by Arianddu » Tue Feb 10, 2009 9:46 am
I'm fine and safe - 800+ kilometres from the fires. Thankfully they are being brought under control at last. Andrew should be ok too - I haven't heard of any fires in Tasmania, and there's a stretch of sea (Bass Straight) between Tas and Victoria, so the risks of spread are low. Canberra's fire free too, so Vladan should be ok as well.
I'm sighing with relief because all of my friends have checked in 'safe' - 3 families I know have lost their homes, and another friend has 2nd degree burns to her arms, legs and part of her face, but otherwise they are ok. But the death toll is sickening, and what is worse is that there are hundreds of missing people. It's going to be weeks before the confirmed death toll stops climbing. The number of children is the worst...
As for the 'jihad' bullshit - there's no evidence of that at all that I can find, and I don't think it helps spreading that kind of crap when we're trying to deal with this disaster. All of South Eastern Australia has been on tenterhooks about bushfires since mid-November when we started getting late rain. We knew it was going to be a bad summer, and it's pure bad luck that we had such a long heatwave of such high temperatures. People are in agony about what has happened, the last thing we need now is idiots throwing around hateful 'look, the Muslims did it!' bullshit before anything has been established. What we really don't need following this disaster is a replay of the Cronulla riots because some biggoted idiot decided to throw out unsubstantiated rumours. Take it somewhere else, please. (Sorry if that's treading on your moderator toes, Andrew, but that really got to me)
Why treat life as a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving in an attractive & well-preserved body? Get there by skidding in sideways, a glass of wine in one hand, chocolate in the other, body totally worn out, screaming WOOHOO! What a ride!
I wish they could get those fires out quick.
