BigTed's Nervous Ride Home - Banjup Bushfire

[BigTed]

Hiya folks,

A few weeks ago I received a very stressed phonecall from my wife - a bushfire was advancing towards our suburb.

It was a surreal day - we were actually 700m from the fire with lots of residential housing in-between, but we have a very dry waiting-to-catch-fire wetland over the road from us. We were directly down wind from the main fire. Our concerns was the potential "ember attack".

This is my rambling narrative on the way home and afterwards. It wasn't until I started to put it together that I realised how quickly a home-owner descends into self-preservation mode, not thinking too much about others (hence some of the captions). In the end nothing untoward happened to us, but it was stressful nonetheless.

  to all of the emergency services - no loss of life, and apparently only a small amount of property damage.

Banjup Bushfire - BigTed's Nervous Ride Home

They're still investigating the cause.

Cheers, Rob.

[ST2UP]

Thanks for sharing Rob, thought their was nothing rambling about you account at at all.....well done and glad it woked out in the finish 

[Biggles]

Good story.
Great that the WA government has invested in effective fire-fighting helis like that.
You have a reasonably long commute.
A good demo of safe filtering.  If only it was allowed Australia-wide!  There will always be riders who will abuse it, but they're out there already doing other stupid things.

[Brock]

I was heading the other way on the freeway at that time, listening to the trucks talk about the road closures. It was messing the traffic around more than usual

[Gavo]

Excellent report

Do you have your headset hooked into cam some how ?

[alans1100]

My sis lives in Calista and she had to evacuate on 23rd Jan so could be the same fire.

[Shiney]

Glad to here that it all worked okay

Awesome video BTW

[BigTed]

Thanks for the positive feedback.

I kinda feel like a bit of a fraud: we weren't evacuated, and in the end there weren't any problems for us - it was just the fear of it going up. I'm sure the heli-tankers rotating through the lake refills would just divert to the wetland if there was a problem. While we had hot ash falling, I'm not sure burning embers would make it that far (perhaps the odd OzSToc member firefighter can answer that?) - but it was stressful nonetheless. I can't imagine what it would have been like for those that were evacuated.

The video itself was edited with Lightworks - that effort took a total of about 4 hours I think, but included some learning.

My sis lives in Calista and she had to evacuate on 23rd Jan so could be the same fire.

Calista is a little further south from me and is separated by lots of freeway - I hope she was OK. Kwinana went up at that time too. It seems it's that time of year. Maybe we need to find something else for our fire-bugs to do in their off-time.

Do you have your headset hooked into cam some how ?

I have a separate external mic for the camera. So, inside the chin-bar of the helmet I have the Sena SMH10 boom mic on the left, and the camera mic on the right. Works nicely.

Great that the WA government has invested in effective fire-fighting helis like that.
You have a reasonably long commute.
A good demo of safe filtering.  If only it was allowed Australia-wide!  There will always be riders who will abuse it, but they're out there already doing other stupid things.

I was heading the other way on the freeway at that time, listening to the trucks talk about the road closures. It was messing the traffic around more than usual

These heli-tankers are going to get good use with the predicted fire season here... but we don't have climate change, you know!
25km commute each way: 25mins in the morning; 50 mins in the arvo - lane filtering is almost compulsory for that. As far as stupid goes, I reckon I'm more likely to be taken out by another bike rather than a car - most cars are quite accommodating.

Cheers, Rob.

[Sabie]

The southern states have a much different vegetation arrangement than Northern Australia. While the vegetation here does dry out and we do see 100% curing, we don't get the very low humidity, say down into single figures that you see in the south of the continent. To the west is mostly savannah country with grasses and clusters of trees which means the fuel loads are lighter then the south and further north is rainforest.

There may be pockets of vegetation similar to the south in the north but these are isolated in general. So in saying all of that, that's why the Fires in the south are on  average more severe than the north, Lower Humidity, Higher Fuel Loads.

I've attached a link to a website which is run and supported by the Federal Government and Territory NRM. The site is hosted at Charles Darwin University and is called the North Australian Fire Information (NAFI). The satellite passes over every 6 hours detecting hotspots. For example there is a permanent hotspot over Mount Isa as it detects heat coming from the plant there.

Enjoy

NAFI 2
http://www.firenorth.org.au/nafi2/

The new NAFI being developed.

http://138.80.129.56:8080/nafi3/