I have been thinking of you all day, along with Iron Horse who is also from Australia.
Man I hope you all stay safe and get those fires out. That is a very scary situation I have been reading the news stories.
I am laying down on the sofa catching up on TBN and look up and there is a HUGE stream of smoke flowing 25ft from the house. It is windy here, real windy so seeing smoke, and LOTS of smoke when it is windy scares the crap out of me. I jump up and tell my husband "Hey there is a big fire near here, we need to go check it out" He runs outside and I go to put on some warm clthes and then head out.
Go through our back field, still smoke but no fire, go through the next back field and can hear the fire crackling. I head towards the noise and there is our new back neighbor who is from Paris and just build their new home, standing by the brush pile of olive tree clippings he has set on fire, in the WIND. We probably had 50mph of wind going at the time. My hsuband has been telling him to put the fire out that it is illegal to burn in Jan, Feb & March and he is saying no it is fine the ground is humid since it rained yesterday. I listen for about half a second, my heart is pounding as the strong wind is blowing from his property to our property that is planted in olive trees, and then I start shouting in crappy French, "No it's to much wind, it's to much wind" he tells me again how it is humid out, I keep telling him it is to much wind and look at the fire red ashes that are falling all over our property. He finally relents and says he'll put it out. My husband left but I stayed there to watch him. He didn't even have a hose! He was burning way back on his property line and didn't have a hose, he had to walk about halfway to his house to bring back a bucket that he had filled on standby. He threw that on and then went and got another one, and threw that on. It seemed like the fire was out so I left, heart still pounding.
After we are home we talk about it and my hsuband and I agree he is jsut ignorent as this is the first time he has lived in the country, just ignorent of the risk. Never ever ever burn with wind, never. We sometime have to wait and wait and wait to burn becasue of the wind. Our neighbor decides that a high wind day it is jsut the right time to burn! What he doesn't realize is that the wind dries out our olive trees. So although it may have rained yesterday or the day before, our trees are very very dry because of the wind.
Man what a scare, actually my heart is starting to pound again as I write this. My husband did the same thing when we first moved here, it was a little bit windy, nothing at all like today though, and our good neighbor from up the hill walked down and told him you can only burn in certain months and additionally you can't burn when there is any wind at all. I haven't met this new neighbor only but once when i invited him and all the rest of the neighbors over for cocktails and appetizers one night. He was still under constructiion then and didn't come over. In the not to distant future I'll extend another invitation to get to know them better at which time we, and the rest of the neighbors, can share our country knowledge with them.
I'm reading the stories on the fires by you folks in Austrailia and end up with our own little scare. Good luck to everyone there, I know there are quite a few olive farms in Australia, I hope they manage to protect their farms. Please keep us posted.
