Fire or Water?

Recently I received a reply to one of my earlier Blogs on our Bush fires over December and January. It read in part: “As I was reading your posts on the fires I had a thought. You were saying how there was a lot of fuel for it, especially because of the drought and stuff, and I was struck with the thought that it happened then because we had enough water to battle it, had it come later we couldn't have fought it. So although it was bad, it could have been much worse had it been any later - it was sent to clean up all the fuel to safe guard it later.”

I do agree that the fire did come at the theoretical worst time of the year, and did burn for around 77 days, and it did indeed burn up a lot of excess forest fuel, whilst causing only a fraction of the expected damage, and therefore we can indeed be grateful that we had the resources to control the blaze then and there and was able to keep the damage down to a minimum.

However despite the fact that the drought has not yet broken and we are now on stricter Water restrictions, I can’t help but believe that if that fire came even now, that we would not find the water to fight it somehow, even to the last drop.

Sometimes we are often left to choose between the lesser of two evils and I think a bush fire, at least in the short term, in the middle of a severe summer drought is more dangerous that having no water and having to truck it in from elsewhere.

What say you? Do you sometimes find yourself in a position where you have to make a choice between two things that under normal considerations neither would make you top 1000 list of desirable things to choose?

When you do, do you try and make the third choice, which really is no choice of all and that is to try and sit on the fence? If you do, you may just find the fence gets burnt out under you and no one will throw their water on you, because you never quite made your mind up where you truly stood. Not nice, not pretty, not even fair, but that’s life and the usual end of fence sitters.

Now I am not saying that in those times one should jump to any decision without thinking. Thinking is good and necessary, but eventually the time for thinking ends and the time for action, as apposed to re-action arises, and sometimes even this time passes eventually and you are often left in a pile of ashes with nowhere to go. How say you? Walter