“When we saw the helicopters dipping in the dam in front of our house we knew it was serious,” Wortley Drive resident Karen Bull said of the bush fire that threatened her home on Monday November 7.
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Mrs Bull and her family were prepared for the fire, which began in Kundabung on Saturday November 5, burning through 4228 hectares of bush land towards Crescent Head before being contained on Wednesday.
“We’ve been through fires here before so we have a plan – get the kids out first, then animals and birth certificates,” she said.
“We even hooked our caravan up on Sunday night so we’d have somewhere to live if our place burned down.”
The Bull’s woke up on Monday morning to thick smoke around their home and were evacuating chickens when three fire engines drove onto their property, followed by police.
“We were just loading the last of our chooks in the trailer when the police came racing in and said, ‘it’s time to get out!’” Mrs Bull said. “They said to us, ‘we need the names and numbers of everyone standing here and we need to do it quickly.”
“Then they asked me for my date of birth and I said, “why do you need to know that?” They said, ‘in case we have to identify your body if you get caught here.”
Mrs Bull and her husband, Roger, relocated the chooks to a friend’s property and returned to Wortley Drive to obtain updated information from firefighters.
“We got back and the street was full of people who had driven in to look at the fire,” she said. “There were at least 20 cars parked, just watching the action. One of our neighbours found people on his lawn when he came back to grab some of his stuff. He had to ask them to get off his property.”
“We were a bit worried about looters!”
The Bull family’s friends and community showered them with love and support throughout their ordeal.
“The community support was unreal,” Mrs Bull said. “People I didn’t even know were stopping me at the school and offering us a place to stay, and we had friends driving out to help us.”
Mrs Bull praised the efforts of firefighters who protected the houses on Wortley Drive – many of them volunteers.
“They need to get paid,” she said. “These people took time out from their paid employment to save our houses.”
“They were so approachable and not rude at all. They were honest about the situation but tried so hard not to make us panic.”
“The bulldozer drivers also need a mention – they did an amazing job.”
