On 09.03.19 22:06, Marshland Engineering wrote: > Hi Erik > > Where do you live? Excuse me for being so ignorant on current news but I just > don't watch it any more. Too much baloney !!! I can only assume California or > Aus.
Victoria, Australia. (Dandenong Ranges, on eastern fringe of Melbourne.) The Bunyip fire is still 23 km distant, and simmering at 15274 Ha. (37743 acres), with only 58 firetrucks holding it now. The Licola fire is 41662 Ha. (102949 acres) and 32 km from the farm. The other 15 fires are smaller and more distant. Most of the 31 houses lost went last Sunday when all the evacuations took place in hot weather and winds. Reinforcements were coming in from interstate and New Zealand, but autumn weather may have reduced the need now. > We suffered an earth quake here and I know I would rather have that than a > flood or fire. One thing about quakes is that once happened, we can normally > safely rest for 100 years. To gain building approval I had to design for BAL19, that is (19 kW/m²) radiant heat flow. It can be done economically, and with 55m to the forest edge, I expect to survive fire out there. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AS3959 for BAL and the reason why. TLDR; Black Saturday: 2000 homes and 173 lives lost, ten years ago, last month. That lot came within 300m of my house. I was out of here, and very glad to have something to come back to.) Designing for FZ (Flame Zone: 100 kW/m²) would be a challenge. The 25m long side of the extension would have to withstand 7.5 megawatts of radiant heat for a couple of hours. > > Flooding, fire and tornadoes just keep coming. Where are you moving to ? To a 308 Ha. (762 acres) bush block at Munro (in Gippsland). It's been off-grid the 53 years we've had it. Destocked now, due to drought, so only kangaroos, wombats, emus, and the few rabbits which can cope with the increasing dryness remain. The 7.2 km of boundary fence is nearly a century old, so keeping that upright is an increasing workload. Steel pickets and a hand driver are a godsend as digging post holes in arid ground is too much crowbar work at my age. Unfortunately we had 2.5 mm rain while I was driving out there on Tuesday - that washed soot from the fires into the water tanks, so our only water supply is undrinkable. Forecasts do not predict rain, and we may have to wait a couple of months for anything useful to refill the tanks. Bloody Murphy scored a bullseye that day. Building as an "owner builder" saves tens of thousands of dollars, but is a bit of work, and pulling in contractors who get more work from professional builders can be tedious to the point of delaying the build quite noticeably. > Something I built from scratch. Dunno whether I'm more envious of the bike or the rain. ;-) It's a beauty, and would clearly beat the old BSA that I rode a little bit many years ago. At the back of my mind is a 4-wheeler EV to tow a 23 hp trailed mower or a modest trailer for bringing home firewood from the forest. Hopefully secondhand DC motors will begin to appear in the next few years. (The need for speed diminishes around the same time the several sets of stairs in the current house predicate a move to a flat build before long.) Erik _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
