“[At around midday] we were cleaning up the tennis court for a tennis weekend – and I just looked at my hand, and it was orange; I looked up and there was the first smoke.”
There is still an immediate threat to lives and homes, and we urge anyone in the Emergency Warning area to leave.Credit: DFES
Dixon said a few hours after he first noticed the smoke and activated his perimeter sprinklers to try to protect the grounds as per his fire plan, the fire was at his doorstep.
Their house was spared from the blaze.
“The spotting was just dropping everywhere – every fragment and leaf that we hadn’t picked up was catching fire,” he said, battling tears as he spoke.
“Our neighbours lost almost everything, their beautiful two-storey house on their lake; that went apparently 15 minutes after us.
“It just ripped through, we’d had 14 millimetres of rain in five months, so the forest was tinder-dry and the wind was up to almost 40-50 kilometres an hour.”
Klemm said the steep and hilly terrain with thick forest and old-growth pine was very dry and difficult to access.
The terrain also posed a risk to firefighters: one light tanker has been damaged by a falling tree, while the rapid damage assessment teams also had to be pulled out at one stage on Sunday.
“It’s not a safe place to be, and it has created some delays in getting the rapid damage assessment analysis done,” Klemm said.
He said the large air tanker had been a “critical defensive strategy” in protecting homes.
Various parts of the region are under bushfire emergency-level warning with others under watch and act and advice alerts, including Waroona and Pinjarra, whose communities have already known bushfire devastation in past years.
Klemm expected the mop-up from the blaze to continue for the next four to seven days.
The fire follows an emergency-level blaze in Perth’s north-eastern semi-rural suburbs last Tuesday that razed more than 690 hectares of land, caused a mass evacuation, came dangerously close to homes and claimed outbuildings as well as a historic building, and another emergency-level fire on Friday in the outer south-eastern suburbs threatened lives and homes.
Authorities implored the public to create fire plans at the start of this month, predicting an unprecedented extension of the state’s southern bushfire season throughout autumn.