Forest Fires Update

Lots of people have emailed me this past week asking about the fires, and checking that I survived and got though them without the house burning down.

Yes both the house and I survived. But only just

The fires burnt the bushes at the end of the garden, and the house was full of smoke for almost a week. One night, when the fires were at their worst, I stayed up all night to keep spraying the house with water, and putting out the small fires made by flying ash and embers. Then I had to stay alert for most of the next day too, just to make sure that the situation didn’t get too dangerous. People who have lived here over 60 years have said they’ve never known anything like it before, and never been so frightened.

In the end I even profited from the situation, getting hired for a day by a Sunday newspaper I used to freelance for. Not that I could do much work because the road into town was blocked by huge boulders, and fallen burning trees which had crashed down the steep slopes and the cliffs onto the road.

Here’s a pic I took for the paper, looking down towards the town. It’s a bit hard to see them, but in the bottom right corner of the photograph there are the first of the houses down in the town, and the fire is dangerously close to them.

Here’s a larger copy of the photograph. It’s quite beautiful really, for something so dangerous. A bit like some women I used to know

Anyway, it’s all over now. It rained heavily a couple of nights ago and seems to have killed the last of the small fires which were still smoking. So back to work.

phil

Tagged as: bush fires qld, dangers of working from home, forest fires qld, mt archer fires, rockhampton fires