FIRE ripped through John Lush’s property yesterday, destroying everything in its path, but the Mallala farmer still says his family is “luckier than we could have been”.
The former SA Farmers Federation president managed to save his home, but the fire destroyed his son’s house next door, and took out most of his family’s farm machinery and unharvested crops.
“It’s probably one of the worst fire days I’ve seen in my lifetime. It was pretty horrific – the winds were catastrophically strong,” Mr Lush said.
Despite initial attempts to fight outbreaks in paddocks, he had to flee to safer ground when the firefront approached.
“It burnt across the countryside that quick we couldn’t fight it out in the paddocks so we just regrouped back at the house,” he said.
“We lost the first house so we moved on to the second one and we were able to save that, just. We’ve lost all our crop, most of our machinery and our house. It’s not good.”
Mr Lush was first aware of the fire not long after it broke out near Pinery at midday yesterday.
“It was burning in a south-easterly direction and heading sort of for Mallala from Pinery,” he said. “As it got level with our place the wind turned and came in from the south-west and blew it straight towards us, and that’s when we knew we were in big trouble.
“We tried to fight it as best we could – and we’ve got pretty good firefighting gear. We’ve got an ex-Army fire unit here that’s fully equipped, but we had no hope of fighting this fire, it was just too strong.
“We drove in onto our grain pad which is all gravel and hunkered down and waited until the fire went over, which was horrific.
“When the actual firefront went through, you couldn’t see the bullbar on the front of the ute when you were sitting in the ute – the visibility was zero. The wind speed, my guess is 80 kilometres an hour at least. It was just howling through and took dirt and embers and flame and everything with it, and for that period of time you couldn’t move, you couldn’t see, you couldn’t do anything.”
Once the firefront had passed and some visibility returned, attention turned to extinguishing blazes all around the house.
“Our fire preparation was good, we’ve got all the area around the house mown – there’s no grass or anything – but the fire was still a big threat because the embers travel through the air.
“We’ve got a car garage with three vehicles in it with fully closed doors, and when we opened the door to see if they were alright there were embers right across the cement floor under everything. We had to give that a quick sweep of water to put that out or we would’ve lost three cars, and then the car garage caught alight on top of the roof so we had to put that out otherwise the house would have gone.
“We had all the house gutters blocked up and full of water, and that probably helped save it because as the embers slid off the roof then they fell into the water in the gutters and that put them out. I’m just amazed we didn’t get any embers in the roof cavity, which would have burnt the house. We were lucky – or we were luckier than we could’ve been.”
He said neighbours in the surrounding area had fared much worse.
“My son lives next door and he lost his house. Two or three of our neighbours lost their houses on the eastern side, and on the western side there was another five or six houses gone. I think there are 20 houses around here gone, so there’s a lot of damage.”
The family was well into its 2800-hectare harvest, but 1000ha of unharvested crops were wiped out. Just one tractor escaped the fire, while several were burnt, along with a header, chaser bin and mother bin.
“We keep everything well insured, our crops are all insured – we’ve already had the assessors here this morning and they’ve very positive about the coverage, so I think we’ll be okay from that point of view. The real dilemma is the mess we’ve got to clean up – burnt down sheds and trees falling everywhere and houses to rebuild – it’s going to be a long-term project.
“We’ve got one tractor left so we’re going to hook that onto a cultivator and cultivate some of this ground up and stop the dust that’s swirling across the paddocks.
“We’ve lost all our ground cover, so it’s just a swirling mess of dust and ash, and that’s something I hate to see because it damages the land for a while.”
He said the road to recovery would be long and hard, but said the community spirit was alive and well.
“This area is going to take a while to recover, because everything as far as you can see is just burnt,” he said. “There’s headers and tractors burnt out everywhere you look and spot fires and smoke still going up and dust in the air – it’s like a war zone really.
“Country people and city people have been ringing up and offering any assistance they can. Something like this really brings people together. I’ve got 50 messages on my phone that I haven’t got around to answering, all offering help and showing their concern.”
