 Fire is a natural part of the Australian environment, particularly the bush environment. We will experience it again and you have to expect if you live in a rural environment that you will be impacted by fires. It's not a maybe, it's a will be. Perhaps not to the extent of the Black Sat Day fires, God forbid that's a one in a hundred year event so I'm told. But it can and it will happen again and we will certainly experience wildfires. You shouldn't put people off, you simply need to make plans and be aware that it will happen and make those plans viable for your survival. We believe that the mental preparedness is just as important as the physical preparedness for fires and by mental preparedness I mean having some expectation of fire behaviour, what the fire is going to look like, what will happen with embers and wind and the heat, the radiant heat and the size of the flames, how long it will take for the fire front to go through, all those sorts of things and it's important to have a mental picture of what is likely to happen. If you decide to stay and defend your house you need to be extremely strong mentally because you can't, when that fire approaches you, you have to be able to stand there and mentally be able to cope with it. You can't panic, if you panic you are basically lost. You need to have the strongest will as all I can say to say yes I can do it and stand there and face it because if you don't have that mental capacity to do it you just don't stay and defend, you need to leave. Our long term planning ever since we lived here over the 24 years is involved looking at what we call both dry defence and wet defence preparation. So dry defence is things like vegetation management so making sure the grass is reduced and before summer raking loose mulch off gardens and reducing the flammable material close to the house. What we call wet defence is defence relying on water. We wanted to rely on a secure water supply and gravity feed water supply to us was the most reliable. Our fire plan is to be self-sufficient and not actually expect any fire trucks to turn up. We consider that to be a bonus if that happens but we worked on the basis that fire crews would be elsewhere and not in front of a major fire like that. They'd be elsewhere protecting other communities and so on and not at our place. Because of their knowledge of what embers can do and where they can go and how fine they are and considering that they're wind driven what I did was lift the ridge capping on the roof and place rock wall insulation. What that does is block up any gaps under the ridge capping where embers can blow into the roof space and cause fires in the roof space. Once you get a fire starting in the roof space it is very difficult to manage and to put out. That was a prime focus around the house is to block up the roof space. During summer what we do is put up shade cloth around the verandas to keep the heat out of the windows. It's a wall of shade cloth that we have around the outside of the verandas and we found that to be very effective during the Black Saturday fires. What the shade cloth did was to not only protect the windows from direct radiant heat but wind blowing embers would hit the shade cloth and those embers would fall into the moist garden below and not land on the veranda and start spot fires. Like many people in Australia I was conscious of some of the big fires that had happened over time and indeed this area had been threatened by big fires in 2003 and 2006. And so there was a consciousness in the area and we had a consciousness of fire. So Yak and Danda is a town with a lot of bushland around it and so depending on where the fire is coming whether from the north right around the west to the south we've got a lot of forest and if the fire is coming at us from any of those particular directions we're sort of very much on high alert. One dimension of our preparations for summer is that we do prepare a tub and that plastic tub has in a range of things that we feel we would need if we ended up in the situation we were having to defend our house or our lives I suppose. And that includes a range of overalls that we would use face masks, helmets, a bit of firefighting equipment by way of a backpack pressure pump for water and two Raycos. And of course we have mops and large 44 gallon drums of water which we don't keep water in and we have them available should we head into that scenario where we would be thinking a fire is on its way. In our fire plans and on Black Saturday we had some quite defined places that we were intending to go to and those places were away from the forested area that is Yak and Danda and into open country and in particular one place some friends of ours have a property next to Lake Hume and so it's in open country and it is next to a large lake and so for us represents a much more secure place to be and we're conscious too that that could be a decision not about overnight or for a couple of hours but over an extended period of time. Every summer we set ourselves up for the possibility of fire coming to our property. Some of the things we do is we bring our houses in very close to the house and we get them to graze down the paddocks that are directly around the house. Every December I'm renowned for getting out my water containers and mops and filling them up and putting them on our verandas, our gutters we clean, our sprinklers, systems that we have on our house and on our stables run through and our ability to pump up to our tanks and for them to be kept full on high fire danger days is tested. The garden is predominantly European deciduous trees and they was very well wet down on Black Saturday started about three o'clock. We had some conifers up the driveway and we lost all of those but again further down on the driveway we've got some deciduous trees and they survived. I've lived here since I was seven and so just under 50 years so it's been a long time. Probably we have never had the experience of fires here because it's traditionally been irrigation area so I've never really fought a fire at all. We'd never even considered going and I guess that part of our plan, not that we had a big plan but we had a fire pump and we had a swimming pool