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Doreen’s account of the Bush Fires in Australia...
Saturday 28th February 2009
Saturday 7th February was the day the fires really started in Victoria with one major fire about 3 miles away from Cathy & Haydn's farm. It started out as a beautiful cool summer morning, but by 10am the temperature had risen dramatically to about 40c and the wind got very strong very quickly. By 1pm we could see a huge plume of smoke coming over the house, so we started to take turns at walking around the property making sure no fires started from embers. It was too hot to stay outside for long as the temperature had reached 46c. About 3pm there was a terrifying wind change and the smoke was seriously coming our way. The sun was now blocked by the smoke and we donned long trousers and sneakers and activated a fire plan. I packed 1 set of clothes, my passport, plane ticket, camera, purse and a couple of other necessities into my handbag just in case we had to evacuate in a hurry. We spent the next 3 hours outside watching the embers flying onto and over the property and a couple of spot fires started less than a mile away across the paddock and we watched the flames spread down the slope towards us and it got darker overhead. Cathy & I had wet bath towels draped around our shoulders in an effort to keep cool and also to use them on little fires if they started in the very dry grass. The heat and the wind were so fierce that I had to use the towel as a mask to be able to breathe. It was still 43c at 5.30pm and we watched as the fires crews started to get control of the nearby spot fires. About 6.15pm a cool change reached us and the temperature dropped over 20degrees in minutes and the wind changed direction again blowing the smoke and embers away from us. The sky in the distance turned as black as night and we were very glad it wasn't over us. Unfortunately the fires in that direction got much worse. We were able to relax a little and had showers and something to eat. The next morning we had a couple of heavy showers of rain as the news came in about the devastation and we realised just how lucky we had been. I left Melbourne that evening and flew back to Perth with the stories of the fire unfolding by the hour and getting worse. At the time of writing this to you (15 February) the death toll is 180 with over 1800 homes, about 700,000 hectares of land destroyed and hundreds of thousands of native animals lost in blaze. There were some 400 bush fires that Saturday in Victoria with most now under control after a week of cooler weather. The saddest and most difficult thing to understand is that authorities believe that many of the fires were deliberately lit.