If the accepted wisdom about adversity revealing a person's true colours is correct, Susan Duncan's bushfire plan delivers the full rainbow. The journalist and author is recalling the summer of 2019, when fires encircled the home she shares with her husband, Bob Story, on a farm in the hills behind the NSW mid-north coast.
“We'd been in drought for three years so there was no water in the dam,” she recalls. “There was a horseshoe of fire surrounding us and it just kept coming closer. I asked Bob when we were going to leave and he said 'not today'. I wasn't about to leave him, so I put two deck chairs, some food for the dogs, a couple of bottles of bubbles for me and a bottle of red for him in the bunker. I figured if we were going to die, we'd die happy.”
As a combustion engineer, Bob had faith that the fire would most likely pass quickly over their home and they would survive in the underground shelter that houses the batteries and other hardware including a back-up generator for their solar-powered, off-grid home. As it turned out, a change in wind direction a few hours earlier than predicted gave the Rural Fire Service the window they needed to come in and make
