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).