Australian Bushfires
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Australian Bushfires
No doubt those of you who followed the news are aware that the area around Melbourne bears a frightening resemblence to Daventry during the KQ3-era. If the news is correct, the place where AGD2 lives was hit particularly hard. I'm keeping my fingers crossed he and his family are okay and I'm hoping for additional crossed fingers from whoever's dropping by.
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1234567890
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Re: Australian Bushfires
damn, I haven't been following it, but yikes! Really that bad? What the hell happened? TO AGD2 and family: I Really hope you are ok! I'll keep my fingers crossed!
YIKES! I just googled "melbourne bushfires" in images, and it looks bad!
http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&c ... a=N&tab=wi
YIKES! I just googled "melbourne bushfires" in images, and it looks bad!
http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&c ... a=N&tab=wi
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greensenshi
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Re: Australian Bushfires
Wow, that is rather scary. I really hope he and his family are okay, and the same goes for everyone else in the area.
Re: Australian Bushfires
Best wishes to AGD2 and anyone else effected by the fires. Really, I can't begin to imagine how terrible it would be to have something like that happen.
I will definately keep my fingers crossed.
I will definately keep my fingers crossed.
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Lady Pyro
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Re: Australian Bushfires
That's frightening. I sincerely hope AGD2 and his family are alright.
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1234567890
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Re: Australian Bushfires
I hope to hear from AGD2 soon! I REALLY hope you are ok! I'll be praying!
Re: Australian Bushfires
Phone lines were still dead yesterday, but I got a hold of him today. He and his family are okay, though the blaze was only a couple of meters away from their house at one point. A trial by fire indeed.
Re: Australian Bushfires
Didn't something like that happen just before the shooting (in the film sense) of The Lord of the Rings? I remember they used the burnt trees on the last scene of The Two Towers.
Edit: Good to know nothing happened to AGD2 and relatives.
Edit: Good to know nothing happened to AGD2 and relatives.
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1234567890
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Re: Australian Bushfires
YAY! Yikes! Olny a few meters! That is great to know!Erpy wrote:Phone lines were still dead yesterday, but I got a hold of him today. He and his family are okay, though the blaze was only a couple of meters away from their house at one point. A trial by fire indeed.
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Anonymous Game Creator 2
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Re: Australian Bushfires
Man, what a week. The fires didn't just come near our house, they tore right through our residence. I'd estimate that at least 80% of our property was destroyed by the flames. In the afternoon on Saturday the 7th of February, the sky outside was very orange and hazy. You could go outside and stare straight up at the sun at the height of midday without hurting your eyes, as if looking at a lunar eclipse. At that point, we didn't know that Kinglake was already burning 30 or so kilometers away and that that was the actual cause of the hazy sky.
Soon after, small singed leaves and dry ashes started falling lightly around our house. This has happened in the past, but has never resulted in fires. We climbed onto the roof to hose the place down as a precaution; we also hosed the walls, all the timber support beams, and saturated the front and back lawn. We have a large amount of land, though, (about 13 acres) so the hose couldn't reach very far away from the house. While atop the roof, we saw a distant plume of smoke billowing out over the eastern hills. It looked fairly far away. Then, larger objects started plummeting from the sky. Dead birds started dropping from above due heat/smoke exhaustion. The falling pieces of debris became larger and larger until, soon enough, sizable pieces of bark and tree branches were landing all over the place, still aflame. I had only started packing some of my personal belongings to evacuate, when my sister yelled to me that there was a fire on our driveway. I ran up there and discovered a large chunk of bark on the ground, burning. I plunged it into a nearby tub of water (we had several filled bins and buckets located at strategic locations around the house). Next thing, I look up and the once distant plume of smoke comes tumbling over the hilltop, as well as a massive wall of flames, tearing towards the houses. Burning embers start falling all over the place and the wind is blowing like crazy. Spot fires are starting up everywhere. The trees and grass at the front of our house suddenly go up in flames, and fire quickly appeared in all directions, encroaching upon the house. An endless parade of cars were evacuating all the nearby residences and emergency vehicles and police cars were tearing up and down the street.
