Victoria's worst day

[Guest]

The effect of yesterday's record breaking temperatures (46.4 degrees in Melbourne and even higher in rural areas) is only just becoming clear.

At least 36 people are now dead but the final figure will be much higher as several bushfires are still blazing, most to the immediate north and east of Melbourne.

Reports are just emerging that the beautiful little tourist town of Marysville has been all but wiped off the map. Some say it's been 80% destroyed; one story suggests there is only a single building left standing.

On Friday, the Victorian Premier said that Saturday could be the worst day in the state's history. Tragically, he was right.

This isn't the bush - it's suburban Melbourne:

[trimster]

Victoria's worst day

I was just about to start a thread on this...

The crazy thing about Australian bushfires is that many of them are deliberately lit...

As if things aren't bad enough with soaring temperatures and hot winds, gangs of firebugs roam the countryside, deliberately lighting fires. The police find it very hard to keep tabs on these people. For years, profilers have been telling us that the typical arsonist is an unemployed male aged between 17 and 25.... yet the last two firebugs caught and charged in South Australia were women in their 40's!

We worry about bushfires now, years ago we never gave it a thought. The Ash Wednesday fires came within a couple of kms of our house- although we weren't living there then.

Yesterday's Victorian fires are horrific beyond words. Even Bendigo, quite a large town, was hit.

[Guest]

Victoria's worst day

The pictures accompanying this report show the utter devastation in Marysville:

http://media.theaustralian.com.au/multimedia/2009/02/08-ferguson/index.html

[ad hoc]

Victoria's worst day

Christ, it looks like Gaza

[G-Man]

Victoria's worst day

Awful stuff. Even if you're not directly affected, seeing your city burning is always terrible. Cape Town is regularly affected (it's fire season right now). Of course, it's big news when the fires come near the residences of the wealthy.

I remember seeing an old guy crying as he surveyed a fire on the face of Table Mountain. I was young still, and thought "Wow, that looks cool".

[Guest]

Victoria's worst day

76 dead. This is now Australia's worst ever bush fire.

Marysville - an unthinkable grave

February 08, 2009

A GREY army blanket beside Falls Rd covers a human-shaped lump. More than 15 hours after the fires went through, it can't be what it seems.

It is just laying there on the roadside at the fringe of town like dumped rubbish.

Two locals gently lift a corner of the blanket and look.

The whole town is a scene of almost unimaginable destruction, but their faces are more desolate.

It is a young girl, they think. They look again.

Marysville is a close-knit town. Everyone knows everyone, but they can't tell who it is they have found.

They only know that it seems to be a young girl.

Five minutes stroll away, Dan Walsh sits on the porch of a cream-brick house.

It is one of perhaps a dozen buildings the inferno spared.

The 74 year old looks to be one of the lucky ones, but his handshake is weak and his eyes are haunted.

A car pulls up and he excuses himself. "Got to talk to my son."

"Mum's dead," he tells his boy Michael, as bluntly as that.

The young man drops to his knees by the roadside and sobs.

Mr Walsh left his 73-year-old wife Marie at the plush Cumberland spa in the town's main street.

They had gone there to sit out the worst, and by early evening the fire around there seemed over.

"I said "It's gone now but in case of fire, out the door and down to the swimming pool area'," Mr Walsh says.

"I said I'd go back and see if I could save the house. It's got all our stuff in it."

Whisps of smoke still rise around the yard and he walks in a daze putting them out.

"She must have gone further inside thinking it was safer," he says, trying to make sense where there is none.

"That's my estimate. I don't know. I haven't seen the police yet.

"I'm just too shell-shocked to think. I'm just buggered."

The Cumberland is a block away in the heart of what little is left of Marysville's elm-lined tourist strip.

Emergency vechicles drive past occasionally, but there is no sense of urgency, or real point to it.

"A few more in there," a CFA volunteer says, gesturing at the Cumberland.

"There's three in a car around the corner. One in a car down there."

Most locals have fled in a convoy to Alexandra, nothing any more to keep them in town.

They huddled through the night at Gallipoli Park. Some sat in the lake.

