Fire Awareness Workshop
I worked 42 of the 58 hours between Monday morning and Wednesday evening, spent another hour sitting up at 4am writing out accounting entries to try to understand something, finally got home last night after being away since Sunday afternoon (financial report lodged, hooray!), and then spent this morning at a fire awareness workshop held in a nearby town.
The latter probably affected me more since I was short on sleep.
I really liked the main emphasis of the workshop, which is that you must be fully prepared and you cannot expect emergency services to be able to help you, or even provide up-to-the-minute information. The entire shire has only nine firefighting units (which they called "appliances") and in a major fire there won't be enough to go around. You must know what to do, keep your property or house fire-ready and make your own decisions. This is a very high fire risk area and they stressed that it's not a matter of if, but when.
I've always thought I would just GO in case of a major fire and I still think so, but they pointed out that "evacuation is mayhem" and carries with it its own dangers, among them lack of visibility, fallen trees, livestock on the roads and people trying to move large animals. As everyone probably knows, you have to decide to go early, or stay.
This story made me have to go sit in my car at the break to get my crying out of my system: with a fire approaching, a woman got in her car to go check on a horse. She soon realised there was nothing she could do for the horse and tried to turn the car around, but it got stuck in some deep gravel near the side of the road. By then the smoke was so thick she probably couldn't see. Rather than staying in the car (which they said is very hard to make yourself do, but you must), she tried to run down the road on foot, only to impale herself on a branch of a fallen tree and die there.
Another one: a local woman who left it too late to safely leave her property ran her car into a fire truck in thick smoke on the road, and killed a firefighter. A lot of the people in the room knew this woman.
I don't actually think I'd find it very hard to decide to leave my animals, though that might sound callous to many of you. I don't think the fear and pain of an animal caught in a fire compares to a person's fear and pain in the same situation, plus their loved ones' grief afterwards. Realistically I couldn't do anything for them in case of a fire that approached rapidly.
I didn't realise that most houses that burn aren't lost in the fire front itself, but from embers up to 8 hours later. If you decide to go and aren't allowed back, no one will be around to protect your home from that. They pointed out that defending your home may mean up to twelve hours of constant physical activity and showed a video of a poor little animated person going endlessly up and down from their roof cavity to around the house to extinguish spot fires.
Part of the session was on house fires that can happen anywhere and of which heaters are a major cause. It made me wonder whether some of you, especially those of you with children, have home fire plans. It can take only two minutes from an ember appearing to total combustion in a room, and the more flammable material you have in the house, the less time you'll have. If you lock your doors or windows with keys from the inside, can you find your keys in the dark to get out? Do your children know what to do if you're incapacitated? Young children apparently easily sleep through smoke alarms.
Anyone who drives out of the city in this state could get caught in a fire, so here are the steps for what to do if you're caught in a vehicle:
1. Stay in the vehicle
2. Park in a previously burned or clear area, preferably not on the road where other people may hit you
3. Close windows and vents
4. Leave your headlights and hazard lights on
5. Leave the engine on
6. Lie down below window level and cover yourself with a woollen blanket. (I keep one plus several litres of water in the boot.) Keep your hands fully covered by the blanket.
7. RESIST THE URGE TO RUN
8. After the fire front has passed and if it appears safe, exit the vehicle and get clear if it is burning. They said fuel tanks are unlikely to explode.
ETA: Nobody's saying you'll be safe in your car - just that you'll have a better chance in it than outside it.
There also was some interesting debate about the conflict between managing land for environmental purposes (leave fallen wood to provide animal habitats, etc) and managing fire risk (get rid of any excess flammable material!) and the inconsistent laws which require you to maintain firebreaks with no vegetation at all on your own property right next to state-owned land where you're supposed to leave all vegetation and debris exactly as it is.
The latter probably affected me more since I was short on sleep.
I really liked the main emphasis of the workshop, which is that you must be fully prepared and you cannot expect emergency services to be able to help you, or even provide up-to-the-minute information. The entire shire has only nine firefighting units (which they called "appliances") and in a major fire there won't be enough to go around. You must know what to do, keep your property or house fire-ready and make your own decisions. This is a very high fire risk area and they stressed that it's not a matter of if, but when.
I've always thought I would just GO in case of a major fire and I still think so, but they pointed out that "evacuation is mayhem" and carries with it its own dangers, among them lack of visibility, fallen trees, livestock on the roads and people trying to move large animals. As everyone probably knows, you have to decide to go early, or stay.
This story made me have to go sit in my car at the break to get my crying out of my system: with a fire approaching, a woman got in her car to go check on a horse. She soon realised there was nothing she could do for the horse and tried to turn the car around, but it got stuck in some deep gravel near the side of the road. By then the smoke was so thick she probably couldn't see. Rather than staying in the car (which they said is very hard to make yourself do, but you must), she tried to run down the road on foot, only to impale herself on a branch of a fallen tree and die there.
Another one: a local woman who left it too late to safely leave her property ran her car into a fire truck in thick smoke on the road, and killed a firefighter. A lot of the people in the room knew this woman.
I don't actually think I'd find it very hard to decide to leave my animals, though that might sound callous to many of you. I don't think the fear and pain of an animal caught in a fire compares to a person's fear and pain in the same situation, plus their loved ones' grief afterwards. Realistically I couldn't do anything for them in case of a fire that approached rapidly.
I didn't realise that most houses that burn aren't lost in the fire front itself, but from embers up to 8 hours later. If you decide to go and aren't allowed back, no one will be around to protect your home from that. They pointed out that defending your home may mean up to twelve hours of constant physical activity and showed a video of a poor little animated person going endlessly up and down from their roof cavity to around the house to extinguish spot fires.
Part of the session was on house fires that can happen anywhere and of which heaters are a major cause. It made me wonder whether some of you, especially those of you with children, have home fire plans. It can take only two minutes from an ember appearing to total combustion in a room, and the more flammable material you have in the house, the less time you'll have. If you lock your doors or windows with keys from the inside, can you find your keys in the dark to get out? Do your children know what to do if you're incapacitated? Young children apparently easily sleep through smoke alarms.
Anyone who drives out of the city in this state could get caught in a fire, so here are the steps for what to do if you're caught in a vehicle:
1. Stay in the vehicle
2. Park in a previously burned or clear area, preferably not on the road where other people may hit you
3. Close windows and vents
4. Leave your headlights and hazard lights on
5. Leave the engine on
6. Lie down below window level and cover yourself with a woollen blanket. (I keep one plus several litres of water in the boot.) Keep your hands fully covered by the blanket.
7. RESIST THE URGE TO RUN
8. After the fire front has passed and if it appears safe, exit the vehicle and get clear if it is burning. They said fuel tanks are unlikely to explode.
ETA: Nobody's saying you'll be safe in your car - just that you'll have a better chance in it than outside it.
There also was some interesting debate about the conflict between managing land for environmental purposes (leave fallen wood to provide animal habitats, etc) and managing fire risk (get rid of any excess flammable material!) and the inconsistent laws which require you to maintain firebreaks with no vegetation at all on your own property right next to state-owned land where you're supposed to leave all vegetation and debris exactly as it is.