gullybogan

Dear Reader,

Q: What would happen if you sent a modern-day CFA administrator back to 1973?

A: He’d only have ten years to say how conditions were actually going to *be* Ash Wednesday, instead of twentyfive years to say they were going to be as bad as or worse than Ash Wednesday.

Every year for the twentyfive (25) years since the horrific bushfires of Ash Wednesday, when fortyseven (47) Victorians lost their lives (seventyfive (75) nationwide) and most of Victoria (and South Australia and parts of NSW) burnt to the ground, the CFA topdogs have been warning us that, this season, we are facing conditions that were either “as bad as” or “worse than” Ash Wednesday.

The cynical amongst us would say that this is exactly the sort of behaviour you would expect from an organisation that was trying to get more funding. And while CFA volunteers are about as close to actual, real, fair dinkum heroes as we can find in our society, there was a growing sense in the community that the CFA administration had become the bureaucrats who cried wolf.

And then yesterday happened.

Whistle

Thing is, there was always a perception that things could never be as bad as Ash Wednesday in terms of outcomes, since the fire response world of 1983 is so vastly removed from that world today.

In the UK version of Life On Mars, our timetravelling copper is pursuing a baddie, and looking about desperately for a walkietalkie, asking frantically how he is supposed to keep in touch with other coppers also pursuing said baddie. One of the coppers standing nearby hands him a whistle.

The Ash Wednesday bushfires were poorly co-ordinated, due to a lack of communication. A generation ago, there simply wasn’t an infrastructure robust enough to support the task of intelligently controlling every truck in Victoria, despatching them to the most appropriate and urgent firefront.

What with our latter day supercommunications network, with trunk radio, and cell technology, and GPS, and what-not, that should no longer be an issue.

However, the future leader of the state opposition, Premier Brumby, this morning confessed that yesterday there were “issues with communications”.

Well, shit.

There are three factors in responding to a bushfire emergency: weather; co-ordinated firefighting; civilian behaviour.

Co-ordinated firefighting is the one thing that the state can most readily support. If they’re not getting that right, then that’s just deplorable.

Weather

The state government can’t do anything about the weather, except warn ppl about it, and that’s what soon-to-be-outgoing Victorian Premier Brumby did.

On Friday he pre-emptively described Saturday as “the Worst Day in Victoria’s History”.

That remains to be seen, of course, since there is still some history to come, but it was certainly the worst in our history so far.

The temperature had the gall to surpass the holy relic of the Black Friday Highest Temperature Ever. Melbourne’s Highest Temperature Ever is now 46.4 Celsius. In parts of the state up north, the temperature gauge was licking at 48.

We can digitally control the water temperature here at Chez Bogan, and Princess sets her shower at 42 degrees. The Melbourne air temperature in the shade yesterday was almost five degrees hotter than Princess’s hot shower.

Combined with a killer northerly, and the state of vegetable affairs due to the Longest Drought In History™, Saturday was akin to holding a blowtorch to a pile of kindling. A cool change came through in the afternoon, but all that did was to turn the wind around to the southwest (similar to the wind change in the Ash Wednesday fires), and convert the firetrail – fifty kilometres long in some complexes – into a firefront, and send it in the direction of new assets.

On Friday, future former Victorian Premier Brumby advised Victorians – all Victorians – to shelter in their homes, cancel all activities, to not leave the house unless it was totally unavoidable (kidney dialysis would be an acceptable reason), and – just for one day – forget about the water restrictions.

See, we have around fifty former Victorians lying in the Melbourne morgue awaiting autopsy to see if last week’s extreme heat contributed to their deaths. We can do without any more ppl dropping dead from a combination of heat and lack of hydration.

This warning didn’t stop Knox Basketball running their junior competition as normal, with a heat policy that says games are only cancelled if the indoor court temperature reaches forty (40) Celsius. Sybylla does some assistant coaching “and stuff” as part of her community service, and she says that the scuttlebutt goin’ ’round was that the temp “only” got to 39.9, so the show went on. Get out there, kids, and enjoy your game.

