Where There Is Smoke There Is Fire

Wednesday the 4 January started out like any other day. The temperature soared as the day progressed and by lunchtime there was a smell of smoke in the air. But living in Western Australia bush fires in summer are a regular occurance and you usually just listen to the radio to see where the fire is.........

The afternoon progressed and you could hear the fire fighting helicopters taking flying backwards and forwards from the airport, this is not an uncommon sound for us as we live by the airport. I had a friend popping in after he had finished work for the day and well being the first day back at work for him he left early and arrived at my house about 3pm, we cracked a drink and that is when all hell broke lose!!!

The noise of the helicopters was getting louder and they were flying really low over the houses in our street, so being the nosey people that we are we went outside to have a look and......

Yep the fire was actually down the other end of our street, it has started at the airport jumped a highway and threatening houses at the far end of our street.
Now this had happened a couple of years ago and it was soon bought under control but with the winds we were having this had the potential to jump again and take out houses.

About 4pm the police came along and told everyone to grab important documents, pets and meds and evacuate the street. Now when this happened we kind of thought WTF. So we loaded up the dogs, grabbed passports, meds, turned the front sprinklers on, jumped in the car and thought "where shall we go" as we didn't want to go to far from home, so we went to a friends place around the corner. The police had completely blocked off the street and were only letting people out so that they could evacuate.
After about 90mins we returned to the blockade and found all our neighbours there also and after about another 30 mins we were allowed back in our houses, but all night fire engines and police were cruising the street to make sure that that the fire didn't flare up again.

The firefighters and helicopter pilots did a wonderful job finally getting the fire under control and luckily no property was damaged.