Our State Is On Fire
I didn’t know whether to post this in my Sustainable Living series, a Climate Change series, or just how to fit it here on the blog so I just decided to let it stand alone. As you may or may not know I live in Australia in the South Eastern state of Victoria.
- I live in the North-East of Victoria and we are basically surrounded by the most ferocious bushfire our country has ever known.
- In truth, the fire in our area has taken only two lives at the time of writing and it is the fires to the South West and South East of us that have taken such a toll on human life and destroyed to many homes.
It was a quiet Saturday, notable because it was going to the the hottest day we have had in a long week of days with temperatures over 40 degrees Celsius, and a week prior that had been over 35 degrees Celsius. The landscape and the people in it were tired from the heat and there was a northernly wind predicted, gusty and hot and moving up to 70/90km per hour. Not nice in the Australian landscape, in a landscape prone to bursting into flames.
All was well until around 5.30pm when a tree just gave up trying to survive in the intense heat and fell over – onto a power line. The resulting spark, combined with the dead, dry grass, the heat, the wind….
- The gusts took the flames and turned them into sheets of fire which rapidly spread into the surrounding paddocks and then in huge horrifying leaps into the forest on the Dingle Range beyond.
- Of course, the power went out at the same time. Luckily we have an old fashioned phone hanging on the wall that doesn’t need extra power and a friend was able to alert us.
- No power for most people though means no telephone landlines, no internet connection and unfortunately, we have unreliable mobile phone coverage at the best of times and when the landlines finally failed the mobile service went down too due to an overload in the system.
- For many people here in the Stanley area where I live, no power also means no water because we rely mainly on groundwater being pumped up for us to use.
- So, no power, phone or water and a fire over the hill.
Of course, we have water tanks and a fire pump and hose and firefighting clothes so we began to prepare and set everything up. We raked up leaves and put things away and worried about the chooks and ducks and the dogs. We did have a small emergency tank set up with the pump to the West of our block because the wind was coming from the North-West and we thought that the most likely direction we would have to protect. We were wrong and the next day when it finally erupted it was further south and we needed to move our rig so we could defend both sides of the property.
The smoke was thickly blanketing the whole area, the strike force and tankers arrived and sat in the road outside our property. Obviously they thought we were in the line of fire and they would be able to stop it jumping the main road from there. Fifteen or twenty minutes later they left and they stopped the fire from crossing the road about 800m up the road. That is not really important now because we personally came out without a flicker of flame reaching us, but we were incredibly lucky and if it were not for the fickle nature of wind changes the story could have been very different.
So now we are planning and revising our options in the event – the sure and certain event – of another fire threat. Each year we will be better equipped, more organised, more aware. Our connections and concerns for our neighbours have been strengthened and friendships forged and reaffirmed. Complacency is not an option.
For me this event confirms what I have believed for some time and it raises some deep questions for our communities and our nation and I hope the world at large. There are political, social, environmental and economic costs to this whole situation.
- There is enormous pressure on our forests and rural landscapes to accommodate more and more people, houses, roads and other infrastructure.
- Cities are expanding into the surrounding mountains.
- Water is being diverted to support those human developments.
As Climate Change impacts ever more directly we are going to see more incidences of storms, massive floods, and Dragon like fires. Governments, communities, businesses will all need to respond. I can see businesses such as Insurance firms being unable to bear the costs of such events and refusing to insure people who live in areas of high risk, who can blame them.
- It’s almost impossible to get insurance for flood in many areas of Australia already. Will fire protection be next?
- As the impacts of climate change expand, more and more areas will become high risk. Fewer and fewer people will be able to get the insurance cover they want and need.
This is just one example. I’m sure you can think of many more. We have an opportunity as citizens of the world, as individuals acting collectively to make positive changes to this deadly scenario.
- We can act quietly within our homes to make changes to our actions, our behaviours, or choices that will lessen our impact on the environment.
- We can act quietly within our communities to help educate each other on our choices and our options, while we still have them.
- We can act quietly within our workplaces to bring about positive actions and choices that will make our work more sustainable, more human friendly, more planet friendly
- We can ensure that our political leaders know what is important to us.We can let them know that massive action on climate change is needed and it is needed now.
Of course we can just keep plodding along like we have been, tweeking the edges of our consciousness, offering small worthless words of support, playing political games.
Fiddle While Rome Burns….