Black Saturday - Victorian Bushfires

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It looks like you guys are getting a bit of coverage of the bushfires back there.

The big fires are not affecting us, they are about an hour and a half form where we are. We're too 'inner city' for them to reach here. There was a smaller fire in the suburb next to where our new house is, they lost 6 houses and think it was arson. There was a fire yesterday in Ivanhoe, which isonly about 6 miles away, but that has been contained.

The big fires are a couple of hours away, but approaching closer. There is a lovely village/town called Healesville in the Yarra Valley which we go to quite often for a Sunday drive out. It's about an hour from us and the people there have been corralled into shelters in case of an evacuation order. The fire has hit at one end of town and it will depend on the weather as to which direction it will head.

Marysville & Kinglake have been completed destroyed. Marysville is about 2 hours drive from here and is the town closest to the nearest ski resorts. Its the start of the Victorian Alps and was such a beautiful little town. We had a weekend there not too long ago, it's where the waterfall pictures on the blog were taken. To see it now on TV is surreal, total devastation. They are not allowing anyone into Marysville at the moment as they have closed the whole area and classified it as a crime scene as they think that the fire was lit deliberately. It looks like it has been nuked, there is literally nothing left. 80% of homes and property have been totally destroyed.

So many lives and homes have been lost, many of the fires are still out of control. It's on the news here pretty much 24/7. It has been the worst fire in Australian history. They say it was one of those freak events, a culmination of 12 years of drought, a week of extreme temperatures setting new records (Melbourne hit 46.4 which is now the record for the highest temperature in history of any Australian capital city and Avalon recorded 48.9 which is also a new record). Last Saturday was when the fires did the most damage, that was the 46.4 degree day and we had scorching hot winds travelling at over 50 miles an hour.

The handful of survivors from Marysville and Kings Lake said there was no warning. They obviously knew the fires were around, but braced themselves for usual fire procedures - however, they said the sky suddenly went black and within 2 minutes everything was on fire. The Marysville fire was travelling at 75 miles per hour. People had no chance. A lot of people didn't even have time to get to their cars, not that it would have done any good as a great many people died in their cars trying to out-run it.

It is unbelievable to think that a lot of these were deliberately lit. They have confirmed now that Marysville was arson and they are hunting a serial arsonist. As the crews are bringing fires under control, someone is following and re-lighting fires behind! Unbelievable. The current death toll is 181 with many still missing. Over a thousand homes have been destroyed and some towns wiped out completely.

It will take Victoria many, many years to even begin to recover from this. It's like the aftermath of a full scale war. We just hope they manage to contain the big fires that are swallowing the place up at the moment. They have flown fire-fighters in from all over Australia, Tasmania, New Zealand and the USA. There are 12 main fires ('complexes' as they call them) still burning at the moment, and over 4500 fire fighters battling, most of them volunteers.

Today was very smokey even up around us, the whole city was under smoke and it was hard to breathe. Todays smoke was mainly from the fire crews back-burning containment lines to try and stop the fires spreading further.

Anyway, we are fine and we’re totally safe where we are so no need to worry.

It couldn't be more opposite than the snow your getting.

Tony & Emma.

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