at least 4 or 5 outside taps as well as taps off the water tanks so that we have an independent water supply in case the mains fail.

We’ll need an extensive sprinkler system on our roof and deck and before we turn that on we’ll need to have brass fitted hoses and taps, changes to our gutter guards, and downpipe plugs.

We’ll also need a few more buckets and mops as well as some second hand woollen blankets that we can wet to protect ourselves if things get really hairy and a hose fitting inside our house to be able to hose down any fires that breach into the inside of the house.

We’ll have fire bags packed for each family member at the beginning of the fire season (and cat cages and dog leashes ready to go) and in each bag is a pair of long sleeve tops (natural fibres), sturdy boots, bandanas, broad rimmed hats and gloves as well as a change of clothes. Precious belongs are already packed as well.

Before the fire front approaches, we’ll have to patrol the outside of the house with buckets and a mop and put out embers. As the radiant heat becomes too intense we will have to retreat inside to a house that has all windows and blinds closed, all doors buttressed by wet towels and lots of buckets full of water ready to put out fires inside the house.

The fire front usually passes within 20 minutes and as it passes we will need to check outside to start the real bushfire warfare, which is about putting out embers which pose the greatest threat to the house. And that fight lasts up to twenty four hours. That, or we get out of here after the fire front has passed - if that’s possible. The latter is my preference.

I thought we’d be able to go to a nearby fire refuge but DH found out at the local fire meeting that the park down the back of our yard is no longer a refuge as we had thought, so like every other person around here, we’ll be heading down the Burwood Highway, if we can…

This is not the scary bit yet. We’ll have to plan for me to be able to implement this ‘last resort’ plan, by myself, or worse, with my one year old to look after at the same time – not forgetting that we also have two dogs and two cats to think of.

And let’s get real here. We’ll have to hope to hell that we aren’t dealing with a fire like they had in the Kinglake area. Because we won’t stand a chance.

I had to start joking at this point. Call it my weird sense of humour, or maybe my way of coping. DH indicated that we’d need a big box at the backdoor with all the necessary supplies to fight the fire, and as he started listing off all the equipment, an image of a large hidden cache of military weapons came to mind, something in the style of Sarah Connor in Terminator. To pull this off alone, I would need to go into a berserker mode and take a leaf out of Sarah’s book.

To my mind this all seems too scary and out of control. Far fetched even. So it got me to half-joking, half-seriously thinking about a bunker in our backyard.

We’ve all seen movies of paranoid US citizens building bunkers during the cold war in an attempt to survive a nuclear war. I mean the chance of nuclear war was low but the fallout (‘scuse the pun) would have been great. Here we live in a wildfire zone so the chances of fire are fairly high and now we know after Feb 7, 2009, that the effects can be almost as a great as a nuclear bomb.

So we could get an old shipping container, dig it into the slope of our backyard, make it air tight so the fire couldn’t suck out all the oxygen, and create a comfy set up with couches and a wind-up radio and a good stash of vintage wines kept in the cool confines.

Why worry about all this bushfire warfare when you could just lock yourself in a separate backyard bunker as your last resort and then just wait until the fire has passed. I’m sure there’s fire experts out there who will tell me this is a mad idea, but it seemed less far fetched to me than the Sarah Connor approach.

If only we could head down to Bunnings and ask for the aisle where we could buy ‘backyard bunkers’.

Seriously though, in the hour it has taken me to write this, I’ve been sitting on our deck amongst the smoke haze, listening to the Church service on a battery radio for the hundreds that perished tragically in Melbourne’s fires last weekend. Words can’t express how much I feel for those affected.

There is a smokey haze everywhere from the easterly winds blowing this very real reminder of tragedy back towards where we live. We have been without power here, in my part of Upwey, for nearly 20 hours and also in the time I’ve been writing this, the CFA fire sirens in Tecoma, Upwey, and I think Upper Ferntree Gully, have been ringing.

Without power I couldn’t check the CFA website so I rang the Bushfire information line, the batteries on my mobile are almost out and scarily our landline requires electricity to work. Though it was a small fire that is now safe, I can’t help thinking that our best bet is to “get the wuck outta ‘ere” at the first sign of danger so that neither the bunker nor the Sarah Connor Chronicle is required.

