We went to town this morning, and came home about 2pm to be met by a fire truck at our gate. You have 2 hrs to evacuate but that could change any minute. Fire is moving fast and we can't get to it from the ground until it gets here!! Very little smoke around and when we asked how far away it was and where was it they couldn't tell us!! they were told by command to door knock and tell every one evacuate or do their fire plan but didn't know much about the fire. Talk about a comedy!!
Anyway Ray and Janet were here so they packed up their fiver and skeddaddled out of here. They were heading down to Freo tomorrow so just left a bit earlier than planned.
We packed up our little van and hooked it onto the ute ready to go and the wind changed again then the thunder that that been playing around decided to get a bit more serious and along with lots of lighting sent us some rain!! Not a lot but enough to either put out the fire or calm it right down. All the fire trucks that were lined up by our gate waiting for the fire to come over the hill have packed up and gone. (bush too thick to get appliances into the fire area, bombers were doing their thing though)
Anyway we are still here, ready to run if we need to but all is good here.
we're in Northam at the moment and we got a really black sky from early arvo and it just stayed like that till about 4pm, then we got a very slow moving front that bought a heap of long, loud, rumbling thunder, heaps of lightening, very strong gusty winds but only a little rain which wouldn't have been more than 20 mins of falling water all up. Probably only got a couple of mm of rain. But hopefully it was enough to put out any fires caused by the lightening. It stopped about 7.30pm and all calm now.
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Cheers Bruce
The amazing things you see when nomading Australia
for those of you not in the general WA area of Gingin, they showed the damage done from yesterdays storm. It was mainly caused by the storm itself, not the fire. Houses were completely knocked down by the winds and one poor guy had his long run tin roof buried into a tree stem about 500m away from his house. Some huge plastic cool houses and the blue berries inside were completely trashed. No-one hurt thankfully
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Cheers Bruce
The amazing things you see when nomading Australia
All is good here now. Ended up with about in inch of rain over 24 hrs so that dampened things nicely. We missed the wind storm fortuneately (or it missed us!!) . Haven't seen any news reports or read the papers so don't know exactly what area where the damage occurred is. According to the shire there are still some smouldering logs which may cause a flare up but fingers crossed there is nothing to burn near them and they will just burn themselves out.
Think we are in for a long summer of fires!! (and summer hasn't got here yet). Unfortunately living in a rural area fires are just another factor of life on the land, be as best prepared as possible and run before it gets too bad. Things are replaceable, people aren't is our motto so get the hell out while it is safe to do so. We are very fire aware.
