reynardo | Tale of the Bushfire

Yesterday at midday the clear sky started to get filled with a large white cloud to the north-west. As the wind is blowing from that quarter, we were a little alarmed.

By 2pm the cloud was dark-red-black and went from north-west to north-east. The wind was driving the fire along the highway to our west. Word began to come through of road and rail closures. We filled all available buckets and the recycling bins, and started thinking about emergency clothing (cotton long-sleeves and long-trousers to protect from embers).

The skyline

Embers are the big worry - the wind is strong enough to drive them from the firefront up to 5 km to start spot-fires. We're 2 blocks from the bush. The important thing in this case is to be ready with water and towels to put them out as soon as they land and try to catch - it's the people not at home that tend to lose in these circumstances. The people directly in the path of the fire are worse off - those houses are exploding. One man has died in his caravan.But as we're not directly beside the bush, even if it firestorms around the next gully we expect embers but not too much more.

We had to fill the water containers early - once the fire gets close the water pressure drops drastically. As it turned out, the power failures meant water pressure got drastically low last night.

By 8pm the sky in the north was an angry red and we had word of Leura and Katoomba North people being told to get ready. (That's about 4 and 6 km to our north-west). At 9pm our neighbour down the road knocked on the door to let us know that the north of our suburb was on fire. We started packing valuables, because as we have elected to stay, if we need to evacuate we'll probably get very little notice. Poor

lederhosen is fretting about his thesis. If I have to, I can have the hard-drives out of the computers in 5 minutes.

At 9.30 we went out to check the sky - and the rain started. Within 10 minutes it was middling-heavy, and the glow to the north had reduced drastically. Soon afterwards the power went out. By 10.30 we reckoned that the immediate danger had passed and that we'd wait until morning to block and fill up the gutters.

Today, the smoke cloud is white (meaning far less intense) but although it's cold enough to need the heater on, the wind is drying the ground and the fire is catching again. Hopefully it's still too far north to get here. Maybe it won't be. We'll stay at alert status until this is over, but I can stop fretting.