Christmas in the tower

It was Christmas Day and 35 degrees when I saw the smoke, rising lazy and blue. Mt Pingerup loomed behind it, almost framing the smoke in its centre.

I was feeling a bit maudlin that morning. It was hot, the granite of Mt Frankland acting as a heat sink. My family were gathering for lunch, catching up after a long time spent apart. The tourist family who has climbed the mountain every Christmas Day for years with chocolate and beer for the fire tower attendant (should I declare that?) hadn’t come this year. So when that smoke showed itself, it made all the missing out feel somewhat worthwhile.

I plotted out the fire’s position on the map. My first fire of the season! Whoo! Mt Pingerup is 25 kilometres from the tower so at my guesstimate the smoke was 21 kilometres. With a shaky hand, I wrote out the coordinates in the tower log book, then called the office on the radio.

  “Walpole office, Frankland tower, smoke report.”

  “Frankland tower, go ahead.”

  “Time is 1117, at 259 degrees, approximately 21 kilometres. It’s a bravo 111 and it definitely shouldn’t be there!”

He repeated the information back to me. This is good practice in the event of a miscommunication. Then I called the spotter pilot, “Frankland spotter, Frankland tower, did you get a copy on that?”

  “Sure did,” the spotter replied. “What bearing from the tower was that again?”

  “259, over near Mt Pingerup.”

  “Heading over now,” she said. She was at the opposite, eastern end of the district.

That wait between calling in a smoke and the spotter confirming the position of a fire - or that it is a fire and not just someone spreading lime in a paddock - can be excruciating. All I could do was watch the plane’s slow trajectory towards the smoke on my phone’s Flight Radar app.

The duty officer called me. “What’s it doing Sarah?” I knew he’d be on the phone to crew too, dragging them away from Christmas lunch and needed to know how many fire trucks were required.

  “There’s no increase. It’s just mooching about, still blue.”

I’ve seen fires out that way start spotting around themselves within fifteen minutes. They act like fire crackers going off in weather like this but today’s one was very quiet. Ordnance block had a prescribed burn through it last year and that made all the difference.

Finally, on my phone I could see the spotter circling and then she called it in. “Walpole office, Frankland spotter, smoke report.”

Ha! I thought as I plotted her grid reference on my map. 21 kilometres. Nailed it! On the radios I could hear the crews talking as they headed out to Deep Road. Within an hour the fire was put out. It was a lightning strike apparently, from ten days previous. The fire had sat, inert and dormant in the days before Christmas and jumped up to party on Christmas Day.