Disasters: Are You Prepared?...

My Christmas and New Year, like so many other Australians this year was almost a non-event. With half of Australia burning, no-one felt like celebrating. As it is, I’m writing this through tears after seeing so many heartbreaking images of our beautiful country go up in flames. So many people now no longer have a home, a business, or a farm that until just a week or two ago, did. Over 100,000 people have been displaced from Victoria, with many 1000s more from New South Wales. There are many thousands of people from right across the country that have dropped everything to go fight these ‘unstoppable’ fires, not to mention others who have come from overseas. The pets, native animals, wildlife and stock loss is staggering – 500,000,000 (half a billion) – and the numbers keep rising as the fires continue to burn. I have family and friends that were impacted by the recent Cudlee Creek fires in the Adelaide Hills … and while that fire covered a fair portion of the Adelaide Hills, it is small in comparison to those in Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria. I’ve been to Kangaroo Island and seen it’s incredible beauty, and now over the period of two days, about half the island has been turned to ash. I’m not going to get political here – this is not the place. But rather I want to say – how prepared are you? If you saw the “watch and act” or the “emergency warning” message come in to your inbox, or heard the evacuate siren sound from your local fire station – just how ready are you? What would you do? Having been through this scenario five years ago with the Sampson Flat...

A Reality Check

Have you ever been in a situation that makes you really, and I mean REALLY, REALLY, REALLY think about things? Well this happened to me last week, and made me realise a lot of things. Firstly let me explain a few things. I live in the Adelaide Hills. I have for most of my life (I say ‘most’ as there was a short stint of metro living at one stage), and living in the hills brings with it the danger of bushfires. I was in primary school when when one of Australia’s worst bushfires ‘Ash Wednesday‘ hit, and I still have very vivid memories of that. Anyone who has been through a disaster (fire, flood, earthquake etc) will agree, that it is something you NEVER forget. Anyway last week was a week to go down in history. Adelaide’s history anyway. And hopefully one that won’t be repeated anytime soon (or hopefully ever). Adelaide almost broke their all-time maximum temperature of 46.1C. We didn’t quite, only making it to 45.1C. However apart from that, we did have 5 consecutive days of over 40C temperatures, which together with the hot nights making a decent sleep impossible, has been simply exhausting. By Thursday and Friday with the ground completely dried out from whatever little moisture might have been in it, together with high winds, the fire danger rating was sky-high (“catastrophic” is the technical term). And for the first time since Ash Wednesday I actually packed up some things and moved them out of my house. I decided to do that rather than face the regret of losing precious items later. Sure I had a “surely it won’t happen to me” feeling, but I also know that it only takes one spark,...

Trove Tuesday: 1 March 1954, The Day the Earth Shook South Australia...

This post is about earthquakes, but let me start off by saying that South Australia is not known for its quakes. In fact it is more known for the lack of quakes, which is why it is big news if we have one. Yesterday was one of those rare days when South Australia (well parts of it) shook. I found this when I was driving home from work and heard it on the news. The report said that South Australia had had two small earthquakes (see the picture below). Remember I said we don’t get them here, so even the small ones make news! Anyway I did my usual weekday routine of getting up and off to work, then busy, busy all day. And I can confirm that I wasn’t one of the ‘hundreds’ who claim to have heard or felt the earthquakes, so I can’t say what it would be like, and don’t particularly want to go through one. Now going back a few years to when I was eight years old, my family moved into the “Springvale” property at Gumeracha in the Adelaide Hills. This is an old house, dating back to pre-1900. And from the day I moved in, till when I left, I felt the walls in my room would collapse whenever there was a big storm as there were huge cracks in the walls, which I was told was from the 1954 earthquake. Having known nothing of the ’54 earthquake as it was way before my time, I headed over to Trove, and found some amazing articles. Here’s the first one I found. It is a LOOOOONG article, so I’ve only copied a small portion of the beginning of the article here. For the...