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“My daughter came around at about 1 o’clock in the morning and said ‘I’ve been told I have to get out’,” Yarloop resident Helen Alexander said.
“She wasn’t told by the hierarchy, it was just the neighbours knocking on the door.
“Nobody else in the street was told, just her.
“It must’ve been an omen because hers was the only house in the street that burnt down.”
On January 7, the day the Waroona bushfires hit Yarloop, Ms Alexander was carrying on with her life.
Her daughter had knocked on her door abot 1am that morning to tell her she had been told by her neighbours to leave Yarloop.
She had been keeping an eye on the fire and she had packed her belongings just in case, but Ms Alexander was waiting for an official evacuation order from authorities to leave, which hadn’t arrived yet.
That morning, as she was walking up to a friend’s house to have a cup of tea the warning arrived.
“Tracy Osborne, who is in the fire brigade was coming up the road and stopped me and said ‘what are you doing?’, Ms Alexander said.
“I told her and she said 'I’m going to get my kids and I’m getting out of here’.
“I thought well, she is in the fire brigade, she must know what the hell is going on.”
So Ms Alexander told her friend and rushed back home, where she gathered the few things she had packed and prepared to leave town with her family.
They first sheltered in Harvey but after an hour they were evacuated so the family sought shelter in Eaton.
The next morning, Ms Alexander received the news that despite losing six massive sheds with irreplaceable items, her house was still standing.
Her daughter’s wasn’t.
“She was absolutely devastated,” Ms Alexander said.
“She is a single mother and she and her daughter lost everything.
“She does work, she does have a job, she’s not on a pension or anything.
“She’s worked hard, very, very hard for all she’s got.”
Ms Alexander said she was grateful they could leave the town in time, but she said she was disappointed at the way the situation was handled by the authorities.
“It’s just bloody ridiculous; everybody should’ve been evacuated by two o’clock in the afternoon,” she said.
“They could see it coming.
“We had one a couple of years ago that wasn’t anywhere near this one was and they told us to get out of town.
“I think a lot of people have got a lot to answer for.”
However, she sees a bright future for Yarloop.
“I was told the other day, how true it is I don’t know, that there’s an estate agent in Waroona who can’t get enough properties to sell to people,” she said.
“That’s what you are going to see over the next three, four, five years.
“The people who have been here a long time, we are just going to sit back and watch all these new houses being built.
“It’s going to be like a new suburb, except it’s going to be on a bigger scale with bigger blocks, probably slightly bigger houses.
“It can never be what it was but it can still be a vibrant little village, and I think that is what it’s going to be.”