I wanted to stay and defend our house. It's in a fairly clear area with not too many tall trees surrounding it. But in the rush and panic, I barely managed to throw my computer into my brother's car (I had no time to grab anything else) before I was herded away from the house by panicked family members, shoved into a car, bare-footed, and evacuated as well. As we drove out of the driveway and pulled onto the road, the full extent of the fire could be seen in all directions. Everything was burning. The entire back of our 13 acre property was ablaze with enormous flames that just appeared from nowhere and were rolling down the hill at high speed. The guy over the road's house was actually burning as our car pulled onto the road. It was like a disaster scene from a movie. As I looked out the window, I seriously though that it was the last time I'd see the house standing, and that all my possessions would be lost to the fire.
I was in my dad's car, and I tried to convince him to let me out so that I could stay back and defend the house. But he wouldn't have any part of it. He drove past all the SES (state emergency service) workers who were directing traffic and forming a road-block, and once we had exited the street, there was absolutely no way to get back in again. They had a roadblock to prevent people coming in, and an endless procession of cars were driving out. We were all evacuated to different places, which left a lot of people displaced from family members. My dad drove off to look for my my mum at another location (where she was sent) and then they went to a friend of my dads' house. So now I was stranded miles from home, with no transport, without shoes, and left to watch the distant flames and smoke which was probably burning down our house as I looked on.
Being car-less, I called a friend to come up (if he could get into the town) so that we could try drive back and save the house... or at least save some of my things. After an hour he SMS'd me to say that the police had placed a roadblock along the main highway, and that he couldn't get in as they were quarantining the town off! I waited around for another 20 minutes or so, and when he still didn't arrive I decided "fuck it". I would head back on foot by myself (quite a distance away, and very painful running all that way, bare-foot on asphalt roads and gravel). I ran a few kilometers and my left ankle was beginning to swell up badly. I saw my brother's car and asked if he had any shoes I could borrow. He asked me why and I told him I was going to head back home on foot; I asked if he was ready to drive back himself and inquired whether he'd give me a ride, but he wasn't prepared. His friend (who lives near us) was heading back though, so I decided to get a ride with him. Just as I was about to get into the car, my own friend whom I had called, finally pulled up. So I got in his car instead and we headed back to our property, post haste. In an attempt to avoid the police and roadblocks, we tried to go around the back of a big mountain which leads into our property from the forested area, where there was no highway and no traffic blockades. But as we ascended higher up the mountain, the sky turned from orange to, blood red, to almost complete black near the top. When the sky was black, it was extremely difficult to see anything out the front windscreen, and shimmering heat-waves obscured the road from sight. Everything was dead silent up the mountain, and no other cars were in the area. We decided it was too risky to continue driving in that direction and decided to turn back around and attempt entry from another side-street instead. We drove down the mountain again and got onto the side-street without any dramas, but at the location where the side-street intersected with the main road to my house, the cops were set up, blocking traffic. The cop pretty much told us "I can't stop you from going ahead, but it's very dangerous and I'd advise you to turn back." We told him we knew of the risks and wanted to go through anyway. He let us pass.
Driving along the road, I was surprised to see that the fire hadn't spread as far as I thought it would have. None of the houses along the first stretch of road had been burned at all. But as we got closer to my house, there was yet another police vehicle blocking traffic JUST over the hill about 150 meters from our property. And they weren't letting any cars over the hill. Up ahead, I couldn't actually see our house (it was over the other side of the hill in the road up ahead), but I could see thick smoke rising from behind the hill, large fallen tree limbs were all over the road, and flames burned on either side of the street. It's like the area just before our house was where the major damage started. It was a very uneasy feeling waiting there, not knowing whether the house was burned to a shell or nit. There was a 4WD parked ahead of us, talking to the cops at the road block. Smoke was tumbling over the hill up ahead and the sides of the road up ahead were completely charred and smouldering. It looked like the fire had obviously already passed right through. The guy in the 4WD just wouldn't MOVE and stayed there for an agonizing 2 minutes or more talking to the police. Then the police walked to the side of the road, and this idiot in the 4WD just remained sitting there in the middle of the road, preventing us from going ahead! Finally, he moved to the side and the cop came up to us and told us that it was too dangerous to go any further. We told him that we just wanted to go over the hill and see the damage to our property. He asked "Is it past the next road on the left?" and I told him it was before that. Again, this cop told us that we shouldn't go ahead, and that he can't prevent us from doing so, but that we were responsible for anything that happens should we ignore his advice. He said to watch out for falling tree branches and go through the area slowly. We said "Okay, thanks" and the cop said "Be careful!" and again we said "Okay, we will", and then the cop says even more seriously "No, really. BE CAREFUL." which really emphasized how precariously dangerous the situation was. We drove over the hill and there were, indeed, huge tree branches and limbs strewn all across the road. The area was very smoky and the sides of the roads were still burning. As we sped over the hill toward our property, house after house whizzed by on our side of the street and, surprisingly, none of them were burned down.