One woman looks around in shock and disbelief.

Marysville was one of the prettiest little towns in the state.

Now it is just chimneys, smoke, twisted corrugated iron and car bodies.

Marysville has died, and that is not remotely the worst of it.

She says the word around is that two mums perished, each dying with two of their children.

Serveral others died in the Cumberland. A couple is missing.

The girl under the grey blanket, she has heard, is actually a woman who was nine months pregnant.

Senior Constable Peter Collyer, a Marysville cop for six years, talks out his car window and abandons police-speak.

"Day turned to night. It was black with embers," he says.

"The sound was like 50 tidal waves coming over the top of you."

Judy Jans lost an old cottage but saved her home.

She asks Sen-Constable Collyer to pass word that she's around if anyone needs somewhere to go.

But there is almost no one left. There is no town any more.

"We watched our house next door blow up, then the next house, it blew up, because everybody's got a lot of gas bottles, you see," she says.

"And then the next house, the next house and we're just watching all these houses rip into these balls of flame and explode around us.

"I've heard there are only about fifteen houses left standing."

Wildlife carers cruise the street trying to help injured animals but find nothing.

With the town almost empty, it is quiet and eerie. No birds are singing.

It is as quiet as the grave Marysville has become.

[Crusoe]

Victoria's worst day

God. It's just horrible.

[anothergoal]

Victoria's worst day

Looked at Google street maps for Marysville-looked like a picturesque little town. It is really devistating what is happening down there.

Melbourne Arab, my thoughts and prayers are with you and the rest of the State of Victoria and Australia as you guys cope with these terrible wildfires.

[Eggchaser]

Victoria's worst day

Meanwhile in Queensland, they're having the exact opposite happen with some really tragic consequences.

http://www.news.com.au/story/0,27574...59-421,00.html

A BOY, 5, is feared to have been taken by a crocodile in a flooded north Queensland creek at Cape Tribulation as his seven-year-old brother watched.

[trimster]

Victoria's worst day

The bushfire death toll is said to be 108 now...

[Greenlander]

Victoria's worst day

I couldn't sleep last night so spent most of it lying in bed listening to the ever worsening reports on Up All Night on R5. It sounded awful then. To read the reports and see the pictures today is just horrific.

I find it utterly amazing that many of these bush fires are deliberately lit. Do the police/ fire investigators have a good success rate in actually catching and prosecuting the perpetrators? I'm amazed they can ever find evidence of arson. And then find the person(s) responsible. If it's proved that these fires are arson and then find someone, what do they charge them with?

[Guest]

Victoria's worst day

Kevin Rudd is describing it as "mass murder." Victoria Police believe that at least some of these fires were started deliberately. Sadly, bushfire arsonists are rarely caught.

The weatherman on the news last night said that there was just 5% humidity on Saturday when the temperatures topped 46 degrees. Apparently, 5% humidity is what you normally get in a desert. Throw in 80km per hour winds, a brown and yellow landscape reeling from a 12 year drought and some murderous arsonists and you have a catastrophe.

There are still 31 bushfires active across drought ravaged Victoria while North Queenslanders are up to their necks in water. What a remarkable country of contrasts this is.

Things are very subdued at work this morning.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Victoria's worst day

This is awful. I was watching the ODI and they said something about having a report on the fires during the interval between innings. There was nothing to suggest to me that even one person had died.

[E10 Rifle]

Victoria's worst day

Do you really mean a 12-year drought, or the worst drought for 12 years?

Fucking horrible this, and quite hard to get your head round when you live in an urban area in a small country. Is there any sense that emergency planning and infrastructure should be better than it is?

(It looks like it's caught the area I spend Christmas Day 2002 in too. Hope the friend's in-laws who hosted us so hospitably are OK.)

[Incandenza]

Victoria's worst day

Can't believe so many died. Huge losses in property and big wildfires are obviously a common occurrence here in Southern California, but I don't think there's ever been a loss of life that bad from brushfires here.

[Femme Folle]

Victoria's worst day

It's absolutely horrifying and so very sad.

