Friday’s extreme fire conditions and statewide total fire ban has raised one question for many Yarra Ranges locals. ‘Should I stay or should I go?’
With many fires dotted around the Yarra Ranges from Warburton to Seville, to Tecoma, the four days since Thursday 8 January were a whirlwind for locals and travellers alike.
With a northerly breeze blowing the blistering flames in Alexandra towards Healesville and the Upper Yarra Valley, locals had varying responses to the threat.
When it comes to staying and going, Tecoma local Tanya chooses leaving every time.
“It felt a bit shocking but I took the warnings from Vic Emergency very seriously,” Tanya said.
“As someone who is newer to the Hills, I have been aware of fire risk for a number of years and we often go away around this time of year so we haven’t really had to deal with it straight off the bat in January,” she said.
“Our plan was always to go on an extreme day based on the weather.”
Friday’s hot and windy forecast had Tanya and her family packing their bags to get out early Friday morning.
“Once it was forecasted to be super hot and windy, we’re like, ‘now we’ve got to go,’” Tanya said.
“I felt really anxious in the lead up to it. I wanted to go sooner, almost for my own peace of mind, but we didn’t actually leave until Friday about 10 o’clock.”
Upon speaking with her neighbours and other Tecoma and Hills residents via a WhatsApp group, Tanya found out that it was roughly a 50-50 split on who was staying and who was leaving on Friday.
“My neighbours on both sides had mixed reactions as to what they were doing, but everyone had sort of clocked that it was getting a bit more serious than a standard hot day,” Tanya said.
“Half of our people were still going to work and doing the usual things and others were like, ‘no, we’re going to go’.”
Tanya and her family rented out an Airbnb in Blackburn for the day and night.
When it came to navigating her fire plan with her family of two preteen children and her husband, Tanya said “I underestimated how my state of stress would affect my kids.”
“There was a bit of arguing in our family, getting ready to go and that sort of thing. And they were very concerned about our pets.
“Giving everyone in the family a job to do really helped.”
Finding accommodation that would house the family cats was, in its own right, a tricky task for Tanya to navigate.
“I think in future, I just need to find a few catteries that I can call in a string of 10 minutes to see if I can get them in well ahead of us going because it is so much easier to move without pets,” Tanya said.
When it came to leaving, Tanya noted her decision relied on the navigation of multiple moving factors.
“I probably would have liked to go a bit sooner, but it was confusing because if it was an extreme day, but if we had a few cool days before, I don’t know if my decision would have been different,” Tanya said.
“There are many factors you’ve got to consider, and also what if we left for the day thinking it’s just an extreme day, but then it turns catastrophic, and we’ve left our pets and certain valuables behind?”
According to Tanya, emotions were heightened on Friday.
“Emotionally, I just kind of stressed at seeing the VicEmergency App going off a lot,” Tanya said.
“On Friday morning as well, there was a small fire quite close to us in Tecoma, and that wasn’t pleasant because we could smell it as well.
“Just waiting it out was not fun.”
Additionally, Tanya noted that choosing to leave takes a financial toll on top of an emotional one.
“Having to flip the credit card to stay just in case, I can see how that adds up,” she said.
In future, Tanya will make sure everything her family needs to leave in a fire emergency will be packed in a bag near the front door for the rest of the summer.
“We are also going to have a post-leaving chat with my family to kind of decide how we all feel and how we’ll be next time, as well as what our absolute trigger for leaving is,” Tanya said.
“I do think extreme trending towards catastrophic is definitely when I would consider leaving.”
Yarra Junction resident Angela Jade took a different approach on Friday.
“I was on a rescue mission. I drove into it,” Angela said.
“The police can’t stop you. They just say ‘We advise you not to.’”
Driving through roadblocks and past towering flames, Angela was on a mission to save the livestock that were stranded on her mother-in-law’s farm.
She and her family managed to save all of the livestock, moving all of the animals to a farm in Healesville.
According to Angela, the fire would need to hit Healesville or Warburton before she considered leaving.
“For us here in Yarra Junction, there was no reason for us to leave. We would have just been congesting the roads and making it harder for people who actually need to get out to leave,” Angela said.
“We didn’t have our bags packed just yet.
“We actually had family from Alexandra and Buxton come and stay with us. They were escaping the fires.”
Angela noted that leaving without being in an immediate fire threat can be dangerous.
“When we were on the roads driving up there to do that, the amount of cars that were leaving from places that they didn’t need to be leaving from caused bottlenecks at intersections,” Angela said.
“If you feel uncomfortable, get out and leave, and if you have a lot of animals, start moving them out, but when you have got a lot of emergency services who are trying to get people to safety, you need to leave the roads as free as possible.
“If people who are 50 and 60 km away from the fires start to leave, it means that people who are closer can’t get out.
“It is actually unsafe for people to be leaving when they don’t need to.”
Healesville resident Cindy De Luca owns a lifestyle property up in Yarck where the fires raged on Friday.
Despite many farms around the area losing everything, Cindy’s beloved family shed has remained intact.
“The whole area up there has been wiped out but our shed and our main area, our buildings where we live, has all survived, thank God,” Cindy said.
“We have spent 25 years making it beautiful and making it our getaway and our friends and family have just loved it.
“The bush was amazing, just an amazing oasis of bird life and koalas and wombats and kangaroos and deer and just unbelievable. It’s so beautiful and now it’s all, it’s all gone.”
With many Yarra Ranges residents owning property in places such as Marysville and Yarck, local townships within the shire are also feeling the burn.
“There’s quite a few Healesville residents that actually have property up there. We have our own little community,” Cindy said.
Cindy looks after her elderly father and took him to her house on Friday to be ready to leave if needed.
“It is just so stressful, I suppose one of the big things is not knowing what’s going on up there,” Cindy said.
“As soon as somebody gives you a bit of information, a guy who I know from the CFA would send me a map and show me the area, and we would see that the fire hasn’t hit our place yet.
“It’s like, oh, this is so good. But you can see it’s coming, you see it was going to be inevitable, but you’re just hopeful that if it does, once it does pass us, it will, you know, we might be able to save some things.”
Cindy found out from a neighbour who stayed back during the fires that her shed and main area had survived the flames.
Cindy believes that it was some pre-emptive slashing and gutter clean-outs that protected her shed.
“We got the whole main area slashed and did as much fire preparation as we could when we left the place after Christmas,” Cindy said.
Now Cindy is trying to organise a trip back to her farm to assess the damage.
“I want to salvage some items of value out of the shed because of looters,” Cindy said.
“All the fences are gone, so we want to make sure we get everything out.”
