This is the third post in a series on the bushfire. Start with the first post here.

Still unsuccessfully chasing sleep, my phone dinged at 5:06am with a message from the local RFS call out officer: FIRE REPORTED AT BUMBALONG. Here we go. Into my gear, no time to go to the fire shed, out to the farm Jeep with the fire trailer hooked up and on the way to find it. I wasn’t even 100m out of the driveway when our neighbour Kim came in over the UHF, “they’re overreacting, it’s in the Naas Valley over the back but it’s not here yet. You better go and wake up John and Julie though, now is the time for them to get their horses out”.

The Bumbalong valley was coordinating over UHF channel 26 and text messages . We had taken turns completing scheduled spot fire patrols overnight, as we had for previous nights when we were under threat. Kim had arranged for a briefing at 9:00am.

Before the briefing C and I worked through the last elements of our fire plan. I blocked the forklift tine gaps in the base of our shipping container with gravel. We raked, shovelled and hoed a bare earth perimeter around the small one-bedroom studio next to our house and moved our indoor ragdoll mouse deterrent cat named Killer into it. Our old house was vulnerable to embers and we were expecting it to be gone by the end of the day, so we relocated anything important to the smaller, less flammable and more defensible studio.

In no time it was 9am and we went next door to Kim and Helen’s place for the briefing. Kim and Helen had prepared A4 topographic maps with gridlines marked so RFS standard grid referenced locations could be provided. They distributed these along with a map showing who lived in each property and whether the occupants were staying or going. Kim briefed us on the weather conditions, the fire spread prediction and the resources around.

Historically, small fires in the valley had been extinguished by a ragtag assembly of converted trailers and old trucks sporting improvised water tanks and petrol water pumps. This time though every property was at risk so it was agreed that we all needed to defend our own properties during the ember attack and main fire front. We would check on each other after. With some humour to dilute the slowly rising sense of terror, the Bumbalong Renegade Brigade dispersed to face what was now called the Clear Range fire.

Stan and Charlie arrived at our place just after the briefing finished. We caught up for a couple of minutes and then stepped through the plan for the day; the situation, our mission and objectives, the execution, communication and safety. This was not a time for ‘she’ll be right’. I assigned a role, area, equipment and objective to each person. We walked around the structures and identified the lines we would try to prevent the fire from crossing. We identified vulnerabilities and safety hazards.

The column of smoke rising behind our place was darkening. The wind was light but chopping from north west (bad) to the north (less bad). The fire was within a couple of kilometres and external sources of information were lagging well behind what we could see ourselves.

Stan and I drove a couple of minutes down the road to a ridge that provided a view of the whole valley and the Clear Range. We needed to see if the fire had crested over the range three kilometres to the west and would communicate this to the valley on UHF radio.

From the ridge we could see the fire had crested the Clear Range at the southern end. It would be heading towards Mick and Karen’s place first so we called them to pass on that bad news and we radioed the valley with an update. Then, we returned to our place.

Like the morning of an exam, there was really nothing more we could do . The test was set and imminent. It would meet our preparation, skill and resilience and destroy anything found lacking. The brutality of the fire and its sheer destructive force was amplified by its erratic behaviour in dry country with steep topography and poor weather conditions. We had ample opportunity to get a sense of this as it approached.

The pumping column of white, grey, black and now increasingly orange smoke furthered its dominance of the sky in all directions but the north, towards Canberra.

Sometime around 11:30am two RFS trucks drove past our gate and turned into Kim and Helen’s place. As they arrived over there a spot fire ignited just below Kim and Helen’s dam. One of the crews saw the fire and raced over to put it out. As far as these things go, that was great timing. They quickly got on top of the fire and then drove up to us. The truck was part of a strike team from up near Lake Macquarie.

I briefed them on our fire plan, the hazards around our place, water sources and our objectives. We chatted as casually as we could. Then, we could see the fire on the ridge just behind our house and on the ridge behind Kim and Helen’s place. It was about 450m away.

I started to see kangaroos and wallabies escaping the bush and heading downhill to the river.

