Fire break

Last Monday afternoon the heavy machinery arrived. Then early on Tuesday morning a bloke arrived to demolish a small strip of bush near our garage. The attachment on the bulldozer shreds the trees and turns them into sticks and mulch spread across the area. So it's a slightly ugly scar on our land right now... but it means the trees are now further away from the buildings. And the chooks and other birds have been enjoying it...

Everyone living here needs to have a fire plan. We all need to know how to prepare our property as best we can in case of bush fire and know in advance what we will do. Our current plan is to go early. Twice last summer we got ready to go as fires approached. We grabbed our box of documents like passports, birth and marriage certificates and insurance papers, got the cat carrier and dogs ready to put in the car. Once we had plenty of time so we packed a small bag of clothes each. Lucky for us, the fires didn't get close in the end. Others in our town were not so lucky.

For anyone in and near Franklin: please come along to the fire awareness evening to be held at the Fire Station in Franklin on Monday 9 December at 6.30pm.