Bushfires

Victoria had its hottest day on record last weekend, topping all meteorological records since white settlement, at 46.4 degrees celcius.  This heat, combined with the previous week of hot forty-plus weather, combined with strong winds, led to the worst bushfires this state has ever experienced.  Hard to imagine, but it's been brought home by our own experiences and the far worse experiences of others.  So far over 130 people have died, and numerous properties, and even whole towns have been obliterated.

The government was urging people to stay home on Saturday, because of these weather conditions.  Friends of ours were getting married at a campsite about an hour away at Neerim East, and had invited us to stay for the weekend.  I just assumed we'd be fine cos we wouldn't be doing any driving on the Saturday.  The couple debated moving the wedding to Melbourne because of the extreme weather conditions, but ended up changing the time of the ceremony to the morning.  Those who drove up in the morning and left just after lunch managed to make it back, but those who left later ended up returning to the campsite, unable to get through on the roads.

The day became progressively warmer, obviously, and the heat of the wind was like a hairdryer blowing.  At about 4pm smoke from a nearby bushfire began darkening the sky.  The colouring in the photos above is accurate - that's what the air/the sky looked like.  The sun looked like a hellfire ball, but then very quickly you couldn't see it at all as more smoke covered the sky, so that it felt like night.

Around 5pm all the guests had been gathered into the main meeting area, and everyone was to stay in this room.  Pretty soon the power went out, but the camp staff rigged up one generator-powered light at the front of the room.  We could see the glow of the fire over the ridge, but it gradually faded, and in actuality, the fire was much further away than it seemed.  At 9pm the police came round saying they were attempting to clear the roads, covered in branches and debris brought down by the strong winds.  They wanted to evacuate everyone in the area because of a predicted wind change at 5am, which would blow the fire, which had passed to the side of us, back in our direction.  

(Choi & Naomi, a memorable wedding for them!)

Everyone settled down to sleep in the main room.  At midnight the police came back saying the roads were clear, and everyone drove out safely to Warragul, a nearby bigger town with an operational evacuation centre.  After registering that we had made it there safely, Gord and I decided to drive south to Korumburra and then back to Melbourne on the Sth Gippsland Hwy, given the direct route, the Princes Hwy, was closed.  The fire had crossed it during the day.

We made it home safely at 4am, but the house was without power until the morning, and we'd had the floorboards in the loungeroom polished while we were away (what a crazy weekend!), so there was furniture and boxes in all kinds of odd places!  Still, we found candles and were happy to fall into bed.

While we were driving home during the night, we started listening to the radio and realised that a whole lot of other bushfires had been ravaging other parts of Victoria, including taking out whole towns not that far from the outer suburbs of Melbourne.  Whole communities have been decimated.  Hard to believe.  To the south of where we were for the wedding, the fire, blown by the wind, travelled 10-15km in 20 minutes.  So many people were caught off guard, it seems, because the fires were moving so quickly.  The news on TV aired a short bit with one couple who'd gone to the supermarket and came back to find their house gone.  You don't go to the supermarket if you're on high alert.  Their dogs were in the house.

What brought it home for me was that the two sisters of Luke, a fellow I went out with for three years before Gord, were missing, and are still missing at this point.  In addition, both his parents' houses, in two different towns, are totally gone.  Other friends in Long Gully and further east than Kinglake were fighting fires to save their places, and are currently fine.  The place where we did the tantra course in Steels Creek, north of Yarra Junction, is pretty much totally gone.

We've had the radio on most of the day to keep up with what's happening.  It keeps feeling real and then unreal, to me.  What made it feel more real later in the afternoon was that our area received an alert about a fire to the north of us, so I ended up packing some bags, ready to leave.  There's no way I want to be here if a fire comes through, that's what the weekend reinforced for me.  For a while there we weren't sure if we'd be spending the night somewhere else, but in the end, the fire posed no threat, and here we are.  

This weekend Gembrook could be on the alert again, due to weather changes, so it feels kind of ongoing, and certainly news and stories keep coming out, about survival or tragedy.  It's draining in a subconscious way.  

If you want to see what the news is saying, go to www.theage.com.au, one of Melbourne's newspapers.