I usually ignore the phone if it rings during the day as it is almost always a call from some poor Indian person earning the equivalent of 50c a day from some call centre in Mumbai. But I decided to pick up. 'FIRE, FIRE' the words tumbled out of the ear piece and into my confused mind. 'What are you talking about, what do you mean?' I asked, dumbfoundedly. 'Get the fire brigade, there's a fire' and so with that last instruction echoing in my mind, from our friend Liam, I walked down to the kitchen to get the phone number for Bill, the local Larnook rural fire brigade chief, who luckily, lives down the end of our road. From the kitchen window I could see the flames leaping out of the dry grass along the McGuinness Road side of our paddock. I rang Bill and rather incredulously described the scene I was looking at. He promised to be up straight away and so I hung up and hurried outside just as Liam ran up the driveway looking anxious and worried. Grabbing our fire extinguisher we raced down the road to be met with the scene in the photo above. Roger was well and truly alight and at one stage, when the fire had melted through the plastic petrol tank, a surge of flames towered about 15 metres into the air. It was a tense moment.
Bill arrived in his ute and very quickly determined he would need to go down to the fire station and return with the truck. In the meantime, he instructed me to ring 000. About 15 minutes later he arrived with the truck and soon got to work hosing the flames down. Liam had already brought the longest hose down from the house and was extinguishing the flames on one edge of the fire. Within 20 minutes or so we were joined by another half dozen Larnook fire brigade volunteers, most of whom were well beyond 60, who helped with the task of putting out the fire. I was astonished as how quickly the fire took off and we were very lucky that it was a calm day with no breeze blowing. But it had been very dry for a long time, the grass had browned off and there was plenty of pine needles in the grass which would have fed the fire.
And this is the result. One very burned out Roger. It seems that heat built up under the cutting deck and the friction of the blades against the grass ignited the grass or a spark created from the blades hitting a rock might have been enough to set the grass on fire. It doesn't happen very often but Bill did tell me of a tractor driver from Casino who lost his tractor in a very similar way just a couple of weeks earlier. We were just glad that Liam wasn't injured.
So we now have a strip of about 150 metres by 15 metres of very burnt paddock lined by singed fence posts and pine trees. And a warning to never underestimate the immense power of fire. And intense admiration and thanks for the volunteer fire fighters who give up there own time and often use their own vehicles to travel to fires when called upon to fight them. Thank you Larnook Rural Fire Brigade! The happy news is that our insurer was very very good about it all and replaced Roger with a brand new version, which shall be henceforth named Roger II.