Finally, we reached our property. We couldn't see whether or not the house was still standing, as it was obscured by the tree-line at the front (which miraculously hadn't been burnt in the fire that flared up there as we were leaving). We quickly pulled down the driveway. I was totally expecting the house to either be gone or in the process of burning down. But to my astonishment, it was still standing. I dashed out of the car before my friend had even parked it, and ran around the side area. Everything was still intact and nothing had been burnt. But then I glanced up at our backyard and immediately noticed that the fire was still blazing toward the house from the rear of our property. It was literally only several meters away from the house. This was about 8pm now; the power was out, and the phone lines were also down and it would soon be dark. I ran out to the main area behind the house... and saw some guy standing at the tap filling up a bucket of water in our yard! "Who the hell is that?" I wondered. Then I noticed that it was my dad's friend; the very same friend whose house my parents had gone to earlier. Recognizing the man, with relief I asked "What are you doing here?" and then I turned my head and also saw my dad walking with a bucket of water. They had both arrived only minutes before my friend and I did. Apparently my dad's friend was able to convince my dad to drive back to the house to check on things.
So, all four of us grabbed hoses, buckets and anything capable of holding water and started fighting back the flames. My brother arrived back home about 40 minutes later and assisted too. We eventually got the fire under control and extinguished. We stopped it from encroaching any further upon the house. We started filling up water in buckets from a nearby creek that runs through our property (which is no longer flowing and only contains a few stagnant pools of murky water). We used them to douse the embers and trees that were still on fire. We kept at it until the early hours of the morning. Embers continued to fall throughout the night. While extinguishing a particularly large tree, I accidentally stepped into a pit of ashes which, unfortunately, contained scorching hot embers beneath the surface. I had steel-capped boots on at the time, and some of the embers came flying up and landed right down the back and burned the hell out of my Achilles heel. The boots were so tight, I couldn't pull them off in time, so I had to stick my entire foot under the running hose. It also burned another hole in my ankle. In addition to that, the same foot was severely swollen from earlier running kilometers in bare feet; so now with all these injuries and burns to my feet, my mobility was becoming severely hampered. But we finally got the fires surrounding the house extinguished in the very early hours of Sunday morning, and saved the house. The back of our property was still burning throughout that night, but the area around the house wasn't under direct threat anymore. And in all that time, not a single fire engine was seen. I swear that if we had we not arrived back when we did, the entire house would have burned down for sure. After the flames were quelled, my friend and everyone else went home. It was a very exhausting day and I fell straight to sleep.
This whole story went on for the rest of the week. In a nutshell, it involved saving more residences, receiving more burns, facing more anxiety at the prospect of recurring ember attacks and so forth. Basically, I just spent the past week putting out spot fires in a nearby forest, assisting neighbours, etc. The fire fighters (CFA) were stretched to their absolute limits on Saturday 7th, and no fire trucks were even seen in our area on the night of the disaster. They didn't come until the next (Sunday) afternoon. Calling 000 would not get you a fire engine to extinguish a huge fire burning your house down, it was truly every person for themselves! The next day we drove up our street and surveyed the damage. At least 30 houses along our stretch of road were razed to the ground. I know people who have lost their houses, possessions, and their pets. They're saying that 1 in 3 people who lost their homes had no insurance. Resources were so stretched, they even had to get the army in to assist. I have really never seen anything like it before. I don't think anyone was killed in our area, but in Kinglake, only 30 kilometers away, many people lost their houses and their lives.