In conversation with the RFS crew it became apparent that the RFS plan for the day was to hold the fire at the Monaro Highway east of us. We were the cannon fodder between the fire and the highway. The Monaro Highway that is surrounded by thousands of acres of African Lovegrass, a tussocky grass so flammable that it’s the subject of RFS awareness campaigns in the area. It seemed unlikely they would achieve their objective.

Around 20 minutes after the truck arrived I heard the crew leader’s portable radio squawk with a call from Fire Command. They were being reassigned to a grass fire somewhere. Both trucks departed leaving us, Kim and Helen and everyone north along Downstream Road without RFS support for asset protection.

We were on our own but that’s what we had prepared for. Looking back through the handful of photos that I took shows the colour changing in the smoke column and finally thick black-red smoke dominating the entire sky. At that stage, the winds were moderate and swinging to the north from time to time which meant the fire progressed slowly in our direction, trickling down the slopes. At 1:15pm the flames were around 300m away.

Things changed rapidly. The wind picked up from the west and the sound was a foreboding announcement of the fire front’s imminent arrival. It was the sound of air induction on an enormous scale. A jet engine powered freight train. The sound of the fire inhaling.

I watched as a bird flew high on a path that would take it directly overhead. It flapped its wings urgently and continually as its trajectory curved sickeningly towards the earth. It thudded into the ground, dead, a few metres away.

The sizeable east-west valley behind Kim and Helen’s place is a prominent feature in the crinkly topography of the Clear Range. Under these conditions the valley funnelled the wind, and it channelled the fire front and spat it out on top of us all. The spot fire in lovegrass north of our driveway reignited and in the darkness I remember seeing the flames race across the front of our place, easily jumping the driveway, streaming down into the gully below our dam and travelling parallel with the road.

It was out of control in seconds and then spreading up toward the house and into our refuge area. The refuge area had grass mown to a centimetre long and was surrounded by a bare mineral earth containment line. It housed two thousand litres of water and our vehicles. It was now alight. That part of the plan did not survive the first minute of the fire front. But that’s the things with plans, nothing ever goes to them exactly and you need to plan to adapt. And we did.

I yelled to Stan ‘vehicles, vehicles’ and we ran down to the now flaming refuge area to move them. C’s car was closer to the house and further from the flames but the fire got there quickly. Stan went back to put out flames underneath C’s car with a wet mop.

While this was happening the fire was moving through the grass up behind the house and the bush further up the hill. It was as black as night and hot as balls.

We returned to positions. I relocated to my area, the shed. The shed was priority two, porous to embers and full of fuel, solvents, lead acid batteries and all my tools and equipment. I couldn’t ask anyone else to defend such a sketchy area. The studio was priority one and C and Charlie were down there actively defending the studio from fire a few metres away coming from the north and north west. The house, being almost indefensible was priority three but needed a superhuman if we were going to save it. Stan was on the house. If it sparked up and burnt down he was going to fall in with me at the shed, provided C and Charlie had the studio sorted.

The Jeep and fire trailer were on a bare mineral earth track near the shed thirty or so metres from the house, pointed downhill towards the carport. I had a hose out trying to get on top of the grass fire moving rapidly from north to south behind the house towards the shed. The erratic wind swung around to the west and gusted, sending the fire downhill towards the house. A few seconds later the wind swung back to the north sending a wall of embers, smoke and flames directly into me. The heat hit with force and I had to move the vehicle or lose it. I dropped my hose and retreated towards the Jeep. I couldn’t see and I was breathing deep lungfuls of acrid black gritty smoke.

I got into the Jeep, looked out the windscreen and I couldn’t see anything, it was all black smoke and a foreboding yellow glow. I turned on the headlights, nothing but smoke. I had to move, urgently, so I rapidly drove by feel until I saw the carport come into view a few metres away. I parked the Jeep on the dirt pad there and I went back out and got on the end of the hose. The fire had jumped the containment line around the back of the house and was burning in short mown lovegrass. C and Charlie were doing an incredible job keeping it under control around the studio. Stan was dealing with embers swirling around the front and back of the house, getting in between the gaps in the deck.