It was announced on 774 (Melbourne’s ABC station, and the Emergency Broadcaster) that the KABA was the only basketball competition – and possibly the *only* indoor sporting competition of any kind – running as normal in the entire state of Victoria.

Commonsense in extreme conditions is often found to be lacking.

It Is Time To Implement Your Bushfire Survival Plan

As i type, twentyfive (25) ppl are confirmed dead as a result of yesterday’s fires. The authorities expect it to go higher as recovery teams get into affected areas today, and discover more bodies.

At least some of the ppl killed were killed in their cars, fleeing the fire at the last minute.

That is not what you are supposed to do.

You are meant to leave early and hope for the best, or stay and defend your home, sheltering inside until the firefront has thundered past like a nuclear shockwave, leaving you to emerge from the burning house and either cope with the residual fires on your property, or simply stand “safely” in the burnt clearing left behind.

Many of the fires yesterday were not the sort to tackle with a garden hose.

Walls of fire thirty metres high galloping along at twenty kilometres an hour are not the sort of thing you (as a civilian) put yourself in front of.

Also, houses tend to “explode” when hit by that sort of firestorm, so they’re not much use as shelter.

Sadly, it would seem that there are ppl no longer with us today who got their bushfire survival plan wrong yesterday.

But, i tell you what. You can plan all you like, but when it comes to the point where you have to abandon the box you keep all your belongings in to the mercy of a mindless firestorm, i can see how that would make you reassess that plan.

Our bushfire survival plan is that Princess and Sybylla escape early in the car with the photos and harddrives, and i stay to defend the house. If it becomes obvious that i can no longer defend the house, i am to quit it and drive out, if possible, or escape on foot if not.

If i was in Kinglake yesterday, i’d most likely be dead today, had i followed that plan.

Bushfire Crisis: What To Call The Bushfire

So everyone agrees: yesterday is now officially a disaster with a capital D.

We can finally stop talking about Ash Wednesday as the yardstick for anticipating bushfires.

Inconveniently, there is no obvious religious calendrical reference or allusion we can make to name it, as we had with Ash Wednesday and Black Friday.

It was the first round of the NAB Cup last night, but “The NAB Cup Bushfires” doesn’t really sound very dignified. Plus, the ABC would have to refer to it as “The AFL Pre-Season Cup Bushfires”.

So that’s no good.

If we consulted our almanacs, we’d probably find that yesterday was Bolivian National Day, or the Taoist Service of the Fourth Veil, or something equally obscure, but that’s not much good, either.

It was the seventh of the second of nine, so we could call it “The Seven Two Nine Bushfires”, which is nice for our Numeralist friends, cos 7+2=9, but it sounds a bit sucky.

If anyone has a good idea, i suggest you email it to The Age fast, before they come up with something dreadful, or nothing at all, which would be even worse.

Quarry Road

Here in Gully we had our traditional bushfire started over on Quarry Road, no doubt by the same stupid prick firebug that we’ve been trying to catch for some years now.

You know the sort. Psychologists tell us that firebugs derive some kind of sexual arousal from setting fires.

Hasn’t he heard of internet porn?

He really should get a proper girlfriend. Or broadband.

The Traditional Quarry Road Fire is a way from here, but there’s a lot of extremely dry vegetables around this suburb, between ppl’s homes and Quarry Road. Princess tells me that there’s no need to worry about Ferntree Gully burning down, cos it’s all suburban and stuff.

Yesterday, the main street of Kinglake was on fire, with cars and shops burning freely. In Bendigo, suburban homes in a “densely suburban” area only two kilometres from the Bendigo Post Office were on fire.

Marysville, a town quite comparable to Ferntree Gully in its relationship to the encroaching bushland, has been levelled. There are maybe one or two buildings still standing there.

So the threat is real. It’s not just me being inappropriately anxious.

But still she scoffs.

And so here we are.

Hopefully, for everyone, things today will be a little less crisisful than they were yesterday.

I hate summer.

Yours,
Gullybogan