Yallingup Rural Volunteer Bush Fire Brigade
Volunteers, Serving their Community
The 2012 AGM will be held at 1100 on Sunday, the 6th of May, at the Fire Shed on Caves Road.
It will be followed by lunch at Swings & Roundabouts – funded by the Brigade.
Partners are welcome to the meeting and/or the lunch: normally the meeting will take about 2 hours.
The Agenda can be found under the Organisation:/Brigade Minutes tab above.
Several days ago there was a small running fire in some leaf litter in the lagoon road area. It was caused by a resident burning off without a permit.
The fire prompted a 000 call, but was extinguished by several of our members who live nearby.
The message here is that Permits are still required, but at the moment they are unlikely to be issued until there is some significant rain.
On Monday morning at about 1030 Dean Henry spotted a pole top fire in Caves Road between Gunyulgup and Marrinup Drives on Michael Gregg’s property. He called it into David Hunt and 000 then efficiently put out the initial leaf litter fire at the base of the pole – wearing his PPE pink flip flops.
Comms in Perth tasked both Yallingup Coastal and Yallingup Rural.
David was first on the scene, and Yallingup Coastal arrived with their LT (Kim Standish and Paul Blight) and we turned out our 1.4 with Mark Fisher, Pete Stewart, Duncan Gardner, Bruce Lawrence and Joe Burley. When they arrived the fire was dropping charcoal to the ground but there were no more spot fires.
Western Power arrived 10 minutes after being called, isolated the power to the pole in another 10 minutes, and re-established power 10 minutes after that.
As you can see from the photo, the mighty 1.4 had plenty of pressure to deal with the situation. Alternatively, if you don’t look too closely at the photo, it could be Joe demonstrating that he doesn’t have prostate problems.
Interestingly, that pole was adjacent to the one which started the fire two years ago that burned into Kangaroo Parade.
An efficient job, well done by all concerned.
The fast response by Rural and the other local brigades and DEC Sunday stopped a fire on Wardanup Hill from escaping into the national park and also destroying houses on private property surrounded by the park.
The SMS went out at 10:49 and by 11:05 tankers were attacking the fire. They quickly set up a defensive line along a fire break and stopped the fire there. By 11:30 they were joined by a helitac which carried out numerous attacks on the eastern flank. The fire was under control by around 1:00 although a wind change caused a further brief flare up.
The 4.4 with Tich driving and Stevo, Annie, Doug, Duncan and Mark F was the first Rural tanker to arrive, quickly followed by the light tanker with Joe and Bruce. The 1.4 was later sent with Andy, David W, Dave T and Tony C. Blaze gave a helping hand to the Dunsborough crew.
David H returned in the evening to monitor and Joe and Bruce returned with the 1.4 Monday morning to mop up.
It was thought the fire might have been started by a cigarette or the previous night’s bbq.
More pictures available here.
Three shifts and the 4.4 attended the Capel fires Thursday and Friday, March 1 & 2. The first shift, with Matty, Stevo, Joe, Noel and Tony S, left around 1pm.
On the way down they were told that the Vasse truck was “lost” and there were four fires burning. Later they learned the truck had got bogged in a collapsed rabbit warren and jammed against a paperbark. The truck had to be evacuated but the crew were ok.
Our crew spent the afternoon initially trying to stop the fire getting into the larger trees and then watching out for hop-overs and patrolling the fire’s perimeters. The highlight was probably knocking over a very large burning stag that turned out to have a large bee’s nest in it that tormented the firefighters for the next 24 hours.
The second crew started around 8pm and consisted of Annie, Ian Morrison, Andy, Blaze and Chris A. They worked steadily all night blacking out in the Southern Sector with a couple of races to hop overs well into the bush. They had a lot of pump practice with 8 fill ups from the muddy dam. They appreciated the crew of 5 as the heavy hose got heavier by 2am. The highlight was Annie being sung happy birthday over the radio.
The last crew of David, Mark P, Pete and Alan worked from 8 am to 3pm blacking out, putting out burning stags and chasing down breakouts. By then the truck was known as “the Yallingup Heavy”.
Most of the water came from a very muddy dam and at times it appeared the brigade had come up with a new firefighting technic of “mudding out” . Unfortunately the pump didn’t enjoy it and was in for repairs on Saturday. Although it was mostly pasture, parts were covered with soft sand, making driving very difficult.
Yallingup Rural Volunteer Bush Fire Brigade 