I extinguished the grass fire to the north of the road between the shed and the house. I moved the Jeep back up near the shed and checked inside. It was pitch black, I had to get my phone torch out to look around. At least that meant there wasn’t anything on fire and incredibly with the fire metres away on 3 sides, the shed was still ok. I took the opportunity to quickly swap from the pitiful P2.5 paper mask to a proper respirator mask.

I think it was then that Stan asked me for Zip-Ties. He quickly explained that he needed them to fix a hose, the only 18mm hose he had to defend the house. In the middle of this hostile environment he was able to communicate the solution he needed and the urgency. I quickly found a few zip ties.

As the main fire front took hold, I heard a call for help over my handheld UHF on channel 25, the local RFS channel. It was Helen next door calling for urgent assistance. It was harrowing to hear her call something to the effect of “where are the trucks, we’re burning here, the fire is coming from all directions. We need help, the valley is burning” A response came back from someone in the RFS “is anyone’s life in danger?”.

What do you bloody reckon?

That must have triggered the beginnings of a response because not long after we heard a senior RFS member absolutely ripping into a Crew Leader. The Crew Leader had phoned Cooma Fire Command directly to request more resources to the valley. The senior member angrily told him “you don’t do that, you go through me”. The resources never came.

Not long after I heard Tony on the UHF. Tony lives about 1km north of us. “Where are the trucks, where are the trucks?, it’s gone my house is gone.”

Tony had been 4km from his place at the river running a Community Fire Unit trailer, filling up fire trucks. As the fire front moved through the trucks took the water and left the valley towards the highway. Tony tried to return to his house but a stand of huge poplar trees were on fire along the road preventing him from getting back to his place. When he did get back, there was nothing left.

Through the flames and pitch blackness we heard explosions echoing up and down the valley. Some thumping loud, others distant and reverberating. Then a too close for comfort ka-boom. I looked south in the direction of the shock. Our neighbour Mik’s place three hundred metres away to the south was well alight. Flames were pouring out the windows five metres into the air. I put my head down and thought of Mik in town recovering from heart bypass surgery. It was beyond hope for his place.

Down the hill from our shed to the south of the house are two huge gum trees and just south of them is a gully that runs down to our dam. The fire was moving through that gully and either spotted or ran from south to north up under the southernmost yellow box.

A few months before Essential Energy contractors had lopped off five or six large limbs and left them piled up a few metres from the base of this tree. I’d been cutting and stacking the timber for firewood but there was still a pile about three metres in diameter left. That was well alight and fire was moving up into the tree.

As I approached from the north the wind was at my back pushing much of the heat and smoke away. I got some water on the base of the fire and made ground. The heat that had been holding me back subsided slightly and I moved closer as parts of the fire were extinguished. I took another step forward and a strong gust of wind came from the south, the opposite direction. Embers and flames surrounded me and I stumbled backwards. Embers were in behind my goggles. I staggered back, regrouped and started again from the south this time, with the wind at my back. I made some progress before the wind violently swung around again and I copped another face full of embers and heat. With the wind chopping and changing by the minute putting out this pile was turning into a tough ask.

I noticed the water pressure in my hose dropping and saw Charlie coming over with the big seventy-metre-long, eighteen-millimetre diameter hose. Bloody marvellous, things must be under control over at the studio. C brought my helmet over, concerned a branch would fall on my head. We could hear trees and branches falling in the bush around us every few minutes. Charlie and I worked to extinguish the pile of timber and then Charlie focussed on the burning tree and I went back up the hill to work out what was going on with the fire trailer pressure.

As I did my fire hose got caught in a roll of poly pipe. While I faced this irritating but normally surmountable inconvenience, I realised my cognitive capacity had dwindled to the point of stupefaction. I registered this, at least, and looked down towards Charlie not far away near the chicken coop. This large man having extinguished the tree was cradling a chicken, patting its singed bum saying you’ll be alright.

