Sampson Flat Bushfire

What a horrid start to the year!
The fire danger rating for the 2nd of January in Adelaide was rated as Catastrophic. Meaning if a fire started that day, it would be nearly impossible to contain it. So what happened? A fire started.

The day was ridiculously hot, 42 degrees and Adelaide managed to top that predicted temperature. Added to that, strong northerly winds to fan any fire.

The fire started in Sampson Flat, which is about 23 km north away from us. I think it started in the early afternoon and by late afternoon, it was out of control. Those northerly winds meant that it was fanning the fire south, towards us. As large fires make their own microclimate, this fire managed to spread in all directions.

We woke up on Saturday to find (and smell) a smoke cloud outside the house, which put us in a bit of a panic. Had the fire managed to travel south that quickly?

Checking the website, the fire was still out of control up north, but the smoke cloud had blown south/south east.

We were due to pick up some Pekin chickens on Saturday morning from Nairne, a small township about 22km south east from us. The picture above is of the smoke cloud as we drove up the freeway. It would have made the fire about 20km away from us when I took the picture.

The smoke and ash were being blown right over Nairne, making the place look very dark indeed. The picture below is of Nairne at 10am in the morning, it felt like late evening.

Another pic of the smoke cloud.

Thank goodness no loss of life yet, can't say that for livestock and pets. A very sad story was of the Inglewood Boarding Kennel and Cattery, only a third of the dogs saved, the rest perished. The owners lost everything, including their home. I know that kennel, I took my dog there a long, long time ago when the family had to go overseas.

Now I just worry about my chickens when we are at work. What would happen if there was a fire up at our place? It's a 40 min drive from work to home. Will we get back in time to save them?

When we got back from picking up the chickens on Saturday, the news was even more severe and suburbs near us were put on alert. We told ourselves, if those suburbs were told to evacuate, we would too. The CFS website had so many people accessing it that it was crashing. The best place to get information was actually the CFS Facebook page. They would post up regular updates on that page.

By the way, we are now located in a rural, hilly area. We have 10,000 acres of forest as our backyard and as we are uphill from that, we know no firefighting will be done at our property. Far too dangerous. We have roof sprinklers, but really, we don't care about the house, save our chickens! The insurance can cover material possessions, but they can't replace any pets.

The rest of Saturday was spent packing the car with chicken food, boxes and rounding up our pets near the house. Our most flighty chickens were placed in a cage for the day, so we could catch them easily. It was still a stifling hot day. We got boxes and bought an extra pet cage for all the new chicks. We were to evacuate to family in the foothills and a cage would be best for the chickens to sleep in if we had to do an extended stay. Then we sat, listened to the emergency broadcast on the radio, kept an eye out for CFS messages on Facebook and waited.

Thankfully, by late afternoon a cool change sprang up and the wind was blowing the fire easterly. Good for us, but bad for several towns in the area. I hope they stay safe. As I write this, the fire is still uncontrolled. Wednesday will be terrible, hot day with strong winds predicted. Will be watching the news with bated breath in the coming days.

From now until the end of the fire season, I think I'll be on tenterhooks on any hot and windy day.

By the way, these were the chicks we bought. They didn't have any more buffs, but they will be pullet companions for Buffy.

This is Ash in the foreground.

Goldilocks. Both of them 2.5 months old (she's a bit hot here). We put them with the baby Leghorns and Marans, who are 2 months old, but quite a bit bigger already. Goldilocks has already shown that she's the oldest boss. All the other chicks are afraid of her!

She's got a very good appetite too, probably why she bosses all the other chicks around. She has already shown a liking to be handled, especially to sit on a shoulder and snuggle so close that she gets too hot.

To those on the fire front, stay safe. We have space to look after your animals, but we're not exactly in the safest location either. We'll see what the coming days bring.

Stay safe.