The risks and rewards of living in the bush

We live on Melbourne’s urban fringe. Upwey. The old signs coming up the mountain near us used to say “Welcome to the Blue Dandenongs”. We are first home buyers who moved to Melbourne almost 7 years ago having lived in various city and urban areas in NSW and VIC. We felt we had discovered a eucalyptus el dorado when we happened upon the area in real estate pages.

It’s leafy and almost semi-rural and certainly low density urban. We have a tree in our backyard that is about 10 storeys high and would take three of my arm spans to hug … if I was so inclined.

We love it here. People are friendly and down to earth, and public transport and other services are at our backdoor; just a short walk through our back gate to the park and schools. The ‘villages’ up here: Upwey, Tecoma, Belgrave, Sassafras, Monbulk, Kallista and Olinda have a bit of everything that we like and need and we are very happy here, as are our two dogs and two cats, chooks and toddler daughter (I think I can speak for her though she knows nothing else!).

And it’s so affordable to live here. Even taking into account a possible commute into the city on the train, owning your own home in this area is within reach of most families’ budget.

Like anyone who’s passionate about where we live we can’t believe everyone doesn’t want to live here.

We live on a sloping 1300m2 bush block and guests commonly refer to our house as the treehouse. And unlike our friends in the middle and inner suburbs of Melbourne, we feel a connection to the bush that both astounds with its beauty and confounds with its awesome power.

More often though, it’s not nearly as dramatic: we get home from the bustle of work and the city, and step onto the deck and feel a slow peace come back into our lives: the squawk of cockatoos, the laughter of kookaburras and king parrots sitting on our deck railing waiting for some seed. The majesty of the trees all around us. Like I said we love it.

Yet the recent bushfires here in Victoria are a stark reminder that we live in a wildfire zone. Fire is the worst risk we face. Although we are lucky enough to have a fire refuge in the park behind our home, we did get a wake-up call with a recent small fire near us the day that Victoria burned (Feb 7 2009).

The other threat is trees falling on our house or property. Yeah I know what you’re thinking. “Not another urban dweller who moves to the fringes only to want all the beautiful trees around her cleared because she’s paranoid about them falling on her”. That’s not quite it.

We bought this place because we love the trees, but we were a bit green. ‘Scuse the pun. Yeah we are a bit environmentally aware but I actually mean naïve! It was only when an arborist report of a fungal body compromising the same said huge 10 storey high mountain grey in our backyard that we began to realise the risks you face in this place. The tree is beautifully dangerous: it “could completely fail” according to an arborist. If it fails, it will most likely fall on our house, and if that happens our one year old daughter’s bedroom will be the first port of call.

On hot windy nights, like we've had a lot of recently, it is the possibility of this tree crashing through our house and the threat of bushfires, that keeps me awake. And it’s the thought that I might not be able to protect my daughter that really does my head in.

How do you ever really plan for either awful possibility? A few weeks ago when we had four days of over 40 degrees Celsius, at 5 in the morning, we found ourselves already on our feet beside the bed when we heard the immense noise of a huge branch falling from a tree on our block. Luckily it was not the tree we were worried about. But we thought it was about to come through the roof.

We have unfortunately had to apply to our Council through all the usual avenues to have the tree removed, costing us a small fortune in the process. And fingers crossed the Council approves it (no small feat I hear from locals who think the Yarra Ranges Council is more likely to protect native trees than people), so that we can just worry about the threat of bushfires. Speaking of which, our fire plan is a lot more water tight now after our recent revision. Hopefully we won’t have to put it to the test soon.

So to those of you who recently voted that less building should be allowed in bush areas in The Age’s polling pages, I get where you’re coming from. At the same time, if you don’t live in the bush yourself, you don’t quite get it.

What do we expect of the CFA?

It's a tricky business; fighting fires. For the most part, everyone can't stop extolling the virtues of the CFA. But now a couple of days after the tragic loss of life across Victoria as a result of widespread vicious bushfires, the blame game has started and Victorian Premiere John Brumby, has announced the need for a Royal Commission into Victoria's bushfire strategy.

