It’s rare that I get the opportunity to promote something that is so personally relevant to me and my country. This is a sponsored post about bushfire safety, preparation and education with particular emphasis on the health and safety of pets. In order for you to understand the importance of bushfire safety, I want to share my story of the Canberra bush fires in 2003 on the 10 year anniversary of the event.

In the summer of 2003 I was 19 years old and living in Canberra with my parents. My mate, who was a movie reviewer for the local paper, had taken me to see two back to back movies on Saturday January 18th. After we spent roughly 6 hours in the cinema, we were full to the gills on Chicken-in-a-Biskit. We stepped outside discussing our evening plans. Basically buying a case of beer and heading to my house because my parents were away in Sydney. We stopped dead in our tracks when we got outside. The air was hot and dry. The afternoon sun looked like a burning ball of red lava and where the sky should have been blue, it was bright orange. Even more terrifying, there wasn’t a soul on the street. We wordlessly fumbled for our chunky mobile phones and saw that we each had at least 20 missed calls. This was before the era of smartphones, twitter, Facebook and mobile internet, back when you actually turned your mobile phone off because the vibrate mode was comparable to a jack hammer. We had no idea what the hell was going on. My brother answered the phone. ‘Canberra’s on fire. You have to come home. Where the hell have you been? I’ve been calling you for four hours!‘

Image by John Lafferty Photography

I jumped in the car and drove along the bush lined highway back to my house. The streets were completely empty. It was quiet. The radio didn’t work in my car and my cassette tapes had melted in the heat so all I could hear was the whirring thunk of my flip clock. As I reached my suburb the sky got brighter and hotter and the smell of smoke started seeping through my defunct air conditioner. The house next to my  bus stop was on fire. Completely, totally on fire. I cruised by the house thinking how odd it was to see such a huge fire that no one was fighting. When I got home my brother was in complete survival mode. He’d filled the bath with water, locked our dog and cat in separate rooms and was spraying the front of the house with the hose. I was extremely confused. I couldn’t figure out why we didn’t get any warning. The electricity went out and it was pitch black dark at 3pm in the afternoon. It was like night-time. I grabbed the giant flashlight that my dad kept on his side of the bed, finally understanding what it was there for. We heard sirens outside our house and a mega phone announcement saying we had to evacuate the area. The phone rang. It was my auntie saying we needed to go to her house. I said okay. The phone rang again and it was my dad’s best mate, Jeremy. He said we needed to go to his house. I said no, we have to go to my auntie’s house. He firmly told me that her suburb was on fire and that we needed to go to him. I said okay. The phone rang again. It was Dad. He said we had to go to Jeremy. I said okay. 

My mother is borderline OCD which made our escape extremely easy. We grabbed the three neatly packed and stacked boxes of family photos, my parents wedding album in its place on the shelf, my mother’s jewellery box, the dog and the cat and hopped in my brother’s car. We lived in a patch of about 100 houses in the middle of a golf course and there was only one road out, each side of the road flanked by bush. Bush that was on fire. We creeped slowly through the pea soup fog of smoke, what should have been a 5 minute drive turning into a 45 minute drive. At one stage we were stopped by a wall of flames. My brother shrugged his shoulders, put his foot down on the accelerator and drove us right out of there. He was very brave. The dog and cat were peeing all over the back seat and the radio was playing Enya in-between the warning sirens and terrifying instructions to evacuate the city. At this stage we actually burst out laughing because it was so surreal, driving through flames to the strains of ‘Sail away, sail away, sail away….‘. We got away safely, with both of our pets.

Four people died in those fires and 500 families lost their homes. Our home was safe, but plenty of homes near us were razed to the ground.
Thanks to the foresight of my brother and the anal retentive housekeeping of my mother, we were able to get our pets out safely. Our cat’s carrier was tucked neatly in the cupboard in the laundry instead of buried in the garage under a pile of junk and my brother had locked the dog and cat in separate rooms at least 8 hours prior to our evacuation. We were also able to actually see what we were doing using my father’s flashlight which has been next to his bed for my entire life. I’m pretty sure it’s still there now. When it comes to bushfires, you cannot be too prepared.

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How To Keep Your Pet Safe During A Bushfire.

* Confine your pets early. As early as possible. Keep them in a secure room, on a lead or in a carrier. My brother had confined our pets, but they were loose in their own rooms. Let me tell you, trying to get a highly stressed cat in a carrier in a hurry is not a job I’d like to try again soon.

* Have wet towels handy to cover and protect your pets.

* Make sure they have plenty of water to drink.

* Make sure your pet is micro chipped.

* Organize a safe place for your pet to go if you decide to leave early. A relative, friend or kennel in a safe area.

* Practice how you will relocate your pets. It takes longer than you think. Both our cat and dog behaved like total lunatics (rightly so, they were stressed) but it certainly threw a spanner in the works when our normally obedient dog starting sprinting around the house and we couldn’t catch her. Be prepared for your pets to behave erratically.

* Make a Pet Bushfire Relocation Kit. Full details are here. If you have a kit ready to go it will greatly increase your pet’s chance of survival in a bushfire.

There’s another, more serious reason why pre-planning is so important when it comes to pets. Bushfires are scary. They are fast, unforgiving and unpredictable. Near the golf course that I lived on there were horse paddocks where local girls kept their horses. When we were driving out, through the flames, we saw three or four young women in the burning paddock, trying to lead their bucking horses to safety. When we heard the death tally the next day, we knew that they all got out safely. It wasn’t until a few months later, when I was working at a bead store when a young woman came in with burns all over her arms, chest and face. She’d lost the tips of all her fingers and her right arm had been fused to her torso to re-grow the damaged skin. She was there to learn a Chinese knotting technique in a class I was teaching to keep her hands moving to improve the elasticity in her damaged skin. I didn’t ask what had happened because I knew who she was. I’d read her story in a magazine. She’d tried to save her horse and had suffered burns to 66% of her body. Her horse died and now she can’t lift her arm higher than her waist.

I understand that people are attached to their pets and the thought of losing them in a bushfire is devastating. That’s why it’s so important to pre-plan and leave early. For the sake of your pets and yourself. In an emergency, a human life is always worth more than the life of a pet. I know that there are people out there who love their pets like humans but please consider this. My best friend, Fliss has a sausage dog called Norton that she adores. To a level that’s almost annoying. Norton’s life is so important to her that she has pet insurance for him because if he needed an expensive life saving operation, she knows she would not be able to deny him that. If Fliss died saving Norton, there’s not one person on this earth who would think that’s a good trade. She’d be devastated if she lost him in a bushfire but it would be nothing compared to the devastation that everyone in Fliss’ life would feel if we lost her trying to save him. You may not think that your life is worth more than your pet’s but I can guarantee that every person in your life does.

If you pre-plan, get out early, practice your pet relocation and be prepared it will give you and your pet the best chances of survival.

Visit the CFA website for some great resources and information about bushfire preparation you can also like them on Facebook and follow them on Twitter for more updates and information about the fire season. Seriously follow them on Twitter. It would have been SO USEFUL back in 2003.

Keep safe and be prepared.

* After I published this post Norton posted a response.What a drama queen.

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