Those nine dreaded words

In the last few weeks, a backhoe and dump truck, accompanied by a crew with shovels, have been cleaning the roadside ditches.

But if they’ve been cleaning them, the water should flow freely, no? Let’s take a look at the culvert (red arrow).

The culvert is black plastic. Here we can look into it from the top because the previous government worker, with a grader, sliced off the top of it. Do you see any sign of water inside it? No, you don’t: bone dry.

Likewise on the other side: standing water.

This is because the government workers didn’t just clean the ditches, they deepened them, to below the level of the drain pipe. Stagnant water, mosquitoes. Lovely.

And this is how far they got into trashing (note standing water) the ditch in front of our house. Why did they stop? Lunch time, I guess. A week ago.

“We’re from the government and we’re here to help.”

After the fire: strange

It’s fascinating walking our normal dog walk route and noticing the changes – and anomalies – since the fires. Here the plastic part of a broom – in a burned area – is neither charred nor melted, while the wooden handle – extending into an unburned area – is completely burned. 

I guess it’s possible someone moved it since the fire two days ago, but we’ve seen no one the last few days, nor any signs of activity other than firefighting in a very few places.

A story ended by the fire

11 June 2016: This afternoon, walking a slightly different route than normal, I spotted a pine tree starting over — lots of trees were lost to fire several years ago. You have to wonder how much of the existing root system feeds this. Or did it sprout from seed in the rotting trunk? I’ll have to look more closely.

5 May 2017: Pine trees don’t regrow from stumps, unlike eucalyptus trees. But you wouldn’t know that from looking at this. Apparently a pine cone sprouted inside the rotting stump. How it fares as the stump continues to rot will be interesting to watch!

3-½ years later, our hopes of seeing the root structure ended. The rotting host stump burned, consuming the roots of the young tree, now four meters tall.

The fire

The dogs were understandably confused yesterday when they encountered something never before seen on the dog walk.

By the end of the walk, we looked back and saw that the brush fire had reached the trees. We were not at all sure we’d have any trees remaining the next morning.

But somehow the fire died down, leaving charred trunks and smoldering stumps today.

The “Boo!” bear stump had already degraded seriously since my photo of it almost three years ago. Not much left of it now.

Some stumps were still aflame. This one has burned underground (note the crater)

Other stumps burned completely, above and below ground, leaving holes.

And strangely, many of the paths we followed were untouched.

Here’s a sapling that was burned in half, but note that the very flammable pine needles nearby were untouched. All in all, very few trees were destroyed.

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An ant colony revealed to have been built around branches of a bush.

Overall, a quite surreal experience.