Stories of survival and loss of human life, especially in the Kinglake fires, have suggested that:
1) There was no warning through official channels that a fire was close to these communities;
2) The fire was moving so fast that 'spotting' was taking about 1 minute to cover one kilometre;
3) That those who had fire plans didn't have warning enough to activate them; and
4) That though some people had well prepared fire plans, many who stayed were not able to fight this fire, it exceeded all expectations in terms of its ferocity.

As a result many died trying to protect property while others were quickly overwhelmed by the intensity of the fire and heat and perished in their cars fleeing their burning homes.

The CFA urgent alert messages have emphasised the need to activate fire plans, to either prepare to stay and defend or leave early. The CFA warnings read on local ABC radio have reminded affected communities that as soon as you can see flames it is too late to leave.

After hearing all the stories of near death and loss in Kinglake on Saturday, today when local communities were being told that it's too late to leave, one couldn't help feel that this might be the end of the road for anyone living there: that we were about to see another Marysville or Kinglake all over again.

What seems obvious now is that a Commission will have to reassess these warnings. How they are delivered: could a SMS service be part of the new strategy as well as an air raid siren? Perhaps information on the ferocity and conditions of the fire could be estimated and then communicated succinctly so that it be made clear if a fire is not defendable.

Overall, however, this disaster has raised the more nebulous question of what our expectations are, and should be, of the CFA. Is it realistic to expect them to know the information that would have been so useful to Kinglake residents on Saturday night? To some extent expectations of the CFA are unrealistically high, we almost expect them to be omnipotent. Others might question though whether the CFA, through their education programs, have unintentionally raised expectations of the service to an unrealistic level.

Although a Royal Commission might uncover details of miscommunication or poor logistics - or not, we surely cannot be surprised that in the conditions experienced on Saturday, that systems were not able to cope. And remember these are conditions that we are likely to experience more frequently given climate change predictions.

So what can be learnt then from this tragedy? That perhaps the warning systems could be finessed but most importantly, that individuals need to be better plugged into their local communities, because it is the local social network that saved lives in the dire circumstances of the most ferocious fires this Black Saturday.

CFA not omnipotent

On Saturday, during roaring winds and 46+ degree celcius heat, the national broadcaster, ABC local radio, provided continuous emergency updates. Well known presenter's voices were uncharacteristically high pitched as they read through lists of urgent messages for particular local communities on Saturday afternoon. No sooner had the list been read out then it would need to be read again as new communities faced ember attack. It seemed as though they could not speak their words quickly enough to try and share the crucial information with all that needed it so desperately.

We turned the radio on after we smelt smoke. When we stepped outside we couldn't believe what we saw. Only moments before we had been watching a DVD trying to take our minds off the heat and we hadn't been outside for more than 2 hours. The radio alerts, coupled with the roar of hot wind, brown sky, smoke and heat like I've never experienced, were unnerving.

What should we pack? Should we have already left? Would we be able to get the cats and dogs in the car as well as ourselves and our baby if it was closer than we thought? Were we prepared enough to stay? If we left, what roads should we use? Could we count on our local CFA firefighters to stop the fire near us down the hill?

Sudden confusion set in. I realised in that moment of indecision that we were obviously not prepared. And we were the lucky ones, it turned out to be a small grass fire that was later contained in Upper Ferntree Gully, only one suburb away.

We still had power and felt we needed more info so we looked up the CFA and VicRaods websites. This didn't seem up to the minute enough and was only what we had already heard on the radio. The old fashioned local phone tree kicked in. Texts were sent to neighbours and soon we knew exactly where the fire was and how fast it was moving as well as how many fire crews were in attendance. When it came down to it, this was the information we found most useful and reassuring in helping us make the decision to wait a little longer while we got the house ready and packed.

Perhaps this is the biggest lesson that can be taken from this tragedy, that we have come to think the CFA will be everyone's first port of call and saviour. Really it's the work of all of us to be vigilant in alerting each other to danger. The CFA are not omnipotent, but the wider community comes closer to it.

PS: That night as the temperatures plummeted from 46 to 21 degrees celcius, the bushfires helped put on a beautiful sunset in our neck of the woods, marking the contrast between our lives and those of our fellow Victorians in Marysville and Kinglake.