At 1pm Adelaide recorded 43 °C with wind gusts of 100 km per hour, and higher velocities in the hills. The RSPCA estimated that up to one million wild and domesticated animals died in the disaster. Of course, I’d seen it. It would take weeks before weather changes, reduction of fuel loads and human intervention extinguished the fires. Hazelwood was the It-power station, one of the dirtiest in the OECD; a grand temple to coal in the eyes of the hard-right, and a brutalist monument, emblematic of Australia’s ongoing climate policy debacle, to environmentalists. The Kilmore East fire spread quickly and crossed the Hume Freeway at 1:58pm. Our politicians will, I’m sure, speak very movingly about the existential terror of fire in the Australian psyche, maybe they’ll quote Henry Lawson on the courage and resilience required to live in the bush, and highlight the real bravery of those who fought so hard that day so more people didn’t die. Geoffrey Cary, David Lindenmayer and Stephen Dovers, Australia Burning: Fire Ecology, Policy and Management Issues, CSIRO Publishing, Canberra, 2003. Black Saturday is an Australian tragedy. Across country they adapt the heat and intensity of fire to individual environments to burn off grass and bush, to keep trails clear, promote new growth that will attract kangaroos and other prey, and to drive animals towards waiting hunters. I was writing about the adjacent town of Churchill, bringing their talismans of coal into parliament. They also charged two youths with arson in connection with the Bendigo blaze. Days before Black Saturday A heatwave struck south-eastern Australia in the weeks before 7 February 2009, building on two months of hot, dry conditions. Lofty Ranges, South Australia, January 1955, (1st edn. Australia captain Michael Hooper says he's "amped" for Sunday's test against the All Blacks. The unofficial slogan of the SEC was “slow, easy and comfortable”, but, as revealed in the Bushfires royal commission, the modern culture of our electricity providers focusing on their bottom line, and ignoring the proper maintenance of ageing electrical assets, is hardly an improvement. For the last decade these same politicians’ quibbling has brought us no closer to any coherent energy policy nor action on climate change. The opposite side of the pile has a bright green discolouring. Brendan was raised in the town, and never left. I’m not suggesting that the disaggregation of the SEC caused Brendan Sokaluk to set a deadly fire. 2009: Black Saturday bushfires kill 173 people in Victoria. The money needed to bring it to legal safety requirements made the venture economically unviable. Loss of life and injury to family and friends, loss of homes and the memories they contained, the complete alteration of familiar landscapes and the sense of foreboding that such a disaster could happen again have affected people across the fire-ravaged region. Victorian school children were once proudly taught that the Valley was the “Ruhr of the South”. ), New South Wales: Allen & Unwin, pp. European settlers, who were afraid of bushfires, brought their own ways of using fire. Australian Journal of Emergency Management, Australian Disaster Resilience Conference, Centre of Excellence for Prescribed Burning, Mt. Every year there is more evidence that in a warmer world fires are becoming more destructive. The Black Saturday bushfires killed 173 people, 120 in the Kinglake area alone. Two firefighters were killed and 40,000 ha burnt out. At first they used fire to clear land but as they put up fences and buildings, raised crops and increased their herds, uncontrolled burning became a threat to life and property. Often the element a writer doesn’t want to face is most central to the story. Over many millennia, these controlled burns have altered the continent’s environment, favouring the survival and spread of fire-resistant plant species and creating open grassy woodlands. 165-166 South Australia Country Fire Service, Bushfire history, website viewed 22 December 2011. Once the jobs left the Valley, those who stayed watched a rust belt form in real time. “Had the tree … previously been seen by an arborist,” states the report from the 2009 Victorian Bushfires royal commission, “the potential hazard would probably have been apparent.” Unfortunately, none of the vegetation inspectors were actually arborists. In Coleraine, in the state’s west, a conductor’s tie wire from 1961 or 1962 corroded and broke starting a fire. But now I beheld the concrete behemoth, its towering chimney stacks creating their own thin, brown cloud-stream.

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