When you become a farmer the weather conditions suddenly become very important. I can’t say I get excited over the weather forecast as much as my husband does but I certainly pay much more attention to it than I ever have. It’s important to know when it’s going to rain, is it a lot or none at all and how will that affect your land, your feed, your guests and your animals.
It’s so much more relevant to me now than it ever was while I was living on the mid north coast of NSW. A thunderstorm woke you up at night, rain on a tin roof was a joy to listen to and lightning strikes prompted me to get out my camera. Here in Western Australia storms are very different. There is often little or no rain, lots of wind and the dreaded dry lightning. Storms often occur in the hottest, driest month of the year: February. Ask Northcliffe residents how they feel about dry lightning.
In February 2015 a massive fire started by dry lightning on a stormy night raged around Northcliffe, threatened the Windy Harbour Settlement and looked like it could head towards Walpole and Pemberton. townships. I remember it well. It was my first real summer here and suddenly the realities of mother nature and the weather hit home. Should the fire head in our direction, and predicted wind changes meant that it probably would, we could lose our home, our livelihood and potentially our animals.
For the first time I was organising grab boxes (boxes of important documents as well as sentimental items that you wished to take) should we need to leave. The cats and dogs were kept inside so I knew where to find them and it looked highly likely that my husband would be called out to assist the volunteer fire brigade of which he was an active member.
We were lucky that year. The predicted wind change didn’t happen and the fire was bought under control but not before an enormous area had been burned. Nobody was killed, thank fully, but sheds, machinery, kilometres of fencing and lots of pasture ear marked for livestock was gone. One woman had just sorted through her kid’s school reports, art work and memorabilia and transferred it all to the shed. Their shed burned down. Another drove his restored classic car into his dam because he decided water damage was fixable but having the car burnt to a cinder was not.
After the fire was brought under control and the media moved on to something else people were still picking up the pieces of their lives months on. Ask the people of Yarloop about it. They pretty much lost most of their town to fire in January 2016 and it was almost a year before the town was reopened again after the clean up. Even then houses still had to be rebuilt, the kids couldn’t go to their own school and a lot of residents simply didn’t return. Sadly two men also lost their lives and many more lives were shattered by this fire.
So we prepare the best we can. Conduct hazard reduction burns on our properties to keep fuel loads down. Have our own little fire fighting unit primed and ready and have our grab boxes by the door with insurance papers, wedding photos and passports inside. We keep tabs on the emergency websites and watch the skyline. Hot, dusty, windy February days make us nervous and any sign of fire; a pillar of smoke off in the distance, over the next hill or even the smell of smoke sends us to the computer to check the appropriate websites. It is an uneasy time of year and the first rains bring a sigh of relief because we all know that even when a fire is ‘under control ‘ it can still flare up. In fact most fires will smoulder for weeks on end and good rain is what finally dampens all those embers down and we can relax…until next summer and we go through it all again.