Bushfire!
Today was the third day in a row of our local heatwave - we had 44, 42, and 44 today, but today was forecast to have very strong winds as well, making conditions less than ideal for people who don’t enjoy bushfires. Alas, that’s how it came to be with apparently more than 60 fires across the state today. We had one turn up just to the west of us, out near Natimuk, I think it started around 3pm.
That’s not great for the people there, but not great for us either - the wind was coming from the north-west blowing it down through Natimuk, but when the wind swung around to coming from the south-west it looked like it’d blow the entire fire front straight at us.
We had all our shit ready to go, but took encouragement from the fact that they were still evacuating people to Horsham, so it felt slightly unlikely we’d have to leave. But still, we were ready if need be. There was a soft recommendation for people in our area (the west side of Horsham, near the grasslands) to move east of Bennett road, but we opted to stay put and just be ready to leave town completely if it looked like we’d have to.
The weather was absolute arse though, the swamp cooler kept up until it reached the point where it was blowing smoke into the house, so we switched it off. Almost immediately though the house became unbearable, but I realized that we had - despite the clouds of smoke - copious amounts of solar capacity free, so we fired up the two old split systems and let them have a go. This kept the house quite comfortable until well into the evening, when we started to look like we’d be dipping into buying electricity… I figured I don’t need to be contributing to any demand surge issues, and the smoke had cleared out a bit so we switched back to the evaporative cooler.
We never lost power, and the next day there were several news articles about the power from solar+wind helping the state cruise through the heatwave event with very few demand issues at all.
At about 8pm or so they downgraded us from dark orange to light orange, with the fire apparently only making it as far as Vectis, so we were able to relax a bit, but it was a bit of a worrisome day. It remains to be seen what sort of damage was done to Natimuk though.
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