News 3
www.tlnews.com.au
From Wheatsheaf to Redding - into the fire
S
OMETIMES, when telling a certain kind of story, such as describing a bushfire, it helps to boil it down to numbers. For example:
65,000 hectares burnt. $A135 million in damage to roads, bridges, utilities and other public facilities. 1604 buildings destroyed - 1080 homes, 24 commercial structures and 500 outbuildings. 1223 buildings still at risk. 4776 personnel employed fighting the fire. 7 people killed, including civilians and firefighters.
How do we envision 585 square kilometres of blackened landscape, or more than a thousand families left homeless? Sometimes the numbers help us suppress the horror we feel if we try to imagine the scale of such devastation. First up, our home has not been destroyed - we’ve been incredibly fortunate to escape the destructive power of the Carr Fire, so named because it started near the Judge Francis Carr Powerhouse, at the head of Whiskeytown Lake, in northern California, 24 kilometres west of the city of Redding, about 300 kilometres north of San Francisco. The fire was sparked into being on Monday, July 23, by a man towing a caravan; the caravan blew a tyre and sparks from the metal wheel rim flew into dry grass, which flared into a full-on bushfire. Firefighters were unable to contain it, and by Wednesday my wife Carol and I started paying close attention. In May this year, after 35 years in Australia, Carol and I moved back to the United States, to Redding, into a house my grandfather built in the 1950s. The house is on a bush block that is badly overgrown with woody scrub and pine and oak forest. We know a bit about bushfire safety, having lived for the past 17 years in a house in Wheatsheaf. We well remember the hot, dry month of February 2009, when Victoria was struck by a series of deadly bushfires of startling speed and ferocity. Our home was threatened by a fire that swept up from the south and blackened about 2000 hectares. Having then lived in the house for eight years, we had closely followed the advice of the Country Fire Authority and believed ourselves to be prepared to defend against a bushfire. Although the flames only came to about a kilometre from our property, we did see glowing embers fall from the evening sky and felt that our defensive efforts may have contributed to our home emerging unscathed from the event. Nevertheless, the next time a fire was reported in our vicinity, we evacuated. No questions asked. Again, CFA and SES information came to the fore. Those experiences, although frightening, have proved to be good training for what we’ve been going through in the past two weeks. To get to our house, the Carr Fire needed to travel almost due east over about 25 kilometres and cross the powerfully-flowing Sacramento River. With that in mind, on Thursday morning I found time to play nine holes of early-morning golf with my father, brother, and next-door neighbour, despite the forecast for temperatures in the mid-40s. But when I returned home I was relieved to find that Carol had packed travel bags for both of us and our dog, Scout. On Thursday afternoon we knew it was time to go, as we watched a huge plume of smoke thrust into the western sky, seemingly just over the next ridge. We thought we might shelter with my parents, who live just a few kilometres south of us but well removed from significant bushland. But what usually took 10 minutes to drive became a 25-minute ordeal as officials enacted mandatory evacuation orders in our neighbourhood and surrounding areas, and roads became clogged with cars - the fire had jumped the river south of us and raced east. It was now about three kilometres from our front door.
By the time we got to my parents’ house, our plan for shelter had become a mandated flight. Initially uncertain about the need to leave their home, despite evacuation orders, the electricity failed, the airconditioning went off, and my parents left willingly. Now on the road, however, we found all access going east, west and south blocked - the only way out was north, and all the roads were choked with fleeing residents. What a day ago had been a handsome town of 90,000 was now bathed in a hellish deep red glow as fires climbed the hills to Redding’s west, and 38,000 evacuees took to the now darkened roads in 36-degree heat. By Friday it had consumed 18,000 heavily forested, mountainous hectares, with 5 per cent containment. And then overnight it more than doubled in size, and containment was reduced to 2 per cent. By August 6 it had become the sixth biggest fire in California history, and was still only 45 per cent contained. In Australia we had the ABC to supply the vital ongoing information we needed to stay safe. The US has a population of more than 300 million, and nearly all of its news media have devolved into national organisations. On Thursday this fire really took off, but it took the national media three days to catch up with the story. Local media, such as they are, struggled and mostly failed to provide timely, accurate information. Officials from fire, law enforcement and state and local government agencies were not forthcoming with much-needed information, a situation that has improved only somewhat. It’s a miserable feeling being forced out of home by a natural disaster. On the Thursday, as we drove away from our home, Carol took a photo of a smoke-choked, glowing red sky, and posted it on social media, with the caption “Out of the frying pan and into the fire”. It was meant to be ironic and maybe even funny. Ten days later we returned to find our house still standing, coated in ash, with clear evidence of ember attack, but intact. Into the fire, indeed. But it’s our home, and, as with having endured 17 Wheatsheaf fire seasons, I suppose we’ll just stay tough.
Words: Jeff Glorfeld | Image: Carol Glorfeld | Inset: Kyle Barnes
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