full of water so but that was the extent of our fire plan. Like we were pretty good, there wasn't a lot of long grass, there wasn't a lot of trees at the front of the house but at the back for here there's a lot of scrub and the heat from that was huge so I think you need to look at your individual circumstances. Talk to the CFA, they're the guys that know if you're not sure what a good fire plan is go and talk to them because they're more than happy to help. I've lived here 34 years, they're about coming up from the city into a bush area I was quite aware that bush fires could be a problem. Sort of did a bit each year, the main thing was the sprinklers on the roof and when I built the house I put fairly large areas of glass in there and it's all laminated glass, it's very thick glass and in hindsight it was one of the best things that I'd ever done with the house because talking to other people, experiences that they had, the glass was just one of those things that just blew in straight away in their homes. Every summer you clean up around the place, make sure that you've got no rubbish or the gardens are all tended to and we do a fire drill every year with the family. Took them a little while to get used to that, there was a bit of a waste of time at first, till after the fires. The amount of water that I've got here is 120,000 litres under this concrete slab here. On that day I estimate that we used about 70,000 litres of water. We had always planned to stay, we had made that decision probably two or three years before, like Saturday, we'd always thought we'd be able to defend mainly because it had been cleared at the back and the grass was kept low, we thought well yeah we would stay and defend if the need arose and the need arose. People that live along the King Parrot Creek had pumping rides, we do have a pump that sits down on the creek and it's always down there in summer, it has five outlets where we can attach sprinklers, we can attach handheld hoses and we always knew that at the time if anything did happen again especially after 82 that we did have plenty of water. From probably 2006 we also had 44 gallon drummers sitting on corners of the house. You need dry loads of water if you're going to defend a house, also our house sits amongst all deciduous, your old English trees. It is green, it's watered regularly and on that day the deciduous trees filtered out embers, they filtered out radiant heat and the garden basically helped save my life, my husband's life in the house. You can't put it any other way. Our fire plan was just if there was a fire go, we never ever considered, we never had sprinklers on the roof and having just water tanks and everything running off electricity, we just assumed the power would go out and then we'd have no way of fighting any fires so our fire plan was just if fire comes let's just go, there was no talk about staying or defending the property. Our preparation I guess has been done over a long period of time, when we built the house it's a steel-framed house, we always knew that there was with the possibility of fire and wooden verandas that was a risk for us so we had sprinklers, a sprinkler system on the house that was both on the roof, on top of the roof and under the verandas and able to keep the house pretty much wetted during a fire. We've got a couple of large concrete tanks, 12,000 gallons in one and 10,000 in another and we're pretty fortunate in that we've got about a 200m buffer between us and any significant bush so it's grass all around. For people who are thinking about staying I'd highly recommend that you think about having a generator because it just means even when you're working in the house or in the house at that point of time you've got light, you can see you're not tripping over things in the dark and so on. I've been a resident of Coligny for more than 16 years now, my property is 42 hectares and I run leaf cattle only here. I'm also a member of the police force and due to the nature of my profession I had a very extensive understanding of bush fires. I'd been through a number of very severe ones including the Warburton Complex and also the Glen Gary fires which is about two years prior to the onset of Black Saturday. It's a misnomer that you can fire to fire, you don't fire to fire. You take action prior to the fire to protect as much of your property as you can, you then go inside your house and you wait for the fire event to pass over you and then you go back outside and you do whatever you can in a mopping up process. So you need to keep in mind that radiant heat will kill you and so will smoky inhalation. So you need to include in your fire plan as did we, tactics to negate those primary concerns. Leading up to the day of Black Saturday we'd been watching the weather and of course had been a prolonged dry period so we were very conscious of what the landscape was doing and of course there was the very hot, dry couple of weeks leading into Black Saturday which was really alerting us to the concern and the possibility of fire and we were very alert to the dangers associated with fire on that particular day. On Black Saturday itself we had made a decision that we weren't going to stay here if a fire occurred but we were conscious we wanted to try and have the property in a condition that it had its best chance and the building that we've got out the back there had unrendered straw and so we spent a couple of hours early in the morning before it got too hot attempting to get some mud onto that building to try and protect vaguely some chance of ember attack but it started to get too hot for the render to work or indeed for us to do it comfortably and so we stopped especially in the afternoon in this area and no doubt many others reminded us of Mad Max there was a hot northerly wind. It was hot, it was dry and very little vegetation on the ground that was there was very burnt and dry. On the day of Black Saturday we were very clear we were going to leave at the first sign that a fire was in our direct vicinity. I was well aware of the extreme fire conditions on the day yeah I went to work in that morning and left the job about ten o'clock and told the site foreman that I was going home to prepare in