Always a fearsome sight, especially by the farmers, as their farms could go up in smoke.
Imagine if you spent your lifetime on your farm slogging and working hard every day and a fire can destroy it all in a matter of minutes.
As we left the house this morning, we saw a heat glaze on the mountain range and we thought that it was going to be one of those very hot days.
It was not to be, as the glaze was in fact heat and smoke from a fire behind the mountains. We do not have the details yet, But I know that there are many farms behind the mountain and also many farms on our side of the mountain. Thankfully the wind was blowing towards the mountains and not in our direction, but that did not stop the fire from trying to creep over the mountain on our side.
See the haze? This is what it looked like when we left this morning.
I drove out to my favorite spot to look for the fire. Can you see anything at the right hand side of the mountains?
Can you see it now? The fire was creeping over the mountain in a valley towards our side.
Here below is a closer look.
At the right is the fire coming over the mountain and at the left is the white building that is the wine cellars on a farm.
But luckily the fire creep was stopped by the heroes in the next picture.
Running far off with a bucket of water to douse the fire.
And here coming in for a re-fill of water in the bucket.
Then swooping around to go and have another water drop.
My time was up as we had a meeting to attend to, but you can still see the hazy smoke on this mountain, as we drove past for the meeting.
I cannot tell you how much I adore the "Working on fire" teams. They are all well trained and experienced fire fighters, and it takes a sackful of bravery to stand at the face of a bush fire flame that rises 20 meters up in the air.
Later on we heard that they were indeed fighting 3 different fires in the mountains today. The heat of summer and the strong winds are very conducive to starting fires and thankfully working on fire have their own light fire spotter plane up doing patrols over the landscapes every day.
These guys are so good that they have even been sent out to other countries to help when they have big fires.
Thanks to them we are safe this side of the mountains and we hope and pray that the fire on the other side was on the mountains and not on the farms.
You can read more about working on fire in the link below.
Source
And That's All Friends.
Photos by Zac Smith-All Rights Reserved,
Camera: Canon Powershot SX70HS Bridge camera.
