PETER Fabrici gained international media exposure thanks to the unusual way he escaped the November 2011 fire – he jumped into a neighbour’s pool in his scuba gear.
Peter was defending his home in Orchid Ramble at the time of the fire, an area which suffered heavily from the blaze.
The decision of when to jump in the pool was made simply - “When I heard the firefront coming,” he said. “It was an intimidating noise.”
“It was fully blazing, the neighbours’ houses were on fire.”
Already wearing scuba apparatus to help with breathing in the thick smoke, Peter
He spent about 10 minutes in the pool until the front had passed, then looked out, and “yew! It was still standing,” he said of his house. “It has a lot of memories, the roots go down deep.”
The story was picked up by the BBC and Daily Mail in the UK, among others. He was “a bit” surprised by how popular it was.
“Would I do it again? Definitely not,” he admitted.
To anyone planning to defend their house from fire, he said they should have a Plan B in place, such as a refuge. “I always knew I had that option,” he said of the pool.
If there had been no pool, he would have been forced to stay in the house, which at that point he feared was “toast”.
Check out photos from the 2011 bushfires here.
