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.