One of the things I’ve learned in the few years of running this site is that the world is huge and enormous and international postage is expensive, but thanks to the internet, the world is also much, much smaller. I know we have readers from all over the world, and now countries I hear about on the news aren’t just places I have trouble finding on a map (Hey, whaddya want from me?! I’m American!) but places where people I know and talk with online live. So when bad shit happens there it makes me feel both powerless because I’m so far away, and at the same time strangely closer and connected, because those places have become personal for me.
Over 130 people have been killed and the death toll is rising with what appears to be arson wildfires consuming southeastern Australia. Bitchery reader Fizz wrote to me:
South-eastern Australia is covered in fires. The fires have been burning for three days. As of seven-thirty this morning, they’d found over a hundred dead bodies, most of them in cars because they’d left it too late to leave. Hundreds are injured. Dozens are missing. There are towns that waited for the fires to come on Saturday night and literally didn’t exist by Sunday morning. The town of Marysville usually has about eight hundred people living in it, got hit on Saturday…and there’s one building still standing. In the whole town, there’s only one. Kinglake and Kinglake North have about a thousand people between them – they’re left with a handful of houses, a pub and a market garden. That’s it.
Thousands of firefighters (most of them unpaid volunteers) are still on duty. They’ve brought the Australian Defence Force in to help. We’re fairly used to fires – some kind of bushfire is pretty much a guaranteed yearly event – but there’s never been anything like this.
What boggles my mind is that they were deliberately set, and that some news accounts I’ve read indicate that after fires were controlled, people were going back to reset the contained areas so the fire would spread again. It’s so hot and so dry that the fire itself moves over 60mph, and people have little to no warning should the flames change direction. People took refuge in animal burrows, football fields, or in reservoirs.
I have a post set to go live on Friday that talks about Australia’s Library Lovers’ Day on 14 Feb, and while I’ll still allow it to publish, I imagine surviving the fires and finding any survivors is more of the focus right now.
There is more information from the Australian Red Cross and the Sydney Daily Telegraph and News.com.au have extensive coverage of the disaster.
So to all our Australian readers: stay safe. I’m so sorry this is happening to you.
You have to- I promised my daughter we would go to Australia when she graduates from college and I plan on keeping my promise!
Moonflower Rose on Livejournal has posted a comprehensive round up of charity and information links. Please remember it’s not just people who need help – the animals are badly affected too.
Thank you.
I’m catching up on a week’s worth of reading. The fires were crazy and frightening and I never want to live through anything like them again. My parents live in Healesville, a medium sized hill country town, and they were under threat from the Kinglake fires. Two of us grown kids went to them and stayed the week on lookout, as the town had fires on three sides. Those fires destroy over 1800 homes and nearly 200+ people lost their lives.
What really pissed me off the most were some bozzos in the city areas who complained about all of the tv coverage and after a two or three days of it, wanted the TV and radio stations to stop screening it and put their shows back on, get back to playing music, its too depressing, we’ve seen enough. What the!??!!! We were outside my parents house, watching the fires approach, listening to a national broadcast radio station as the best way to keep up to date on wind changes, warnings, urgent warnings etc while we watched them approach with our own eyes and these idiots were ringing up saying to change the topic. Let them go stand outside their house, or parents house as the case may be, and watch the fire top one hill to east, another come closer from the north. Watch how in two hours it went from one hill, down a valley, across another hill and the valley which will bring it straight in to where your house is. You want to change the topic now bozzo? Sorry, emotional about this. We didn’t sleep, we spent nights with zero sleep, getting some rest through the day when it was safer to not be on constant alert because others were up and about to do it instead. No net access, mobile phones intermittant at best, families in the city and around the country going nuts wondering how we were, if we’d evacuated if we were okay. And some of people, those in the city, were getting fed up with having to hear news about it.
Sorry, shall leave it there. Am still amazed at the shallow, self serving, self absorbed “It doesn’t affect me so why should I have to know about it constantly” attitude a few, thankfully a very few, had the nerve to say. I wont say I know one of those people, but sadly I do. Two of them in fact. *stops ranting, needs to catch up on a week’s worth of sleep*