Winter time is our dry season here in the Clarence Valley. It’s also the time that a lot of farmers burn off their rubbish. Two weeks ago we had a crazy windy weekend that fueled quite a few bush fires. South East Australia had a wintery blast that brought snow to just 2 1/2 hours away from us…but just left us with crazy windy weather.
Our voluntary fire fighter neighbour was the first to alert us to this close encounter. Another neighbour who is a HAM radio enthusiast gave us a real time update of what the fire fighters were doing in great detail (they could hear all the communication going on between the fire fighters…how cool is that!)
The NSW Fires Near Me app was also a great tool to keep up with what was going on and this was the situation: Out of control fires just 9km away in crazy windy weather and the wind was blowing the fire in our direction!
The app showed the fires just 5kms away at one stage. It must have been a spot fire that the firefighters got onto straightaway. Anyway, for quite a few days we had planes and helicopters with monsoon buckets flying over us constantly. It was kind of reassuring…and kind of freaky at the same time.
So our fire plan is to turn on our water pump which pumps water from our dam to a huge tank at the top of our property. The water is then gravity fed down to over 20 taps around our home and gardens. We would turn on all the taps and have our hoses ready to pump water everywhere. Luckily we have a large cleared area around our house so our neighbour advised us that we should have a line around our property that we would be willing to let the grass burn up to and only fight the fires within that line, otherwise we would be using all our energy and resources fighting fires all over the place.
Here’s our water pump that we just put in a few weeks ago. The top right picture shows the old water pump that we used up until then. We had to attach the old tractor to the old pump to get it going, but the old tractor kept dying on us. We inherited the old tractor and the old water pump from the previous owners. It worked, but the new water pump is way more efficient.
Here’s our water tank at the top of our property…and as you can see we are very much in dry season…hopefully we’ll get some rain soon. We’re almost looking like the outback.
As for the bush fire, it never got to us…thanks to all the firefighters. It’s been over 2 weeks and the fire is still going, but under control and has currently burnt 5738 hectares.
Off Grid Maori 