Wooroloo Bushfire First Days

It’s been a tough 48 hours, I spent Monday setting up hoses, pumps and wetting down the house and gutters.

Watched the fire advance as a narrow column of smoke, then it hit Noble Falls Reserve and changed to a huge bushfire. The west flank advanced towards us down into the valley at Preedy Road, then up our property towards the house.

We stopped the fire an inch from the house and spent hours wetting down the walls to cool from radiated heat. Then spent all night and the next day patrolling and wetting gutters and decking repeatedly covered in embers. The wind was unbelievably strong from the south east constantly blowing embers from the burnt bush onto the house.

Tuesday was blacking out around the house and removing burnt debris. Got a good sleep in our temporary safe refuge, TSR, last night in the pool area. Smoke inside the house still thick but dissipating, no power so no cooling or forced ventilation so staying in our pool area camp.

Power is long gone, our transformer is lying at the side of the road with a pole on top. Cable lying on the road. Probably be a month or more without power. We have been lucky, house saved, lost all our fencing and plastic liner on dam, macadamia orchard cooked, water tanks scorched, in addition to power supply infrastructure destroyed.

Strange feeling being in the middle of a disaster zone, usually only seen on TV. It’s not knowing what is happening, no wifi, Telstra towers down, landline cable melted.

The scary moment was at 6 pm Monday evening. The fire was at the house, suddenly all the aerial support across the valley stopped, it was dead quiet except for the pump and the roaring fire. We were alone.

I was standing on the verandah of the pole home, the fire was below me and couldn’t see because of the smoke, couldn’t breath but kept blindly plying water down on where I thought the fire was. I was lucky the smoke cleared for 10 seconds and I managed to kill the fire at the house. Many friends and neighbours have lost houses, everything gone.

We were lucky. We stayed and defended, didn’t expect help and didn’t get any. The Fire Brigade resources were limited, and were busy fire fighting on the fire front. We were the forgotten west flank. If we had taken the DFES advise and left the house and shed would have gone.