This was the worst natural disaster in Australia's history, and they beleive several of the fires were started by arsonists. Others, like the fire in my area, was caused by embers blown here from the Kinglake fire, which were started by severe weather conditions. Saturday 7th of February was the hottest Victorian day since 1939 (46.6 degrees Celsius) and it was also extremely windy, which made perfect conditions for the fire to spread. And in dry country areas which haven't received much water during the past year, it created conditions where the flames had a LOT of fuel to feed on. If anyone here would like to contribute to the victims who lost everything, donations to the Bushfire Appeal can be made at: http://www.redcross.org.au
Below, I have attached some photos we took. They show various captioned images of our burned property and other photos related to the incident.
Soon after, small singed leaves and dry ashes started falling lightly around our house. This has happened in the past, but has never resulted in fires. We climbed onto the roof to hose the place down as a precaution; we also hosed the walls, all the timber support beams, and saturated the front and back lawn. We have a large amount of land, though, (about 13 acres) so the hose couldn't reach very far away from the house. While atop the roof, we saw a distant plume of smoke billowing out over the eastern hills. It looked fairly far away. Then, larger objects started plummeting from the sky. Dead birds started dropping from above due heat/smoke exhaustion. The falling pieces of debris became larger and larger until, soon enough, sizable pieces of bark and tree branches were landing all over the place, still aflame. I had only started packing some of my personal belongings to evacuate, when my sister yelled to me that there was a fire on our driveway. I ran up there and discovered a large chunk of bark on the ground, burning. I plunged it into a nearby tub of water (we had several filled bins and buckets located at strategic locations around the house). Next thing, I look up and the once distant plume of smoke comes tumbling over the hilltop, as well as a massive wall of flames, tearing towards the houses. Burning embers start falling all over the place and the wind is blowing like crazy. Spot fires are starting up everywhere. The trees and grass at the front of our house suddenly go up in flames, and fire quickly appeared in all directions, encroaching upon the house. An endless parade of cars were evacuating all the nearby residences and emergency vehicles and police cars were tearing up and down the street.
I wanted to stay and defend our house. It's in a fairly clear area with not too many tall trees surrounding it. But in the rush and panic, I barely managed to throw my computer into my brother's car (I had no time to grab anything else) before I was herded away from the house by panicked family members, shoved into a car, bare-footed, and evacuated as well. As we drove out of the driveway and pulled onto the road, the full extent of the fire could be seen in all directions. Everything was burning. The entire back of our 13 acre property was ablaze with enormous flames that just appeared from nowhere and were rolling down the hill at high speed. The guy over the road's house was actually burning as our car pulled onto the road. It was like a disaster scene from a movie. As I looked out the window, I seriously though that it was the last time I'd see the house standing, and that all my possessions would be lost to the fire.
I was in my dad's car, and I tried to convince him to let me out so that I could stay back and defend the house. But he wouldn't have any part of it. He drove past all the SES (state emergency service) workers who were directing traffic and forming a road-block, and once we had exited the street, there was absolutely no way to get back in again. They had a roadblock to prevent people coming in, and an endless procession of cars were driving out. We were all evacuated to different places, which left a lot of people displaced from family members. My dad drove off to look for my my mum at another location (where she was sent) and then they went to a friend of my dads' house. So now I was stranded miles from home, with no transport, without shoes, and left to watch the distant flames and smoke which was probably burning down our house as I looked on.
Being car-less, I called a friend to come up (if he could get into the town) so that we could try drive back and save the house... or at least save some of my things. After an hour he SMS'd me to say that the police had placed a roadblock along the main highway, and that he couldn't get in as they were quarantining the town off! I waited around for another 20 minutes or so, and when he still didn't arrive I decided "fuck it". I would head back on foot by myself (quite a distance away, and very painful running all that way, bare-foot on asphalt roads and gravel). I ran a few kilometers and my left ankle was beginning to swell up badly. I saw my brother's car and asked if he had any shoes I could borrow. He asked me why and I told him I was going to head back home on foot; I asked if he was ready to drive back himself and inquired whether he'd give me a ride, but he wasn't prepared. His friend (who lives near us) was heading back though, so I decided to get a ride with him. Just as I was about to get into the car, my own friend whom I had called, finally pulled up. So I got in his car instead and we headed back to our property, post haste. In an attempt to avoid the police and roadblocks, we tried to go around the back of a big mountain which leads into our property from the forested area, where there was no highway and no traffic blockades. But as we ascended higher up the mountain, the sky turned from orange to, blood red, to almost complete black near the top. When the sky was black, it was extremely difficult to see anything out the front windscreen, and shimmering heat-waves obscured the road from sight. Everything was dead silent up the mountain, and no other cars were in the area. We decided it was too risky to continue driving in that direction and decided to turn back around and attempt entry from another side-street instead. We drove down the mountain again and got onto the side-street without any dramas, but at the location where the side-street intersected with the main road to my house, the cops were set up, blocking traffic. The cop pretty much told us "I can't stop you from going ahead, but it's very dangerous and I'd advise you to turn back." We told him we knew of the risks and wanted to go through anyway. He let us pass.
