The Lucindale community is again reeling after its third major blaze in three years.
Across four days in the past week, hundreds of fire fighters from SA and Vic battled the Coles fire in blue gum plantations and surrounding paddocks, about 20 kilometres south of Lucindale.
Remarkably no houses or livestock were lost due to the hard work of volunteers, but the tragic death of Happy Valley Country Fire Service brigade member, Louise Hincks was a dark day on the fireground.
She was killed when a tree fell on her.
Valuable blue gum timber, some not far off harvest, was burnt but one quarter of the 3877 hectares impacted was on Elad, a property the Seears family, Boonderoo Pastoral Company, bought less than a year ago.
They are reverting it from harvested blue gum land back into productive grazing country. The fire tore through about 1000ha of their 3160ha property.
Boonderoo's Lachie Seears says they lost a significant amount of paddock feed, along with boundary fencing.
"Even though the country that got burnt hadn't had its stumps ground, there was a lot of feed out there" he said.
"Since it was harvested in 2014 and 2015 the phalaris had all come back - we lost our autumn and winter feed wedge."
Mr Seears says the large paddock sizes gave the cattle a chance to get out of the path of the fire.
The first paddock the fire entered from the neighbouring blue gum plantation was 800ha, with 520ha of this burning within a short period of time.
Boonderoo is in the process of looking for agistment for its Angus cows, which are still calving, complicating things further.
"It is still early days, because of the nature of this fire we still have burning sticks and stuff to put out but when the calves are at an appropriate age we will look to get them out," he said.
Mr Seears said they were hugely grateful to the CFS, Vic Country Fire Authority, National Parks staff and all the other volunteers who battled the blaze, but particularly the efforts of local farm fire units.
"We have had a few goes at getting it right with the Blackford and Keilira fires but to see within half an hour of the fire starting all those utes and farm fire units rolling through the gates was just fantastic," he said.
"They did a great job coming in behind the local brigades and when the non-local brigades and strike forces came in they were showing them the local roads and access - that local knowledge was so critical in controlling the fire.
"The community has again stood up, it could have been a lot worse."
Mr Seears' thoughts were with Ms Hincks' family.
Nearby landowner, Henry Legoe says his family also considers themselves "pretty lucky" to have only had 150ha burnt on their property Ballogie.
On the first day of the fire (last Wednesday) the corner of a paddock closest to the neighbouring plantation was burnt but when it progressed to the 10ha paddock surrounding their house, Mr Legoe says there were significant resources waiting to protect their home.
"There were about 20 farm fire units north of the house waiting for it to come out of the blue gums plus firetrucks ready and the bombers and helicopters - people came from everywhere," he said.
He said they were fortunate they had time to move 90 heifers, which had been in the block next to the blue gums, preventing any stock losses.
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The following day when the blaze broke the containment lines, it swung back onto their property burning some more pasture, but Mr Legoe says they are grateful to all the volunteers for their amazing efforts minimising the area burnt.
"To see people with ploughs, dozers and graders making effective firebreaks enabled the firefighters to safely attack it," he said. "Without those efforts I have no doubt it would have kept going on our place.
"We were overwhelmed and sincerely appreciated the response and support we were given. Our thoughts are with the Happy Valley CFS crew and Louise Hincks' family and friends."
The cause of the Coles fire is still under investigation.
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