Bushfire.

2AM

Don bursts into my room and flicks the light on. My first reaction is to think “OH S%#T I’ve slept in three hours late and he’s going to shoot me now.” I was sort of half in and out of consciousness and then I heard the words “blah blah blah blah BUSHFIRE….” Then I woke up.

It’s amazing how one word can spike your adrenaline so high so quickly. Something so serious that the simple mention of it is enough to clear any other thought in your head.

There were two fires in Dneiper that had apparently started when someone hit a kangaroo, flipped their car then escaped and tried to make a fire to keep themselves warm in the night. The first one was fairly small and didn’t spread that far. The second one started as a kilometer long and got big enough to spread to the neighbors property.

We took a little longer to get ready than I thought we might on first hearing that there were fires raging out of control on the property but you have to consider that we have to make sure that we have absolutely everything we could possibly need to fight the unknown. We loaded 400 liter tanks with spray motors on the backs of the utes and got the grader ready and left by 4:15.

By the way a grader is a GIANT tractor thing that has a big blade on the bottom of it that drives across open bush and leaves behind it a perfectly flat dirt road as if by magic. And it happens to be a more useful firefighting tool than water. Fire can only spread if it has something to spread to. So the idea is to make a new road around the perimeter of the fire and to actually start fires around the inside edge of the fire side to burn away all the possible fuel for it. Then you just let it run its course and use the water to take care of any places where the fire is out of control or might jump the road.

Those two sentences comprised my 20 hour work day on Saturday. Actually part of it was spent pushing 40 massive bales of hay out of the top of a road train but that part was much less interesting that the fighting fires bit.

We started off for dneiper at 4:15 but then halfway through the grader got a flat tire. Something that doesn’t happen too often I don’t think. by 6 we had gone to the neighbors place and gotten a new tire (which are f__ing heavy let me tell you) and had started to change it. Don had a road train coming in to deliver hay in the middle of the night; it was actually the truckie that reported the fire in the first place; and while they fixed the flat I spent the next few hours unloading hay and gathering supplies and recruits from the homestead. By the time that I got to the first fire it was pretty much out. There was a new road around the perimeter and the whole inside was toatally burnt out, except weirdly enough, for the trees. It looks very weird to see just dirt and ash and flaming embers dotted sporadically by perfectly normal looking trees but that’s sort of what the aftermath looks like. The trees here must have evolved to live with the common occurrence of bushfires.

We spent a while patrolling the edges of the fire and shoveling dirt on the places where there was still open flame and smoke by the new road. The flipped car that was the origin of the fire looked the part. There were river flows of melted metal and glass that had cooled running out of the car. There was just nothing left but the siding and the frame. Luckily there was no one in the car, but unluckily they weren’t so good at watching campfires. Mopping up the first fire was exciting at the time but that was the most boring bit of the day compared to what came later.

After a very quick lunch we met up with Don, Masa and the grader that had just started making a road around the second fire. The plan for this much bigger and out of control fire was to start burning back at it from the inside of the perimeter road. We would do this with a thing called a firebug. It’s a can filled with a mix of diesel and petrol and a long long dripper with a flame on the end. You tip it down and a stream of flaming liquid drops out. And let me tell you, you have never seen a fire start so quickly. It has to do with the terrain more than the equipment. We dropped one match on the ground and absolutely instantly three bushes were two feet high in flames. When the firebug tips it lets out these tiny glowing blue dots that you seen hang in the air for a second and the instant even one of them hits a patch of grass, the whole thing goes up.

And so our convoy started into the bush. The grader in front, making a road, followed slowly by a ute with someone hanging off the side spreading fire to the inside perimeter, followed by a ute with a water tank on the back to put out any trees that might fall across the road or what not, followed by me in my own ute driving back and forth from the end of the convoy back to the beginning monitoring the whole situation and the state of the flames and directing the water ute if needbe. And so it went for several hours making a miles long road around the fire.

The fire is sort of less impressive than you might think it would be at first glance. “Bushfire” calls to mind towering 100 ft. walls of spiraling hellfire, but in real life from where we were making the road it was hard to tell that anything was happening apart from the clouds of black smoke rising from the other side of the hill. But I saw plenty of the danger from it in the fires that we started with the firebugs. One tiny bit of grass would be happily burning, minding its own business, then a small breeze would push by and like spilling water the fire would just move out onto everything the wind brought it to. And quickly it would eat everything 5, 10, 15, then 20 meters from the road and we could only see the flames working their way away from us and a charred ashen field between. Then the grader blew a gasket.

The grading and controlled burn had gone without a hitch, and we had surrounded the down wind side of the fire already and were just about to start working on the other half of the perimeter luckily, so we didn’t need everyone. And Don sent most of us back home. They had all been giving it their all and Masa and Ji had gotten up with Don and I at 2 AM so they had a well earned end to the day, But a chosen few stayed back to finish the job. Don, myself Chloe and Celine kept fighting for another few hours and it only got more intense after dark. This time I was on firebug duty, and I don’t know what the guys were doing with it during the day, but at night it might as well have been a flamethrower. During the day thwy would roll along and little fires would pop up here and there behind them; at night we were rolling along and I would watch the little blue dots fly out of the firebug and lite up the grass, then look back only a few meters to see an entire hillside on fire. Flaming trees falling, towering walls of smoke, everything, nothing but flames all down the road we just came from. And I started it all.

The rest of the perimeter went ok until the last hundred meters or so when Chloe and Celine in the follow-up ute got bogged in the sand just as the flames were licking up and were right in the path of all the smoke. We managed to tow them out just in time for the neighbor to show up and help finish the last hundred meters. All in all I worked 20 hours straight. But I have to say that I felt good every second of it. You might think that you would feel tired, and I could tell that my body was getting fatigued (especially from those stupid hay bales and hanging onto the side of Don’s ute) but my mind was ready to go as long as it needed to to get the job done. It’s the kind of thing where if you stop for even a second you won’t be able to start again but if you keep going you can go until you drop. Of course I didn’t feel tired until I was partway through the drive home, causing it’s own problems, but at least there wasn’t any fire around.

All in all the technique worked very well. I drove back today and checked on it and found just ash fields of what had been before grassen prairies and hills. Just black and grey. I have to say that this has been the most amazing thing that I have ever been a part of. I mean just watching the raw power of the bushfire puts you in shock. But it is a great feeling working in such a great team as we had and everybody working and doing what needs to be done to make sure that we win the fight. You don’t really notice how long you’ve been up for or how many snickers bars you ate instead of a proper lunch, you just do what needs to be done. And everyone that Don sent home was fighting to try to stay and keep going even Masa and Ji who had been up as long as Don and I so props to everyone on their hard work. We won the fight with no mistakes. Delmore:1 Fire: 0

And now it’s back to fighting steers.