case he was a bushfire and he said to me that he'd heard some excuses in his life and he'd never heard that one and after the fires went through it was probably a week and a half before he could get in contact with me because all the mobile tower and that was down so he was very apologetic when he actually got on to me. The first time we were aware of it was when we went out the back door and we could smell it. We could just smell it there was smoke in the area and just concerned about where was it and was it in the area or maybe was it perhaps even a little desert on fire again or we just weren't sure but we could smell it. We realised the seriousness of the situation when a friend who works for the CFA was able to call and she said that there was a fire heading directly towards our property and to give our fire action plan in place. Basically then it was panic because we hadn't actually worked on a specific fire plan so it was just trying to draw on information from friends you know my sister had a fire I was trying to remember what she had done different advice that she had given from the experience that they had trying to draw on what do we do what's the next thing to do. My role was closing windows getting things off the verandas and changing clothes to get some clothes on to be ready for when the fire arrived. For Gary's role he went straight out to the shed to get the fire pump so we were pretty well ready to to attack the fire when it arrived we were just then waiting for it to come across the paddock. From the time we noticed that the fire was coming the smoke was just relentless it's not not like you can look a lot across the paddock and see a fire coming if you're in the in the path of it the smoke it just comes and it gets thicker and thicker the ash there's ash coming there's embers coming you can hardly breathe. We were trying to get you know something to cover our noses I tried to get men's hankies but they weren't big enough then I tried tea towels and they were they were too too tight too big to try and tie so we just at the you know in the heat of the moment you just couldn't find the right thing but in a fire plan it'll be you know have masks there and have sunglasses there and have hats we didn't sort of grab a lot of those things. We didn't have enough hoses and I was basically allocated one hose which I had to run with from you know the front of the house to the back of the house and back to the front and at one stage right when the flames were here the plastic sitting gave away it snapped in my hand and on my heart just sang I don't know now what I've got I've got no hose and my son-in-law was here helping and he saw me so looking at it and he come flying in and grabbed it and went out to the shed and grabbed another fitting and was able to fit it but it really just proves on a day like that you need to have hoses basically on every tap. We did a lot of work and ourselves we had some friends call in that were going past that was very valuable to have those extra set of hands to running around you know trying to one was using the fire pump the other one had hoses we were just trying to wet things down and time pushed a fire around us. About 130 we went outside we could see the smoke through the trees and at that time we started to put in place our final preparations because we knew we were going to be impacted directly from that fire with the south-west wind change and the things we did was fill the spouting with water clear the veranda and make sure that the veranda sprinklers were going and the garden adjacent to the house was wet we'd prepared well beforehand we had overalls on we had good leather hat we had the smoke mask smoke goggles we had leather gloves so we considered ourselves to be well prepared with the right protective clothing so that sort of preparation is is vital. On the day my wife called me roughly 130 and said she'd had a call from the neighbour that there was smoke in the area she was a bit concerned so we came home pretty much straight away and started preparing on the day and those sorts of things included getting our gas bottles and moving them away from the house we had a bit of timber and stuff that was around the house tidied all that up we've got a hay shed that's about 20 metres from the house and it's not a good spot for it I guess we recognise that now. On the afternoon I got the tractor out and piled dirt around the base of the shed to keep embers out from getting in underneath the shed and we stuffed the cracks in the doors up with old truck bags and and that very fortunately and I don't know how but managed to keep the shed from catching a light. We've since moved that hay or not moved the hay shed but moved hay out of that shed and we don't use that shed for hay anymore because it's just too close to the house if it had gone up we would have had a real problem on the day. I don't think we realised how serious that fire was until it had actually been thrown but at three o'clock we started to kick in our fire plans and so our sprinklers were going by three o'clock everything was being tested we did put our horses into our dirt and concrete floor stables when we put them in we took all their rugs and their head collars off and I did close the top doors of the stables so that if they got a fright they wouldn't be jumping out of the stables and causing more harm. The domestic animals were put in the stables with the horses as well contained and we made it to priorities we made the house if we could save the house that was actually number two number one priority was saving the stables and the animals that were in it and number two was if we could we would save the house as well and anything beyond that perimeter just was not for us to worry about so that's the protocol that we followed on the day. I was asleep with and because my newborn was the first day I'd ever had a day nap at the same time as my son and my husband woke me up after having a few phone calls from friends and he was just listening to the radio because he was listening to the cricket that day before he was on the same station and he was just outside and my cousin rang to say that a friend of hers who lived in King Lake had heard that the fires are