Driving along the road, I was surprised to see that the fire hadn't spread as far as I thought it would have. None of the houses along the first stretch of road had been burned at all. But as we got closer to my house, there was yet another police vehicle blocking traffic JUST over the hill about 150 meters from our property. And they weren't letting any cars over the hill. Up ahead, I couldn't actually see our house (it was over the other side of the hill in the road up ahead), but I could see thick smoke rising from behind the hill, large fallen tree limbs were all over the road, and flames burned on either side of the street. It's like the area just before our house was where the major damage started. It was a very uneasy feeling waiting there, not knowing whether the house was burned to a shell or nit. There was a 4WD parked ahead of us, talking to the cops at the road block. Smoke was tumbling over the hill up ahead and the sides of the road up ahead were completely charred and smouldering. It looked like the fire had obviously already passed right through. The guy in the 4WD just wouldn't MOVE and stayed there for an agonizing 2 minutes or more talking to the police. Then the police walked to the side of the road, and this idiot in the 4WD just remained sitting there in the middle of the road, preventing us from going ahead! Finally, he moved to the side and the cop came up to us and told us that it was too dangerous to go any further. We told him that we just wanted to go over the hill and see the damage to our property. He asked "Is it past the next road on the left?" and I told him it was before that. Again, this cop told us that we shouldn't go ahead, and that he can't prevent us from doing so, but that we were responsible for anything that happens should we ignore his advice. He said to watch out for falling tree branches and go through the area slowly. We said "Okay, thanks" and the cop said "Be careful!" and again we said "Okay, we will", and then the cop says even more seriously "No, really. BE CAREFUL." which really emphasized how precariously dangerous the situation was. We drove over the hill and there were, indeed, huge tree branches and limbs strewn all across the road. The area was very smoky and the sides of the roads were still burning. As we sped over the hill toward our property, house after house whizzed by on our side of the street and, surprisingly, none of them were burned down.
Finally, we reached our property. We couldn't see whether or not the house was still standing, as it was obscured by the tree-line at the front (which miraculously hadn't been burnt in the fire that flared up there as we were leaving). We quickly pulled down the driveway. I was totally expecting the house to either be gone or in the process of burning down. But to my astonishment, it was still standing. I dashed out of the car before my friend had even parked it, and ran around the side area. Everything was still intact and nothing had been burnt. But then I glanced up at our backyard and immediately noticed that the fire was still blazing toward the house from the rear of our property. It was literally only several meters away from the house. This was about 8pm now; the power was out, and the phone lines were also down and it would soon be dark. I ran out to the main area behind the house... and saw some guy standing at the tap filling up a bucket of water in our yard! "Who the hell is that?" I wondered. Then I noticed that it was my dad's friend; the very same friend whose house my parents had gone to earlier. Recognizing the man, with relief I asked "What are you doing here?" and then I turned my head and also saw my dad walking with a bucket of water. They had both arrived only minutes before my friend and I did. Apparently my dad's friend was able to convince my dad to drive back to the house to check on things.