[Guest]

Victoria's worst day

It's a 12 year drought, E10. If you know any climate change sceptics, send them to Victoria. In January, we had just 0.8mm of rain and blistering temperatures. In the few years I've been here, the expression "since records began" has been commonplace where the weather is concerned. There are severe water restrictions in place and they'll probably get much tougher some time very soon.

One thing which is worth mentioning, which may stagger non-Australian readers, is that the people fighting these fires, working day and night and risking their lives in brutal conditions, are almost all volunteers. Although Melbourne's Metropolitan Fire Brigade is professional, the Country Fire Authority are butchers, bakers and candlestick makers. Many of them are fighting the fires while their own houses are being destroyed.

[Incandenza]

Victoria's worst day

California sometimes has volunteer fire-fighters...except they're prisoners, and almost dying fighting brush fires are they only way they can see something outside of the prison gates.

[Guest]

Victoria's worst day

Grim stuff.

Reminded me of this. The trailer featured a Grant Hackett lookalike wearing an elated yet slack-jawed expression and excitedly growling: "Fiiiiiiiire!"

But yes, a fucking awful story -- and, as has already been noted, how on earth are you supposed to catch an arsonist in the act in a place the size of rural Australia.

[jason voorhees]

Victoria's worst day

Neeedlesstosay, MA, I've been thinking of you, Willie1Foot, and the whole OZ brigade during these times.

Nothing else to say other than Good Luck, and God Bless.

[trimster]

Victoria's worst day

Greenlander wrote:

I couldn't sleep last night so spent most of it lying in bed listening to the ever worsening reports on Up All Night on R5. It sounded awful then. To read the reports and see the pictures today is just horrific.

I find it utterly amazing that many of these bush fires are deliberately lit. Do the police/ fire investigators have a good success rate in actually catching and prosecuting the perpetrators? I'm amazed they can ever find evidence of arson. And then find the person(s) responsible. If it's proved that these fires are arson and then find someone, what do they charge them with?

Tough-talking (but wimpy looking) SA Premier Mike Rann has been talking about life imprisonment for arsonists, but I doubt that will ever happen....

This summer, South Australian police have made a big effort to monitor known arsonists within the community.... keeping them under surveillance and visiting them to issue warnings. Result: so far there have been fewer bushfires in SA this summer. Last summer, more than half the bushfires in the state were proved to have been deliberatley lit.

[Guest]

Victoria's worst day

Thanks to another goal and jv for their kind thoughts.

When I saw this was the lead story on the BBC website yesterday morning, I thought I'd phone Scotland to let the parents know I was still alive. They weren't worried – they had no idea what I was talking about.

[Uncle Ethan]

Victoria's worst day

I like to think I am a man of moderation, but my solution would be winching arsonists down into the middle of the next blaze and letting them get a kick out of that.

Next on my list would be the utter halfwits who pack their kids into the car and head off to what they apparently see as the state's latest tourist attraction.

[G-Man]

Victoria's worst day

This is just utterly shocking...

The Western Cape province in South Africa reportedly had 90 fires a day last week. Happily, the effects of these have not nearly been as devastating as in Victoria. But, as in Victoria, there is much talk about arson. And I ask myself, what kind of craziness impels somebody to start a destructive fire (there are non-destructive, controlled fires to regenerate ecologies)?

Could it be that some of the Victoria fires were started by idiots who throw cigarette butts out of the car? A couple of years ago, a British tourist was arrested and charged with arson after starting a fire by doing just that. I don't know how that case ended, but I did hope for a guilty verdict and a very stiff sentence.

[willie1foot]

Victoria's worst day

Thanks for the good wishes all.

I'm in Sydney, so whilst there's been a few fires around here, nothing near the scale that our neighbours in Victoria have had to put up with; very little property damage and no loss of life.

My wife and I have been following this tragedy on TV and it's very difficult not to burst into tears when you hear some of the stories coming from people who are living this nightmare right now. They just didn't have time to escape in many cases.

MA is spot on; the Bush Fire Brigade is nearly all volunteers. I take my hat off to those guys.