Hello fellow brinellers and Dr Brin.
I'm mindful that co-listees with Culturelist will know that the
bushfires in Victoria are VERY close to home for me and my wife. For
the rest of you: Claire has been working in the Major Incident Room at
Victoria Police during the bushfire crisis, and she's seeing and
hearing stuff far worse than makes the public media. So much so that
my wife really doesn't need to see stuff about the bushfires on social
email lists. Hence, I'm posting a few things here on Brin-L, as she's
not here and I think some local perspective might go further than the
news does. Any fellow Australia residents who've been affected,
forgive me if anything I post is too soon for you. My thoughts are of
course with you.
Right. The official death toll is now 201. The last death was a
fireman from the ACT, in a firetruck who was hit by a falling tree
bough while driving between fires. He was the first, and hopefully the
last, firefighter to be killed during this particular firestorm. Of
those 201 dead, I fortunately do not know any victims personally. But
friends from my Melbourne Victory (soccer) supporting crowd have lost
people they've known since school. As have students and colleagues of
a teacher friend, and also Girl Guides that Claire knows - a pair from
a troop not far from us lost their parents. There are very few people
we know in the city that don't at least have 2nd degree grief. It's a
huge event, because while Melbourne is a big city, it's a small town
too and the interconnectedness here is higher than most people outside
might understand.
The thing people won't get is this: whole towns have been razed.
Totally gone. The fires were 60m high in places, with embers landing
up to 20km in front of the fire front. There's footage of the fire
spreading up a ridgeline, and even folks familiar with bushfire
defence are gobsmacked at the rate of advance. We witnessed a natural
disaster on the scale of the Boxing Day Tsunami or the Argentinian
mudslides, and in terms of the effect on our emergency services and
the population, it's been compared to the World Trade Centre attacks
(and that may seem like hyperbole, but think of the vast geographic
spread of this disaster, compared with the total population of the
region and the available police and emergency crews... make sense
now?). If it weren't for a fortunate cool change and wind change on
the afternoon of Saturday 7 February, we'd have been fighting fires in
the suburbs of Melbourne and maybe even into my own suburb. This is a
terrifying thought.
There are still several fires on the go in Victoria. The town of
Healesville, about an hour from the Melbourne CBD, has been on full
alert for 10 days now, and they're feeling the strain.
So, I hope after this, those who crosspost to Culture will get why
some are reluctant to have discussions on esoterica and meta-causes
right now. And for the Brin-L crew, I hope I've given a tiny window
into the stress of life in Victoria during this crisis. We've been
dealing as best we can, but it's very hard right now. Not least for
the 7500 persons or so that are homeless now. Refugees in modern
Australia... a bit nuts, huh.
Charlie.
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