on their way and that a fire truck from King Lake West had got in trouble so that was the first time it was about 3.30 in the afternoon and he woke me up and said we're going and I just said let me just feed Billy before we go and then he asked me what I wanted to pack and I said oh I don't worry I'll just pack it after I finish feeding he's like no what do you want to pack so I just gave him a few instructions and he just threw a whole lot of stuff in the car and so by the time I finished with Billy he just made me get in the car. That particular day I was due to work and afternoon shift and I was trying to snooze in a house that got to 45 degrees I was telephoned by a friend of mine around 3.30 who alluded me to the fact that there's a huge fire that had been started on the eastern edge of the Churchill area and could I see it and I naturally looked north couldn't see anything and he said well you better get outside and have a look because it's huge. I had an extensive fire plan set up and my son and I had revisited that the previous week and it did worry me when I saw this this fire plume that just on the off chance it may end up affecting us so I've grabbed the first five things on my property list that I'd made as part of the fire plan and thrown into into my car before going into work. Well from the time that it was actually over it probably would have been maybe two or three hours because the main firefront had gone through but everything just kept flaring up all the time we had a lot of a spot fires in right through all the gardens we had bark that just kept reed nighting all the time trees and you know there's a fear of trees catching fire so it kind of put the big trees out so they didn't fall and land on the house so we were continually running and with water buckets of water hoses just trying to put out spot fires as well. Cos my cousin had rang and she said just come to my place and I just when I sort of quickly had a look around the house before we left I thought I will be back tonight will be fine and left a whole lot of stuff that I wish I had have taken because it was about 20 minutes from when I woke up to when we got in the car so as we said would meet her down at her place in King Lake sorry in Greensboro and when we drove out we went to the King Lake West CFA where there was one person there and we said where we're going and he said no the roads are closed to get down through Whittlesey so we went towards King Lake and when we got to King Lake there was just you wouldn't even be able to tell that there was a danger anywhere because we rang our neighbors say that we're leaving they had no idea people were just going about their business so we got into King Lake and thought maybe we were being a bit overreacting maybe a little bit to it all so we just thought we'd keep going anyway and just try and get off the mountain because we were packed and had our dogs with us and stuff so we thought about going down her spree but we thought no it's a bit too bullshit so we went to go through Yarra Glen and then when we got almost to Yarra Glen there was a roadblock there and they made us turn around because the fires had just gone through Yarra Glen and as we were turning around at the road block on the left-hand side as we're going back towards King Lake there was flames on the paddocks and they were going faster than our car was and we could see them really clearly they weren't very far away so that was the first sort of sign of the fire that we saw and when we left we saw the billowing smoke coming up the mountain about 430 we saw it just looked like an atomic bomb had gone off south west of us at King Lake West we knew there was a change and from that time on we just got the hoses the hoses were already ready fiber sheeting put around the house where the where we're embers could get underneath we cut down ferns that adjoin the house we cut down all the trees that were up against the house with the water on the house we had three sprinklers on three sides of the house going because during a fireguard talk we had talked about that you need to keep at least six feet from your house totally wet for embers that were falling and the pump was turned on about quarter to five and the house was starting to be drowned about an hour hour and a half before we got hit with the fire it went really really black it was as black as night you just couldn't see and if you're thinking about leaving at that time of the day that's when it's too late there's potential for the road to be blocked you just can't see it's just too dark and too dangerous to be leaving late in the day went back up the mountain and then I suggested we go back to King Lake to see what was going on and my husband just said no we won't we'll just keep going to yay so as we're driving to yay there wasn't very many cars on the road so it wasn't like it was really busy and lots of people were evacuating so we're driving towards yay and there was a tree had fallen over and there was already a tractor there pulling the tree off the road there's about four cars in front of us and then on the way to yay we stopped at a petrol station to get just some water there was just confusion everywhere there was no power in the petrol station already because as we were leaving the power went off at our house too so we had no phone no water no nothing so that was a good time to leave anyway so yeah we left the petrol station and we got up to yay and yay was pretty busy and we just sat in yay and sat in the air conditioning we could get out of the car a little bit because it was hot but there was no smoke there and then we waited in line with everyone else in town to sort of fill up with petrol to make sure that we had enough like kept the fuel tank full just in case we had to travel somewhere else that would have been at about five o'clock I think about five o'clock we probably put a gear on at about five so put our overalls and breathing apparatus not on but handy and easy to get we'd put some water bottles out you know we were ready it wasn't really an ember attack until the front was nearly honest they probably two or three kilometers away you know not even that probably by the time the wind turned outside the