Family have close call after random fire rips through paddock prompting calls for fire safety awareness

Scott Campbell was leaving for Griffith on Saturday when, glancing down the road, he noticed smoke rising over the trees.

At first he thought it was just his neighbours burning off, but in the next few moments a woman frantically pulled over in front of him, alerting him to the fire that had started on his property.

For the next 12 hours the entire community worked to control the inferno, battling against unpredictable gusts of wind.

Luckily for them, fate was on their side with the blaze in area they could reach with firetrucks, in a paddock that just two days before had been filled with sheep.

If not for this the losses could have been “horrific”, not only for the Campbells, but for their neighbours as well.

While it remains unclear how the fire began a cursory inspection of the side of the road found three cigarette butts, flicked from cars by careless drivers on the Mid-Western Highway.

“That is a cigarette butt every 100 metres,” Mr Campbell said with a shake of his head.

“If the cigarette butt had rolled over the other side of the road, my house is only a kilometre away through the trees and between the road and there is where we have all of our sheep. “That would have been total loss.”

As it stands the family lost only 100 hectares of land used for grazing, instead of their entire stud – but there are still many hot summer days ahead where they and neighbours remain vulnerable to other peoples’ lack of fire safety awareness.

It is a situation Emma Nancarrow took to social media to express her frustrations about – calling on the nation to be aware after spending her weekend fighting the fire.

In a video viewed 15,000 times on her Facebook page the young woman said it baffled her that people still threw cigarette butts out the window of their cars when everyone knew what damage they could wreck during an Australian summer.