What a day that was! We had been on a Tag-a-Long 4WD in the High Country visiting as many of the Huts as we could. On the Pinnacles Fire Tower as we chatted with the Duty persons, they saw a lightning strike on Mt Feather Top and that was the start of that series of events. Some days later we camped at the Bulltown vicinity and had to do a runner to Swifts Creek Refuge under RFS orders and eventually got to ACT to be with relatives to experience that monstrous Day. I have been a CFS volunteer on Eyre Peninsula, Montacute (Adelaide Hills) and Woomera variously since 1970's and THAT DAY was the most hairy of all my experiences.
Hats off to ALL the crews and a pity our S.A. bureaucrats do not exempt our volunteers from the Emergency Services Levee which is charged.
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Cheers - Ian
I slowly realise as I get older that I am definitely NOT the fastest rat in the race.
Also the older I get the more I realise I do not know.
We drove the 450kms down to Canberra on Thursday to attend a mates funeral service which was held at the Margaret Whitlam Pavillion in the National Arboretum. What a beautiful place for a service, they told us that they built the Arboretum after the fires had destroyed the place in 2003, so I guess at least some good came out of that tragic event. I couldn't work out what the words on the top of the opposite hill said, I was able to read "brown land" but not the first word which someone later told me was "wide" - apparently it's written in Dorothy McKella's own script from her poem My Country.