sprinklers were going I did have a couple of the fire hoses pointed it in different directions at each end of the house and we had of course sinks and baths and that with water in it and if we noticed any embers coming in you know we we didn't mind throwing a bucket of water over over a curtain or blind when the main part of the fire was here the whole house was just literally shaking and the three sets of double doors down the bottom and two of them blew open and flames actually come in from the garden and I'd say was a fair as a mature garden with mature trees in it but it would have had to been a good 16 meters away and at the same time the doors blew open the wall will be ran in the house and we had pets we had about seven pets in the house five dogs and a couple of cats that people have bought and I've got to tell you the wallaby was the best behave one of a lot of them that just come in put its head in the corner in the games room stayed there for about three hours before it left and didn't move the whole time but it was pretty frightening when the doors did blow open because you had to have the people there in the house at different points to be aware of these things because if we my wife and I were up upstairs here on this level and if we were the only two here we probably wouldn't have gone downstairs because it is all solid brick and we wouldn't have been particularly worried about it so yeah you've got to really be able to cover all points we had seven adults and six children in the house the dogs were here and they weren't restrained and you have people running around and on top of that when the doors blew open you get a bit of smoke in the house the smoke alarms are going off so yeah all in all it was a fairly hectic scene inside the house even though we were safe and and I was always under the impression that they would all be just sitting downstairs watching TV because the power was on we had TV on the kids with us I've seen them we're all sitting down watching TV and and that's the way they would have gone through the whole scenario but that wasn't the case they were quite aware of what was happening outside and from what I was told a couple of them were feeling panic-stricken about the whole thing you know to me it was like watching a chemical reaction going on behind the glass that the thick smoke was right up to the glass and all you could see was this red glow in amongst the thick smoke you know like there was no way you were going to survive outside and you know after the fire went through there was a kangaroo in the garden down the bottom that was fine it hadn't been burnt because it got in close to the house and it was getting wet from the spray from the sprinklers but it died anyway and that just would have been because there was no oxygen in the air that there was such thick you know smoke around the place that nothing would have survived out there anyway you know I would say that we actually got out about 20 minutes after the five main five front hit and that probably would have been about half past five 25 to six or something and get the hoses and then start you know make sure that everything was all right around the point and like I say there was three at least three of us out maybe four outside and yeah well little wasn't too much longer or outside and we knew that we'd we'd had it beat which was a great experience about half past five the sky started to darken with smoke become pitch black about about cord to six the power went out it flickered for a few times and and the power was cut at that stage from about six o'clock we could start to see the glow of the fire coming we're impacted by the first stage of embers floating embers that were starting spotfires on the lee side of the house we're on the lee side of the house here and this is the area where we considered most of our spot fires at start with our past experience living here at Coligny dry leaves and so on would all drop in this area and not blow under the house and so therefore we we thought that embers would land here so we based ourselves myself and my mate Steve based ourselves here with fire hoses I was up this end of the house and Steve was down the other end and we put out spot fires as they started and protected the house from this side at the time the radiant heat from the fire and the embers were absolutely horrific but as the fire front went by after about 15 minutes we were able to then focus more on the little spot fires that were starting up on the decking and around the the garden and the grass areas and around the swimming pool and so on but during the fire front itself there was not a lot we could do because it was just such mayhem I have to say we're pretty calm when the firestorm hit us a lot calmer than what I thought we were going to be it was just do what you had to do we'd spoken about it enough we were prepared we were ready we felt like we've been waiting for a few hours actually but yeah quite calm and when we just got about what what we'd plan to do it went very black you can't see you couldn't see a couple of meters in front of you there were times when someone was beside me using the hose and I didn't realise I was there until you actually heard the wish of the water we were lucky during the fire we didn't go inside the house we did shelter on the opposite side of the house to a lot of where the heat was coming from and I think that's partly because we had the protective overalls on gloves breathing apparatus we had plenty of water so but it was it was hot and it was very smoky the filters on our breathing apparatus when we looked at them later were absolutely black I think if we hadn't had that we would have had to go inside to give ourselves some sort of relief the front probably lasted about 20 minutes after the front came through was really the time to get really active because the front sort of barrels its way through noise dark heat smoke can't see but as that disappears daylight came again and that's when you've got to get out and start putting some of those things that my cordon fire but haven't yet fully ignited and and helped save them I was given the opportunity to return to my property in order to fight the fires and also because I knew my