Firefighting Equipment (ie we're not here to copulate with spiders you know)

We've been accumulating fire fighting gear now for so many years. Every major fire that gets near, we reassess the gear, the plans, the age of us both, and we tweak and tweak and tweak. This year we're expanding the automatic sprinkler systems, with a view to eventually installing a full on roof version (finances are limiting what options we have at the moment - have you SEEN the cost of farm insurance recently!)

Right now the gear stands at:

PPE for us both - his is obviously CFA gear / mine's purchased.

Firefighting gear laid out on the back deck ready to grab and run

Then we've got three backpacks - two solid ones, and a softer, more pliable beastie that's a bit easier to get on. These are used to fighting ember attacks and small fires around the house and are kept full and ready to get on quickly.

We only aim to save the house and the immediate outbuildings. All the farm animals are moved into the house yard - nobody needs a garden, everybody needs a pet pig, alpacas, goats and sheep. 

The poultry tend to be mostly kept locked up on days that WE think are a bit dodgy. They have sprinkler systems through their yards / the walkways around them that are automatically temperature triggered.

Generator's are stored on pallet racks so we can pick them up and deploy as required.

We've got multiple generators, and the battery system that the house runs on - so the generators are deployed on pumps, power guzzlers like the cool room and anywhere else we think needs protecting on the mornings of any days that WE think are going to be bad so they are in place if we need them.

Pallet tank at the back of the house yard.

One of the pallet tanks sitting at the front of the house

Second pallet tank at the end of the house

Dotted around the house yard we've got various pallet tanks, with fittings that one of our fire pumps can connect straight up to. Worst comes to worst these can flood the area as well.

Old farm ute with a fire fighting unit including pump, extinguishers, hoses and water supply on board.

The firecart is forklifted onto the ute at the start of the season and we leave it parked in the shed most of the time - which makes the run to the local town to pick up feed a right pain in the rear, but at least we can roll that out quickly. On days where WE think the threat is bad we position the ute in relation to incoming wind.

Firefighting cart with its own pump, hoses and water supply sitting at one of the paddock entrances from the house yard.

The second fire cart sits at the front of the house / south-west sector of the property - it's a right pain to move in a panic and mostly goes behind the tractor (which is another story at the moment), so it sits in place. We can reach a fair distance with the gear on it.

Not pictured is the 22,500 litre tank around the back that's sequestered from all other use - just for firefighting or the firefighting pump on a standalone cart that we can move quickly as needed.

Everything's got CFA fittings on it, everything started regularly, maintained, checked.

Anything that's electric has some sort of backup and isn't part of the "core plan".

The house is protected from extended power loss by the battery bank. The air con's only turned on if a) we've got enough water and b) there's nothing flying about in the air.

We monitor the boundaries half hourly, checking for signs / smell of smoke / people behaving oddly / header's running / dust going up / wind directions / speed / temperature.

We don't leave the place on days where it's warm, windy, dodgy. Everything's also monitored by a network of cameras so we can see if something's amiss (and I don't just mean those blasted foxes - which are around in plague proportions at the moment).

Did the Weather Bureau really just mention Western Victoria and Drought in the same sentence....

Of course it was probably my imagination, I can't find the specific reference anywhere, but I'm sure I saw, in Ballarat's The Courier, a mention of Western Victoria and Drought.

Not "rainfall deficiency" / not "dry" but actual drought. They used the word. I was so shocked and surprised I forgot to bookmark the report. Not shocked about the drought bit - we're living it. Profoundly shocked that somebody in Melbourne had dragged out an atlas and a compass and figured out there was a "west" in Victoria. I guess it's possible somebody got lost on a driving holiday to Gippsland but even then, it's a big detour and it must have come as a hell of a surprise for most people to discover a) there is Western Victoria; and b) it's a bloody big area. Imagine how amazed they are going to be if they find out how much of their grain comes from out here. 

But looking at:

https://www.afac.com.au/docs/default-source/bushfire-seasonal-outlook/spring-2024/afac-seasonal-bushfire-outlook_spring-2024.pdf

The seasonal bushfire outlook is suggesting we're all gonna die.

No. Shit. Sherlock.

We're going into this summer with a yearly rainfall of 492.6mls (up to November). That's, what, slightly more than half of 2023 when we got 805.9mls. Which was around 2/3rds of 2022, which was around 2/3rds of 2021 and on it goes. The hassle with those last few years was also that what we got tended to come in massive downpours which caused flooding, washed out fences and chaos. And little of it into tanks or dams. 

So we find the idea of "average yearly rainfall figures" a great steaming pile of bullshit - unless they are spreading it over 50 years - in which case we might pay attention.

But we've been buying in water for animals now for so many years I can't remember when it started (and trust me - that's unbelievably expensive compared to what city people pay in water rates - it's eye-wateringly (if we had any) expensive). We've managed to avoid house water buy ins so far, mostly by not using water in the house. We have shower's that are < 1 minute (we use a watersaver on the shower that means we can turn the water on and off with a paddle attachment). This year we've done that all year round, normally we give ourselves a couple of minutes under the shower in winter but not this year. Which was interesting because when it's as dry as this its also frosty and bloody freezing. But combine that with minimal laundry (god I laughed at somebody on the radio a while ago suggesting it wasn't hygienic to not wash pillowslips every day... I mean ffs!), and minimal everything else and we sort of stagger through most years. Which is a hassle because the main aircon is evaporative so we cook frequently overnight because of the complicated use case required to justify turning it on. We've also had some help from the conditions and the gardens and orchards are pretty well gone now.

But this year you can really see the carnage. We've got dead gumtrees all around - not just in the bush but on the property and road verges. There was a tiny bit of grass growth when we had the single down pour we've had this year but that's dried off and we've been walking through crackling dry grass, dry gum leaves and dust for months now. And the dust is getting worse - even startled ourselves recently driving home - dust storm that looked for all the world like a smoke showing until we stopped worrying, and had a good look (could everyone driving down highways right now do the same thing - dust is brown / smoke is white or black, dust tends to move behind whatever is throwing it into the air / smoke doesn't do 100ks - immediately / granted it can if the wind is blowing). Which it's looking like it's going to do all summer - god we've had some wind and heat already, and today and this weekend we're nudging 40 already.

Wonderful.

Needless to say it's going to be a shit of a summer, after an absolute shit of a year.