I might have to go back up north this afternoon to help my mum and stepdad who live outside Yackandandah. The Beechworth/Mudgegonga fire is still some way away from them yet, but recent days have shown us just how damned quickly those fires move, and particularly for the elderly, an earlier rather than a later evacuation is of course the better option. They’re having a town-meeting as we speak to alert the locals about their prospects and their options.
Take care everyone.
It is far better to evacuate early and possibly unnecessarily than not to evacuate and find out you should have, whether it’s a fire or anything else. Been there done that, from a hurricane. It was no fun at all but I’m still glad I went.
Be careful out there!
I can’t believe the fatalities are at 108. This is unbelievable!
Some friends have been stuck in Sydney over the weekend and are right now heading back to see if their house and all their belongings are still there. When I last spoke to them, late last night, all they knew was that all their neighbors were evacuating and the fires were headed their way. The nearest house, about 1.5 km down the road, was in flames.
And I can’t believe that some employers are threatening employees who are RFS volunteers with the sack, if those vollies head south to help with fighting the fires.
131 confirmed dead now.
I’m in Greensborough and have spent the day avoiding the media. However am getting stories from friends and family who have lost friends and family. It is horrific.
Sitting beside the pool at my daughters swimming lesson today and a lady sitting next to me got a call that her brother, his wife and children have died at Kinglake.
A friend rings to tell me that a friend of hers and that friends 3 teenage children have all died. Her mothers best friend and children are all unaccounted for.
My nephew has friends in Kinglake who lost their home, another family of friends all dead (parents, children) except for 19yo boy, other friends camping in Kinglake unaccounted for.
Teacher at my older daughters school was not there today, her parents lived in Kinglake.
Everyone who is out is white faced, silent and the tears are so close to the surface.
Urgent Threat Warnings are still going out over the radio with the message “It is too late to leave”, no escape, fires are still burning.
The worst is the children, it was the weekend, so many families were home, the stories from the survivors are horrific.
You can see the pictures, videos and new stories here - http://www.abc.net.au/news/events/bushfires/
Please if you can spare the $'s donate to the Australian Red Cross.
http://www.redcross.org.au/default.asp
If you don’t have the $'s then you can still help, pray for us, send up good thoughts, what ever it is you do, please do it. Go to your local blood bank, donate blood to help those in your home town in honour of those who died here this weekend.
Thank you.
Hug your loved ones close, tell them you love them.
The People, The Animals, The Fire, The Trees. - link has pictures of the forest around the fire effected (affected?) areas, gives you a real idea of the scale of the trees.
And after all of that, Cicero’s wish has come true.
It’s a beautiful day here in Melbourne. It’s cool enough to wear socks again, there are bunches of cumulus clouds in the sky and the breeze coming off the Bay is encouragement to climb under a blanket and watch crap TV for the night…even allowing the cat to schmooze on your lap!!
All the fires and carnage happening in the rest of the state might as well be on Mars for all the physical effect it has here.
Choppers are getting noisy at our place again after being quiet today compared to yesterday where the chopper noise was almost constant.
Urgent threat alert to Healsville about an hour ago. Wind has changed because we can smell the smoke for the first time today. Explains why the chopper noise was getting busy again.
K. was at work today with red eyes and frequently on the verge of tears. Don’t know who she lost, but store rumor says friends, in the plural.
Covered H.'s shift today because she’s still on the other side of roadblocks. If she leaves her home she won’t be allowed to return, so her family has elected to stay so far. Tonight their road is being mentioned on the news as under attack. As they’ve had no power for three days now, her mobile phone has gone flat and I don’t want to tie up their landline… will just have to wait for news. The last message I heard from her was the the fire was on the property opposite her house but the wind was pushing it away from them… and toward my boss’s house instead.
Please send rain, ASAP.
Death toll now past 170, will likely go higher. Pictures show the aftermath of numerous car crashes caused by folks attempting to flee in conditions where visibility was obviously hopeless. Congealed pools of metal melted by the fires tell you how hot it was.
This tragedy must surely lead to major changes in how such events are prepared for.
:eek:
This is even worse than I thought. {{Australians}} I’d send snow if I could, honest, but it wouldn’t get there in time.
H. is ok! The danger has mostly passed, electricity and water have been restored to their home and so she’s finally had both shower and sleep. Hooray!
I wonder what’s left of her neighbourhood. Sounds like the fires have taken most of her street.
Great news Cazzle!
181 dead according to ABC news tonight.
Here in Greensborough you can’t seem to go anywhere without running into someone who is talking about a friend or family member in the fire zone.
It is way too close.
Glad to hear your friend is OK, Cazzle. My wife and I are going through our wardrobes and drawers to find clothes to send down to help all the people who have lost their homes.
I also discovered I’ve got no hours at work next week, so part of me would like to go down and volunteer with the clean-up, but realistically I don’t know how much help I’d be, so I think we’ll have to stick with donating clothes in the meantime.
I really hope it gets better down there.
Good stuff Martini, it looks like Australians are pulling together nicely for this.
I’m wondering if this will stretch the insurance companies at all in these times of financial crisis or if destruction of this scale is accounted for.
Martini, sorry to hear work’s slow. Good on you for thinking of volunteering. I have tomorrow off, so would like to go through the stuff Annabel’s grown out of and see what I can donate. I have also thought about taking a couple of batches of blueberry muffins to the evacuation/relief centre. No one needs muffins, but maybe they might give someone a little lift?
I always need muffins.
I’ve just been at the community meeting at St Andrews - part of the Kinglake complex of fires. About 40 people died in the vicinity. They explained why it was a unique fire and the usual precautions were useless. This has never happened before and was worse than their worst case scenarios. With the previous week with temperatures over 40, and the long dry of the ten year drought, the eucalyptus oil from the trees had evaporated into the air. On Saturday, with some places reaching 48 deg C (120 deg F) the fire was burning the oil laden air - the wind was literally on fire. So it moved at incredible speeds, because it wasn’t only the bush burning which was moving. That is why some swathes of bush weren’t burnt. The fire was moving through the air, not on the ground. It means that we were in much more danger than we realized when we could hear the roar - probably about 5 minutes from the fire front when the wind changed. This realization has really made me a tad shakey.
The police were very direct about the issues, and why some roads were still closed. The number of deaths will go a lot higher. People ran, or fled in cars. If they crashed, or were running, they were picked up in other cars which then burnt out. So many of the bodies would never be identified. They are keeping people out until the bodies can be moved. It would really upset people to see the remains of neighbors like that. That is the reality that people there were trying to accept. Yet everyone was calm and just asked the questions they needed to ask, which were answered calmly and directly.
Help was there for every little detail of getting through these few days. All you have to do is show identity for everything to go into action. But one guy had none. He’d lost his wife, house and everything except the clothes he was wearing. The police immediately took him to print out a new licence and photo so he at least had paperwork and could send the vet in to check his stock. The vets are either destroying them, or feeding them - depending on what is best.
To help the children from the little school at Strathewen, which no longer exists, they are going back to school tomorrow. They will go to the Wattle Glen school, which will make room for them all, so they can stay as a group. There is a lot of work going on to try and protect the children from the stress.
The trouble is then going to be the next few months and years, when all the action and attention has stopped, and the numbness passed. That is when the depression will sink in. The community is planning for that. But the worry is that we still have a month or so of the fire season to go.
Thanks for posting that, lynne-42. That must have been a hard meeting to be at. I saw elsewhere that the flash point of eucalyptus oil is 49.4C. The way it was on Saturday it didn’t take much to explode, let alone burn.
I don’t know where country Victoria goes from here.