Our little piece of heaven is change forever

When I was 10 my Dad told me that our house might not burn in his lifetime but it probably would in mine. The beginning of every fire season I thought of those words and hoped that this wouldn’t be the season they would come true.

On the 23rd of Jan 2020 my phone buzzed it was a notification from the fires near me app. There was a warning that a fire would likely impact our property it was 7kms from our little house. We watched and waited. Every morning for 9 days I would wake up and check all of my tracking apps to see what the overnight spread had been. It was the most tense week of my life.

On the 31st of January we saw the fire spread prediction map and our little house was smack bang in the middle of the burn zone. We knew that decisions were being made in a control room somewhere on where they would make their stand to fight this beast and that place was going to be well beyond our property gate. It was devastating knowing there was no aerial support and that there would be no fire truck down our road. The fate of our house was in the hands of the universe now.

I woke at 7am on the 1st of Feb 2020, I checked my phone. Fire. I measured it at 300m from the house. I watched the fires near me app all day it look like we may have been lucky the fire had run along the ridgeline and hadn’t come down towards the house. 6pm a hotspot appears meters from the house. By 9pm there was so much red on the map I could no longer locate where the house was.

6 days later Dad was able to walk out to the house things were still on fire. Our house was gone. 7 out of 10 houses down our road were lost.

8 days later the rain came. It flooded and due to the fire burning everything there was nothing to hold the soil. Our road was cut in 4 places. We had the road fixed but since then there have been another 3 floods and we have been cut off from our property since August.

On the 29th of December my husband and I walked out to our block to see how the bush was recovering. It was devastating only about 10% of the trees have any regrowth the rest are dead. Our little piece of heaven is change forever.