son was back here and my intent was to save the house and then resume duty and that certainly didn't happen I arrived here at 6 p.m. completed opening the gates by quarter past six because cattle are quite intelligent in the event of a fire they know what to do by opening up all the gates around the farm it allowed them to go where they wanted to they jumped in my big damn we were prepared for bushfires in Australian summers bushfires tend to come from the north or the northwest and it couldn't have been further from the truth I was impacted from the southwest in a cool change I was expecting that cool change to make a difference and to soften the the fire front and all it did was we had six to eight hours of extremely hot air come through from the southwest driving a 10 kilometre fire front which had been set up by the original northerly burn so you can't rely on a southwesterly change to save you the fire hit our place roughly 6 30 6 45 at night that day it had been dark for about an hour beforehand with the smoke coming over it was nearly pitch black you could hardly see anything at all then it started to get pretty smoky and we had embers an ember attack at that point in time and and my son and I were outside trying to put embers out and it got to a point where it was just too smoky and and we couldn't stay outside any longer and and headed inside and I've seen to remember a couple of minutes later the fire actually hit and came through it was smoky inside the house as well the smoke alarms were were sounding which sort of added you know adds to all the sense of urgency and panic from in the house we could see the plantation go up just a fireball of flame in the in the plantation and and then a haystack in the distance was on fire we could see out one window and there were burning embers flying past the window horizontally I guess you know blown with the wind that was pretty strong at that point in time and that went on for about 15 minutes or so we were reasonably well set up inside we had buckets of water and towels in a few of the windows and I did go outside a couple of occasions during the time that it was coming through and certainly really smoky and hard to see and breathe outside going outside was to put out bushes that were burning right up right up close to the front of the house treated pine fence posts were burning all over the place had a little fire in one of our sheds it was fortunate that I went in there and managed to to be able to put that out before it sort of got hold our sprinkler system that we had which included sprinklers in under the eaves helped us a significant amount because that really stopped stuff that was close to the house from from continuing to burn when the fire impacted on my property it was coming across the back hay paddock and it was swirling like a washing machine motion in two 300 meter wide circles and there was two of them the flames I thought were extending about 60 meters in into the air I was later told that probably close to 600 meters in into the air the time we come back up here the ember attack was full-on and rather than having a spotfire here and a little one you know 30 feet over the air which were prepared to go and put out it was just lighting up like Lucifer around us everywhere so we gave that idea up of trying to put out the spot fires we then went inside the house I was expecting the windows to go black and and fracture slightly and perhaps to start shattering when the firestorm hit us that certainly happened the you we watched the windows go brown and then black within the space of about 30 seconds and then literally the house imploded the windows exploded in ice immediately came to the realization the house is lost so then we've gone and got all the wet towels and and the provisions that we did that my son had set aside the water bottles the lanterns and we waited as long as we could inside the house because the firestorm was going over the top of us so that was the vapor fires that rolled through we left the house on the eastern side through us a glass sliding door and we sheltered in an alcove area which is there's a concrete plinth up there and sat there because at that stage the fire was around a 360 degrees in the air and 360 degrees on the ground so we sheltered on that concrete area for about five minutes and then the house had really lit up from the inside and I said Tim time to go to the concrete tank so this is where we took shelter leaning up against the wall protecting our faces breathing through the towels I had my water bottle in the lantern down here this is where the lantern started to melt so my son and I moved across burning ember beds around the other side of the tank and ended up here you can see the remains of the variegated potassium and it was quite large and then we we simply knelt behind it so we crouched there with towels over our face behind this big stump and that's what protected us from the radiant heat and when the fires were going through and I was sitting there I couldn't even see the watch face in front of my face I couldn't tell the time it was that accurate and yeah so that tree really saved their lives and the tank we knew there was going to be a southwest change we knew that the fire was the King Lake West so we knew the valley was in trouble about three hours before it hit us unfortunately for us they would hit with no smoke warning with no fire visible fire warning the noise was horrendous before it hit and then and then it basically just absolutely rain dimbers rain dimbers down on us before you could actually still either smell smoke or visibly see fire from those embers my neighbour's houses all went up in flames and still no smoke and so the sprinklers were we're going so that the house was being totally watered but also the surrounds all the gardens surrounding it was also being watered as well my husband had a handheld hose and I did as well so we watering the garden as well as the house to keep it totally wet after a spade of time the pump did fail the pump failed because it was burnt burnt out we went inside because that was when the fire front was was hitting us we went inside husband wouldn't stay inside for very long because well they say 10 minutes