It was still dark, everything around us was alight. I got the tangle out and moved over to the fire trailer. It was low on water but not completely empty. Doesn’t explain the drop in pressure I thought, but I need to fill it up anyway. I started reeling in the hose and gallant early efforts to reel that thing in rapidly gave way to meagre attempts. It may as well have been attached to an ocean liner headed for New Zealand. C saw this, came over and gave me a hand to pull that boat in.

With the hose secured I drove down to the refuge area and started to work through the task of refilling the fire trailer from the cubes. C brought down the only sugary drink we had, a bottle of tonic water, and a wet tea towel. The sugar in the tonic water, a few words from C and the wet towel on my neck saw cognition and optimism return.

I finished filling the tank and the wind started to pick up again, flipping back and forth and we saw a big willy-willy moving from north to south and crossing the driveway. We had performed well but it wasn’t over yet. The fire was still creating its own weather.

Flames four metres high told us that the building materials and lovegrass just south of the shed had lit up. With the studio and house area now surrounded by black earth and mainly out of immediate danger it was incredible to have Stan and Charles to help get on top of this. The fire trailer pump was rapidly dying but held on long enough to get us in the clear.

We continued to put out the larger fires near the structures and it wasn’t until 3:15pm and a thousand years later that we paused to regroup, taking in some food and water. It looked like we had made it through.

The power pole in the paddock was on fire so after a short break Stan and I thought we’d better go and put that out. If it fell, the power lines would have fallen onto the shed. The lines were live at that point, but we lost power not long after. Putting the power pole out was the last gasp for the fire trailer pump. We still had one petrol pump left at the house but with a little island of dry lovegrass around the house and everything else burning, there was no way we were moving that pump.

The power pole fire was out and the main threat had passed so we sat on the front deck, incredibly somehow still there, and exchanged stories. As we talked we watched our front gate burn to the ground without the water, pump or energy to do anything about it. Everything was still on fire, just not quite as much as before.

The strike team crew from earlier came back up the road. We learnt that they’d driven back in past Charlie and Danielle’s family gathering property thirty years in the making burning to the ground, past Tom’s weekender which was completely destroyed and stopped near Mik’s still burning pile of former house just down the hill from us. The counsellor that happened to be on the crew asked the driver to stop so he could prepare the rest of the team to find our corpses.

They talked that through and then continued up the hill. As they crested the rise they saw us sitting on the front deck, spent but alive. We were there sitting down in a different frame of mind, full of relief and elation at having made it through. I got up to greet them and as I shook his hand I asked the crew leader, ‘are we having fun yet’? He looked at me ashen faced. I looked around and the crew had tears in their eyes. They said that they cheered in the truck when they saw us, because they thought maybe they wouldn’t.

We chatted for a few more minutes and they left. They probably passed a conspicuously out of place vehicle on the way out because not long after that, through the smoke and flaming gate, emerged a silver Corolla with an orange mirror. A Go-Get car. It was my younger brother Matt who had driven down from Sydney to lend a hand as part of a negotiation to stop our mum from coming over to help fight the fire. “Don’t you go mum, I’ll go”. He’d talked his way through two roadblocks and brought news of the fire along both sides of the Monaro highway. He said now everyone knew about Bumbalong, it was all over the radio. We didn’t know at the time, but an SBS crew were also broadcasting from down the road towards the highway.

With a fresh reinforcement on site, Stan and Charlie returned to their families in Canberra. I double checked for embers under the house and in the roof cavity, all clear. We touched base with neighbours. They were still kicking.

Text messages from friends, work colleagues and acquaintances had gone unanswered during the fire while we had our hands full. Too exhausted to text, we responded by sending a photo of C, Charles, Stan and I still alive and smiling in front of black paddocks, smoke and charred trees.

Matt helped us put out what we could within the reaches of our hoses and stayed up all night while we tried to get some sleep, he was watching a tree burn behind the shed. It was burning in the base of the trunk and when it burnt through it had the potential to fall into the shed. There were burning logs rolling down the hill through the night and we could see and hear trees and limbs falling with a crack, an earthy thud, and a shower of embers that threatened to ignite anything that had not yet burned.

Needless to say, sleep was still hard to come by.