So, all four of us grabbed hoses, buckets and anything capable of holding water and started fighting back the flames. My brother arrived back home about 40 minutes later and assisted too. We eventually got the fire under control and extinguished. We stopped it from encroaching any further upon the house. We started filling up water in buckets from a nearby creek that runs through our property (which is no longer flowing and only contains a few stagnant pools of murky water). We used them to douse the embers and trees that were still on fire. We kept at it until the early hours of the morning. Embers continued to fall throughout the night. While extinguishing a particularly large tree, I accidentally stepped into a pit of ashes which, unfortunately, contained scorching hot embers beneath the surface. I had steel-capped boots on at the time, and some of the embers came flying up and landed right down the back and burned the hell out of my Achilles heel. The boots were so tight, I couldn't pull them off in time, so I had to stick my entire foot under the running hose. It also burned another hole in my ankle. In addition to that, the same foot was severely swollen from earlier running kilometers in bare feet; so now with all these injuries and burns to my feet, my mobility was becoming severely hampered. But we finally got the fires surrounding the house extinguished in the very early hours of Sunday morning, and saved the house. The back of our property was still burning throughout that night, but the area around the house wasn't under direct threat anymore. And in all that time, not a single fire engine was seen. I swear that if we had we not arrived back when we did, the entire house would have burned down for sure. After the flames were quelled, my friend and everyone else went home. It was a very exhausting day and I fell straight to sleep.
This whole story went on for the rest of the week. In a nutshell, it involved saving more residences, receiving more burns, facing more anxiety at the prospect of recurring ember attacks and so forth. Basically, I just spent the past week putting out spot fires in a nearby forest, assisting neighbours, etc. The fire fighters (CFA) were stretched to their absolute limits on Saturday 7th, and no fire trucks were even seen in our area on the night of the disaster. They didn't come until the next (Sunday) afternoon. Calling 000 would not get you a fire engine to extinguish a huge fire burning your house down, it was truly every person for themselves! The next day we drove up our street and surveyed the damage. At least 30 houses along our stretch of road were razed to the ground. I know people who have lost their houses, possessions, and their pets. They're saying that 1 in 3 people who lost their homes had no insurance. Resources were so stretched, they even had to get the army in to assist. I have really never seen anything like it before. I don't think anyone was killed in our area, but in Kinglake, only 30 kilometers away, many people lost their houses and their lives.
This was the worst natural disaster in Australia's history, and they beleive several of the fires were started by arsonists. Others, like the fire in my area, was caused by embers blown here from the Kinglake fire, which were started by severe weather conditions. Saturday 7th of February was the hottest Victorian day since 1939 (46.6 degrees Celsius) and it was also extremely windy, which made perfect conditions for the fire to spread. And in dry country areas which haven't received much water during the past year, it created conditions where the flames had a LOT of fuel to feed on. If anyone here would like to contribute to the victims who lost everything, donations to the Bushfire Appeal can be made at: http://www.redcross.org.au
Below, I have attached some photos we took. They show various captioned images of our burned property and other photos related to the incident.
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Lady Pyro
- Defense Minister Status
- Posts: 584
- Joined: Sun Jul 27, 2008 1:22 pm
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Re: Australian Bushfires
I'm glad you guys managed to save your house, and you and your family are all okay.
What a disaster though.
I can't get over how it looks like the moon itself is on fire in one of those pictures.
What a disaster though.
I can't get over how it looks like the moon itself is on fire in one of those pictures.
Re: Australian Bushfires
Yikes, that was Dangerous! You are truly intrepid if you managed to save your house from the fires by your own means, and also true adventurers for drawing parallelisms between the situation and a graphic adventure!
It's good to see you sane after that many days offline, hope you have treated those wounds, as they don't mix well with stressful events. Welcome back and thanks for sharing your experience with us!
It's good to see you sane after that many days offline, hope you have treated those wounds, as they don't mix well with stressful events. Welcome back and thanks for sharing your experience with us!
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navynuke04
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Re: Australian Bushfires
Wow Chris, that's scary! I'm glad to hear your family and home made it through okay though. Take care of yourself!
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1234567890
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Re: Australian Bushfires
YIKES! What a week! I'm glad you and your family are safe, and you saved your house and all! That must have been really freaky! I don't think I could have slept at all for that week!
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MusicallyInspired
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Re: Australian Bushfires
That's nasty. Glad you made it through!
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Blackthorne519
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Re: Australian Bushfires
Wow, man. That's some crazy shit happening there. Even crazier that you ran back to protect your possesions. That's brave stuff, though some would call it foolish. Sometimes, though, a foolish act is actually one of bravery. Any case, I'm babbling. I'm just glad YOU'RE all right and your efforts paid off. To have everything destroyed in a fire is heartbreaking.