he lasted about three or four and said I don't know what's going on outside and I need to get outside to see he was outside putting out spot fires every five minutes I was climbing the ladder in the bathroom up into the roof and checking that there were no smoldering embers within our roof cavity with me I had of course needed torch and I also had a water pistol one of those great big water pistols that you can squirt and they go a fair distance because yeah if you needed to put out a fire within your roof cavity they were the best at the time Robert went outside after the front had gone over and he's he was putting out spot fires all over the place at that time the drums that were filled with water proved absolutely invaluable to fill up buckets and to be able to go and the water on a spot fire where it was occurring and of course when that fires gone over that's when it can be the most difficult putting out spot fires because if you're not there to put them out that's when they cause so much damage and destruction from about half past seven twenty five to eight when it actually hit us with embers and that's when I watched all my neighbour's houses burn that was before the main fire front by quarter past eight or not even that long the whole valley was basically up in flames so when the smoke began to clear and it was still coming through in ways but we could see recently well and there wasn't the ferocity of the flame so we went for an inspection around the home block could see that there was nothing left the house was gone my machinery shed was gone the hay shed was gone all infrastructure around here was gone there was nothing left standing other than the concrete tank my son had had his four-wheel drive sitting on the driveway at without anything surrounding it he did caught fire and the intensity of the flames and the fireballs that went through was enough to melt the windshield glass so that it looked like liquid river over his dashboard and running down the sides of his doors so we knew they're pretty hot fires the fire plan that we made worked my son and I are living testimony to that we survived the worst fire event in recent history that Australia's ever ever seen being a firestorm in all honesty my house couldn't be saved in that fire event it wasn't designed to last that fire event because it impacted under my house and there's no way that I could have saved it the way that I will modify my fire plan is to obviously incorporate the new house I'm building a house that will be fireproof it'll be made out of masonry in my case he will block all my garden will be English garden I'll have a shelter for the car so that I've got access and transport after the fire I'll put a fire suppression system on the roof I'll certainly have more petrol pump firefighters and put them on independent systems that are reticulated so if I need to I can pump for weeks if I had the fuel in order to suppress the fires so any infrastructure that you need to save needs to be under a fire suppression system there's lots of information that you can get not only on the internet but from your local CFA that will assist you in developing first of all a quality fire plan but also set up infrastructure on your property so that you can save your primary residence but also being farmers to take action so that you can save you the animals that you run and perhaps even the crops that you grow prior to Black Saturday we had a Virginia hedge that was about two meters tall that ran from right up the property on the southwest side which is where the fire came from and on that night the Virginia hedge acted as a barrier and and gave us a fighting chance we would stay and defend again there is one thing definitely we would do different our plan was if the house did go up and we couldn't save it we would head for the creek and we would not have survived it would have been too hot too open to try and get to it it the creek also is surrounded by bush so what we would do the next time if the house did go with a second pump you'd stay by your tank and put your second pump in and basically stand there and drain yourself in water and hope that you survive it we still struggle with the fact that we were isolated for those few days after the fires and the power was cut of course and it was out for two or three weeks phones were cut they weren't reconnected for two or three weeks so it was very isolating we have to organize generators and an alternative communication methods it meant that because of the roadblocks for a few days after the fires we'd meet our friends at the roadblocks to get food supplies and so on so it was very isolating and it was blocked for a reason because the police had declared it a crime scene because of the people that were killed some of the things that we'd improve in terms of our planning would be and some of these things we've already done is to move some of our native vegetation back away from the house native vegetation is a lot more inflammable than deciduous trees and things like fruit trees which were great barriers with the fire we would install fixed sprinklers around the veranda at the time we had movable sprinklers that we had to shift at about every 10 minutes and they did a wonderful job but fixed sprinklers might save us a little bit of time our decision whether to stay and defend or go for future fires depends very much on how our health is at the time how well prepared we are both mentally and physically if we felt as prepared as we did for Black Saturday we'd probably stay but if if our health was not so good as what it was then we'd probably leave early we did it originally say that we're going to rebuild and then I was a little bit apprehensive because I knew that there's not going to be a fire go through the year after but I thought later down the track when the kids are older and they're at school on the mountain and I'm at work and they would if if I came through and they wouldn't let me back up and those sort of things I don't think I'd ever feel comfortable during a summer so we decided to sell put the block on the market and look for a house back where we originally lived so if I live there now I'd have all my keepsakes ready to go I'd go any meetings