Remembering Black Saturday

Yesterday marked one year since the Black Saturday bush fires that killed 173 people.

I have to say, it’s left me a little on edge. There’s a lot of hype about fire safety and preparation this year and it’s given me a kind of quiet paranoia. We live about 20km from the edge of where the Kinglake bush fires reached last year. A lot of our friends lived in badly hit areas, but thankfully they all managed to survive, and most of their homes did as well.

We were lucky last year. The suburb we live in is basically the first real, densely populated suburb before all the proper bush areas start, and the fires didn’t spread that far. They easily could have though. So I’m quietly a little tense at the moment while we hit the hot period that caused so much trouble last year.


On what ended up being Black Saturday last year, we knew it was going to be a hot day so we headed into the city before sunrise to take some photos. I shot this one at about 6:30am, and even though the colours are pretty wild, it doesn’t really do justice to the intense colour of the sunrise. Everything was bathed in this incredible red and yellow light. The whole city was glowing.



It’s really just odd how a day that started out with something so beautiful could turn into something so nasty. I shot this one at about 7am, and not long after this, it had gotten so hot that we had to head home.



I think in the end it reached about 47 degrees C (117 F) and the wind speed was about 100km/h plus. But at 6am it was a beautiful, balmy, calm morning.

So you can’t help but be a little paranoid when you wake up to a beautiful morning and the forecast is for high temperatures and you just want to close all the curtains and turn on the air conditioning so you can’t see what’s going on outside. I suspect it will be a long time before the paranoia subsides.

Fires & Spirits

We had a bit of excitement here at work yesterday when the factory two doors down caught on fire. To be honest, I had no idea anything was going on until 5 or 6 fire trucks pulled into the street. Then I stood up to go downstairs and see what was going on and a frenzied policeman ran through the factory screaming at us all to evacuate.

We all wandered out into the street where we could see thick black smoke pouring out of the factory just up the street. It was 39 degrees yesterday so it was way too hot to be outside, let alone in the middle of the street in full sun. We took it in turns to stand in the shade of the one small sapling that someone had planted nearby.

20 or so firemen ran around connecting hoses to hydrants and yelling important sounding things to each other, and then it was all a bit of a letdown after that. The smoke just sort of disappeared and the policemen told us we could go back to work.

I haven’t yet worked out how standing in the street was any safer than being inside a big concrete box, but I guess he knew what he was doing since it’s his job and all. Well, actually he was a traffic cop, so maybe it wasn’t his job.

These kind of minor emergencies really do manage to break up the day a bit though. It’s just a shame that I had left my camera at home yesterday. I actually picked it up on the way to work, then thought that it would be a waste to lug it to work where nothing ever happens, so I put it down again.



Honestly there isn’t much going on around here other than that. Christmas is coming up and no matter what I do, I can’t seem to find my Christmas spirit this year. In an attempt to build some excitement, I put 200-odd Christmas songs onto my MP3 player and listened to them in the car on the way to and from work. But that just got annoying when I wanted to listen to something else and shuffle mode kept picking out Christmas songs.

I guess I’m just hoping for a last minute rush of Christmas spirit. Alternatively, if I can’t find any, I may resort to Christmas spirits instead.

Fire Mania

We’ve just started to slip into summer weather this week and it’s caused this kind of fire prevention mania. Last year’s bushfires have everyone freaked out. Everyone is (understandably) paranoid about another Black Saturday since they’re predicting that the weather is going to be even hotter this year than last year.

As a result of this excessive paranoia and because of the fact that I live very close to where last year’s bushfires were, not a single day goes by when I don’t get a brochure in the mail for some kind of fire repelling product or service.

This means that I now have a house full of paper – just the thing I need to fireproof the place – a nice big pile of good old fire friendly paper. Thanks, anti-fire product suppliers. You might have sold me fire gel, mesh and roof sprinklers, but you have made the inside of my house a fire’s best friend.

In un-fire-related news, this weekend is the party that I was dreading. My problem has been solved (sort of) by the fact that we aren’t able to go. It turns out we had already planned to go away for the weekend, so we won’t be around to go to the party. Really this just pushes the issue back for another time, but at least for now I can forget about it.