Bt
Bt
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Anonymous Game Creator 2
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Re: Australian Bushfires
Thanks, guys. Yeah, over here we have the right to either stay back and defend our homes or to evacuate. I've heard that in the US, you can be arrested if you refuse to evacuate a high-risk area. In Australia, they tell home owners to formulate a fire plan well in advance; (admittedly, we didn't). If you're going to stay, then you're supposed to be well-prepared and know exactly what you're doing. If you're planning to evacuate, then they advise you to leave early, before the fire arrives so that you don't get caught up in the flames while trying to escape. A lot of people in Kinglake were killed because they stayed home, but many were also killed trying to evacuate in cars along the main road, when they left too late. Apparently, there were cars with burnt bodies in them all up the main roads and they had to close the highway into Kinglake off to prevent members of the public and journalists from entering the town.
Personally speaking, I had always wanted to stay back and defend the house, but I was whisked away in the panic, against my will. I knew the fire was a threat, but not as dangerous as the one in Kinglake (which was spreading at a speed of 13km in 4 minutes). I had at least wanted to tackle the fire at home until it was either subdued or got out of control. In the event that it got out of hand, at that point I would have made the decision to either evacuate or (if the road was too dangerous) head into an area where the fire had already burned everything and wait it out.
Anyhow, I'm glad that I managed to save my computer and all the work I've done over the past 10 years. There are still fires burning around the state and it's still smoky outside here, but it appears that the threat is decreasing every day. I'll certainly be better prepared if there's ever a 'next time'.
Personally speaking, I had always wanted to stay back and defend the house, but I was whisked away in the panic, against my will. I knew the fire was a threat, but not as dangerous as the one in Kinglake (which was spreading at a speed of 13km in 4 minutes). I had at least wanted to tackle the fire at home until it was either subdued or got out of control. In the event that it got out of hand, at that point I would have made the decision to either evacuate or (if the road was too dangerous) head into an area where the fire had already burned everything and wait it out.
To be honest, the swollen ankle hurt more than the burns. Though, burns do take a long time to heal fully. It's just a nuisance that the biggest burn is situated on the heel of my foot... it means I can't put on shoes at the moment.DrJones wrote:It's good to see you sane after that many days offline, hope you have treated those wounds, as they don't mix well with stressful events.
For the first few nights afterwards, we didn't really sleep much at all. Only a couple of hours per night. The risk of embers falling and of new fires flaring up was high, so we really had to remain alert.1234567890 wrote:I don't think I could have slept at all for that week!
I forgot to mention that those last 2 pictures are actually time-lapse photos, taken over a period of one minute. That's why everything looks a bit lighter than it normally would, and also why the moon is glowing like the sun. But the moon really WAS glowing blood-red that night. We managed to take some other non-time-lapsed photos of it from earlier in the night as well. My friend has those photos though, so I don't know how they turned out.Lady Pyro wrote:I can't get over how it looks like the moon itself is on fire in one of those pictures.
Anyhow, I'm glad that I managed to save my computer and all the work I've done over the past 10 years. There are still fires burning around the state and it's still smoky outside here, but it appears that the threat is decreasing every day. I'll certainly be better prepared if there's ever a 'next time'.
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Cadbury Wookie
- Royal Scribe
- Posts: 1269
- Joined: Tue Aug 14, 2001 3:20 pm
Re: Australian Bushfires
I've been hearing a lot of horror stories over the past week or so. Cannot tell you how glad I am to know that yours isn't one of them.
Good to have you back, mate.
Good to have you back, mate.
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1234567890
- Knight Status
- Posts: 213
- Joined: Tue Oct 14, 2008 12:11 pm
Re: Australian Bushfires
Hey man, glad that your fine, just want to say again now I've heard from you some more!
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Boogeyman
- Knight Status
- Posts: 384
- Joined: Sat May 08, 2004 5:55 am
- Location: deadfall beneath Ooga Booga
Re: Australian Bushfires
Glad to hear you're all right. However, I must point out that this was no natural disaster, this was arson!
Re: Australian Bushfires
And the alleged arsonist was an ex-bomber, from what can be seen on the news.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldne ... stake.html
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldne ... stake.html
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Quest For Glory Fan
- Slacker of Shapeir
- Posts: 2418
- Joined: Sat Jul 10, 2004 9:11 am
- Location: Canada
Re: Australian Bushfires
Well this is certainly a story to tell. I don't eve know what to say. Amazing Stuff.