that like the community was running about fire awareness where there was going to be places for safety to evacuation points I just have knowledge we were completely and utterly ignorant when it came to what to do because it wasn't a point that anyone really pushed on us when we moved to the area it wasn't said that oh you know that this could possibly happen you should be ready it was pretty amazed that there wasn't a thing left there wasn't a leaf left or a twig or anything and yeah and it was a very strange experience because as I was training the water out of the tank I heard this scratching going on behind me and there was three lyrebirds in the water trail scratching away and I thought they must either go into the creeks there's a couple of creeks down there or they got to go into wombat holes my ideas changed a lot if it was my choice I wouldn't stay again if another if we had another daylight that if I had the opportunity to get out I would go before the fire even got here mainly because I don't think whatever preparations you put into place you only need something small to go wrong and it could you know it could mean difference between life and death so my first option next time would be to go it's great having the house set up you've got to have everything in place everything prepared everything ready just the same but first option would be to go like everybody were faced with a decision about leaving early or staying and we had a made a decision to leave and the question is what's the definition on that day for early and I think there's a complexity there that is quite challenging to answer and that the answer is related to how dry it is on the day what the wind patterns are for the day what the projections of humidity are and so we don't have an absolute point at which we're saying if it's eight o'clock in the morning we will leave we we have a default position that we will leave and we will update that default position depending on the prevailing conditions on that day or indeed on that that week or whatever and it's also quite a challenging environment in a community sense because obviously as soon as we leave we cease to be a contributor to a community fire response so we didn't get a fire front coming through here and in fact ended up not coming all of that close but we now each year do some planning to put ourselves in a position where the either the property is most likely to survive or if we happen to be in the property we can defend ourselves and the property we've got toughened glass and all the windows we've prepared cement sheeting boards to paste over all the doors and windows we've put cement sheeting right around the subfloor area and and we're in the process of installing a fire pump and putting in sprinklers on the eaves and on the roof we haven't done that yet but it's part of the ongoing plan I don't think I would change any of our actions that we did on the day I never have to find that one out but I felt that we were very well prepared there have been some things that we have changed our independent water supplies now gravity fed rather than relying on a pump that is sitting in amongst trees we have added another petrol pump and we replaced a plastic water tank with a concrete one we haven't changed our mind about staying or leaving we have discussed it since and as a family our decision would still be to stay but that is as long as we are a hundred percent prepared and ready and we all feel capable of of doing it again so with our setup I would say yes we will be staying with each individual setup I would have to say you need to think it through very thoroughly in the few days after the fires because the the police had declared it a crime scene we were we're pretty much locked in we couldn't well we could have gone out but if we'd gone out we wouldn't have been allowed back in again and there's a group of about four or five of us in a couple of houses up the road that I guess started to work together pretty well in terms of looking after one another and so on we were lucky in that we've had a generator and we're able to to keep power going and keep fridges and and so on running our verandahs one of them did catch fire on the day so we've decided now to replace this with concrete and cement sheet as a measure to make sure that it can't burn we've also added shutters to all of our windows and sealed up the house a lot better under the eaves where the eaves meet the bricks and also under the ridgeline of the house because we did find afterwards a lot of ash inside the roof in the house that had got in under the the capping of the roof and also changed the vents on the roof of the house we had one of those whirly bird vents before which is not fireproof and we've changed those over to some fireproof vents I think we would still stay we'd be prepared to make the decision if we had to on the day we've certainly improved the the things in terms of keeping the house safe up up the sprinkler system and got rid of the wooden verandahs and and so on I think in hindsight we probably shouldn't have had the kids here on the day you know in future I don't think we'd want to put the kids through that sort of trauma I guess yeah wouldn't put the kids through that again one of the things that we've done as part of our fire plan is to add a wall into the back of the house here so stop the embers and everything we're coming right through here so it's been an important thing to try and block that off and make it a bit more fireproof for us obviously we've still got our screen pools we've got a permanent water supply we've got our pump that we now you know it's all been used so we know how to where to set it up and my husband Gary is a plumber so he's been able to put in some really good fire wheels so we we know what we need now if there's a fire coming we know what to grab Black Saturday for us at the Haven rim law and Drunk South we were the ones that copped it on the day next time it could be you you know it could be your neighbor it could be anybody you don't have to live in the mountains there's something like this to happen it could happen to anybody it's just a spark in the wrong spot and if you're in the line of it you need to be prepared for it