Fire, possibly arson, on my doorstep

• life

[minor pseudonymising edits during Drupal to hugo migration for all the good that will do now]

Okay, maybe not quite on my doorstep. But it was a big fire. And it was possibly deliberately lit. First I noticed of it was the smoke. Not really that unusual, it’s Australia in summer. It happens.

Then JJ and the kids got home from City Farmers. The kids were terribly excited, rushing in yelling that we have to wake up the baby and get going. JJ came in and asked if I’d noticed the fire. I said I smelled the smoke but otherwise hadn’t been concerned about it, there’s occasionally fires up in the hills.

JJ said on the way to City Farmers the smoke had been pretty thick and the staff nervous. They’d gone in and gotten cat litter, roo meat and layer crumble and he’d been looking for the fire on the way back. Sirens were already on the way there as he was heading back.

We discussed what we would do in a worst case scenario as we minded the plume. A couple of times it loomed threateningly over the house. Other times it veered away towards right of screen. I stalked FESA’s alert page obsessively. We worked out from reading and plotting roughly on Google Maps where the fire was going from aforementioned alerts page that it would miss us, and the more likely worst case scenario was that it would pass close enough that we’d have to mind spot fires.

Still, we shut the cat door to get our cats in, bribed most of the chooks back into the coop, herded in the ones that didn’t go in for food and worked out how to keep them from fleeing JJ’s boot if we had to load them in there. I primed the kids for the absoute worst case scenario, and got them to pack their favourite toys and books into their backpacks and put them in my room in case we had to do a runner.

Our plan was to cram the cats into their crate (they freak out if they’re seperated), cram the chickens into JJ’s boot, throw the dogs in my boot, stuff bags and cat-filled crate into JJ’s car, kids in mine and head down Ranford Rd to either my aunty’s house or farther afield to JJ’s parents’ or sister’s houses, both north of the river. Ranford Rd it had to be either way as there was another fire behind us in Ferndale. We weren’t concerned about that fire itself as it was moving slowly away from us, but we thought it might be tricky travelling that way.

We didn’t pack a bag as from studying the plume we figured we’d be all right. With disaster not imminent I didn’t have to be in deal-with-it mode and felt free to fall apart for a little while. I then talked to the kids about next worst case scenario and about the importance of staying inside the house and making sure the chickens (which we would have moved inside) and the cats and the dogs all stayed inside and didn’t harrass each other too much, as JJ and I would have to be outside patrolling. We also assured them that this probably wouldn’t happen as it looked like the fire was going to miss us entirely but we wanted to be ready in the unlikely event it did happen.

6yo was getting rather worked up and worried about all the terrible things that might happen.

We were all feeling rather antagonistic toward arsonists at this point, though nobody knew for sure whether it was deliberate or accidental, just suspecting deliberate as the one in Roleystone had started/been initially called in at 11:42am and the one in Canning River Regional Park at 12:28pm.

They were two of five fires going almost simultaneously. The poor emergency services personnel would have been stretched.

I checked in on a friend in Camillo who was doing fine aside from the smoke, and there was ongoing Facebook status discussions as I heard about friends who had friends whose houses and critters were getting eaten by the fire. More anti-arson sentiments. I was thinking I wouldn’t be able to sleep tonight til the blaze was under control or at least past us.

Dinner time came round, the kids demanded a barbeque and JJ obliged. The sun set, JJ fed the animals and was out front with the dogs for that long that I walked out to see what he thought of the smoke plume, as I figured he was scrutinising the fire.

We could see the bloody fire.

Photo is not the best as we didn’t bother trying to find the tripod for a proper long exposure shot. Seeing as it was about 3km away give or take, JJ told me to pack a bag which I did, figuring it would be better to have it and not use it than not have it and need it. We weren’t on any evac list so while we were more worried by this point, we still planned to not go anywhere.

Over the course of the night I, too paranoid to sleep, kept checking the fire, and was certain it was getting duller. This meant the firefighters were winning or the fire was going back over the hill. We hoped for the former but was glad it seemed to be moving away from us at any rate, and away from my friends in Camillo.

FESA’s 11:35pm update said the fire is still uncontrolled and unpredictable but’s slowed down (moving at 200m/hr in several directions instead of “fast” in one direction), is 3m high rather than over the rooftops, and spot fires are starting 100m ahead of it rather than 4-500m. The cause determined from preliminary investigations by them and WA Police was accidental from a person using a grinder.

Be careful with power tools that can cause sparks in a country notorious for bushfires, people.

I just checked and all I can see of the fire is a bright spot on the hill. More sirens just screamed past. Hopefully they’re doing alright out there. Thank you firefighters, I think I can sleep now.

This work by ryivhnn is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License