I’ve spent every night for the past few weeks trawling classified ads for horse floats. For our budget there are not many available that are big enough for my ridiculously large horses, but we’re on a deadline: the fire season is approaching and we need a way to get the horses to safety. I couldn’t live with myself if I left them behind – and I don’t rate our chance of survival if we stay.
It will be the first bad fire season since we bought the place. After three wet La Niña years, the Australasian Fire Authorities Council is predicting an “increased risk” across much of eastern and central Australia this year. We’re not in the areas coloured red on the map, but the risk remains. As the Victorian and New South Wales fire chiefs told reporter Emily Middleton this month, it’s best to be prepared early.
Growing up, stay or go wasn’t even a question. There were ads on the television with two little cartoon figures: one who calmly stayed within the house and survived the bushfire and one who panicked and ran out into the flames. The public safety campaign that rolled out after the deadly Ash Wednesday bushfires was all about staying put. Of the 75 people who perished in those fires, a number died fleeing in their cars, having left it too late to safely leave. Staying in a house, which is better able to protect against radiant heat, was recognised by researchers as a better survival strategy.
In the early 2000s, our bushfire safety plan was to stay and defend. We had long-sleeved cotton drill overalls hanging by the back door and a fire pump around the back, which we each had to start every summer. We slashed and grazed down the largest paddock, which also had a large irrigation dam, before the height of summer.
When a fire threatened, my job was to run out to take off the fly veils, cut the horses’ tails and open all the internal gates. It happened a few times. The closest was the 2002-03 fires, when a third of Victoria burned and one of the fires was just a few kilometres from our place, over the ridge in the forest behind Eldorado. One particularly bad day, when the water-bombing aircraft were flying back and forth from Lake Sambell, a spear of flame ran up the hill of a neighbour’s paddock, headed for our house. One of the passing planes dumped its full tank and doused it. We thought the main fire had spotted over the hill from 2km away, but it was the neighbour welding in an open shed.
Six years later, on 7 February 2009, we got up at 5am to go into town in shifts. We knew it would be a bad day and wanted someone to be home to protect the house. We listened to ABC radio as Jon Faine did hour upon hour of terrifying talkback from Marysville. I drove to a friend’s 21st that night and saw the Beechworth fire start, racing off towards Mudgegonga. I left the party early; my friend and his family defended their home from that fire the next day. I woke up the next day and was shocked by the report that 14 people had died. We kept the radio on and the number kept climbing.
A few months later, after the royal commission and the inquests, the advice changed. The conditions seen on Black Saturday had broken the scale. A new fire danger rating of catastrophic was created. In catastrophic conditions, the only safe option was to leave early, before the fire started. Because on a catastrophic day, a fire will start. No preparation will keep you safe in such conditions – it’s all down to chance.
The frequency of catastrophic days increased in the 10 years after Black Saturday, culminating in the devastating 2019-20 fires in which 34 people died.
When a rating of catastrophic is issued, all within the affected area are advised to evacuate until conditions have eased. This advice is rarely followed except when enforced with a state of disaster declaration, as Victoria did in January 2020. I was calling people up and down the Gippsland coast in the week before that declaration, asking if they planned to evacuate and without exception they told me they’d stay. Most survived. Their homes did not.
In the Country Fire Authority’s bushfire community survey, 30.9% of Victorians living in high-risk bushfire areas said they would wait for emergency authorities to tell them what to do, 28.6% would stay until they felt threatened and 13.8% said they planned to stay and defend. The CFA’s chief officer, Jason Heffernan, urged people to use common sense.
People think they are using common sense. They’ve absorbed the outdated messages and the lessons learned by a long-ago grassfire. They think they know how to handle it.
But it’s hard to grasp that the fires we’re talking about now are off-the-scale bad. From the accounts of the Sir Ivan fire in the NSW upper Hunter in 2017, where my mother’s family farm burned and my cousins survived thanks to extreme preparation and the fortuitous arrival of the Rural Fire Service, this meant cattle exploding in front of you and thinking you will be next. In Kinglake in 2009 it meant winds that blew the roofs off houses and fires that burned so fiercely “they produced energy the equivalent of 1,500 atomic bombs”. In the Green Valley fire in 2019 it meant a fire tornado that picked up an RFS truck, killing a volunteer firefighter.
The message you hear on the radio every summer is not a platitude. For your safety, you must leave before the fire starts. So we’ll keep looking for a float, lest we stay to become a cautionary tale.
