Bush Fires

I live in Australia - Western Sydney to be precise.

Our winters are mild and our summers are hot, dry and windy.

It isn't even summer yet, and we have already lost over 200 homes to bush fires in NSW, the state I live in. While my home and my horse are not in immediate danger right now from fires, the whole of Sydney is covered in an eerie smoke haze.

I can smell smoke while sitting inside at my desk at work. I can smell smoke in my hair and on my clothes.

We had an amazing HUGE cloud of smoke billowing out over Sydney last Thursday, it reached over 100km (62 miles) away and dominated the skyline for hours and hours and into the night. The photos below were taken from over 60km away from the fire front.

This is Australia. This is summer. They call us the sunburnt country and it is for a very logical reason.

Trying to load a horse onto a float to escape from this is almost impossible. Natalie recently had a fire less than a km away from Gracie and luckily the wind was blowing it away from them because it took Nat and her boyfriend over 3 hours to get Gracie on the float with helicopters dropping water nearly over the top of them and flames reaching high into the sky, fire trucks and police screaming around the streets and thick black smoke around them. And Gracie is normally a self loader!

Above photo taken during the fires last Thursday across the valley from Springwood.

These are the risks we take to live in this lucky, wealthy, free and awesome country.