Bushfires and the Australian summer unfortunately go hand in hand, as summer rolls around each year, no matter how much you hope and pray there won't be any bushfires there always is. Growing up here in dairy country where we have irrigation, fires have never really been a worry because a good majority of the farms were always lush and green with summer pastures, but no so much any more. Over the past few years so many farmers have sold up and sold their water leaving a lot of farms dry and abandoned, or now running sheep or beef cattle, so those lush summer pastures that were our buffer zone are now few and far between. Even so I still haven't been overly worried, well at least I wasn't, until a week or so ago when I had a worried friend and neighbour on the phone, voicing her concerns about the dry lightning that was coming in our direction. It was at this point that I walked out my front door and saw the ferocity of the lightning in the not to far off distance. Still not overly worried and secretly really wanting to just grab my camera, I instead came back inside and checked the radar and fire map, and watched on these little virtual maps the lightning slowing make its way towards us and starting fires along its way. It was at this point that the worry set in, our spur had run almost dry from the extreme heat wave we were having, and our pump had blown up earlier that day. We were able to get the pump fixed and pump water from the dam, but the pipe has a hole somewhere and we didn't have full pressure. And thats not to mention the paddocks of dry grass surrounding the house, and a front yard that was dry as a bone and hadn't been mowed in months. Thankfully that night the lightning suddenly stopped about 50kms away and didn't return.
On Friday just gone, there were a few fires up the bush but nothing close enough for us to have to worry about. We were going out to our friends for dinner and I'd just sat down to check the fire map one last time before I turned my computer off, just at that moment my friend rang, and at the exact same time they said it it popped up on the map, there was a fire directly over the road from us. I ran outside and up the drive a bit and there it was as plain as day. Even though it was close the wind was blowing away from us so at this point it didn't pose a threat, but still too close for comfort. We decided to jump in the car and go take a closer look, we got to the end of the road where it was just as the first tanker arrived, so we just pulled over out of the way and watched from where we were. After a little while it became obvious that they would soon have it under control and there was no threat to us, but we still didn't feel like going out while it was still going, so David took the kids home and I hung around on the channel bank out of the way to take some photos and watch the unwelcome excitement unfold. I lost count, but there were at least 6 tankers from around the district turned up to help put it out. I can't thank the CFA volunteers enough for the work they do every summer fighting these seemingly endless supply of fires day after day. I was a bit slow off the mark getting my camera out and they'd already pushed it back into the paddock by the time I started taking photos, but when the trucks first arrived the fire had made it out into the long grass in the side cut where all the trees are.
