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The light is golden again, due to the haze from the fires around Melbourne.
Most of where we went on our holiday is on fire at the moment, or being evacuated. I think we picked the right time to go. :-)
The sun this morning was a red disc against the white cloud/smoke haze. Very pretty, but of course we didn't have a camera with us.
When I went up to water the seedlings in the greenhouse I noticed that you can see the smoke from the Lysterfield fires quite clearly. I suppose it's under 10km away, but I hadn't really thought of it.
It feels at times like the whole of Australia is rather edgily looking towards where the nearest fires to them are. I'm not so much - for me to be burnt out by bushfire the fires would have to have taken out quite a large chunk of the northern suburbs or have come roaring up the creek, leapt a major road and still have taken out a fair chunk of suburbia - but I'm mildly concerned for my parents (near paddocks on the edge of a major town) and Dean's parents. Dean's parents are in an area that is extremely dry, although there isn't a lot of bush around.
The number of deliberately lit fires amazes me. It's as if people really can't make the correlation between the weather, the dryness and the fire potential. And then you have the dickheads who can't correlate between "cigarette butt out the window" and "dry grass" - there is the remains of a grass fire on the SE Arterial, which definitely wasn't there yesterday...
I suppose a lot of people in Victoria would be too young now to remember Ash Wednesday, and media coverage of fires elsewhere always seems a bit remote. Both newspapers had crap maps of Canberra to illustrate the fires, for example, which made it really difficult for me to work out how close my sister was to them and whether her house was likely to be threatened. The classic Melbourne news TV quote from the Sydney fires in 1995 was "And the fires are as close to the CBD as Prahran is." Um, yeah, guys but there's this harbour in between, which there isn't in between Prahran and the CBD... did you want to factor that in at all?
Still. Arson remains a strong possibility, and tomorrow is forecast to be 40oC with northerlies.
Look to the hills...
Most of where we went on our holiday is on fire at the moment, or being evacuated. I think we picked the right time to go. :-)
The sun this morning was a red disc against the white cloud/smoke haze. Very pretty, but of course we didn't have a camera with us.
When I went up to water the seedlings in the greenhouse I noticed that you can see the smoke from the Lysterfield fires quite clearly. I suppose it's under 10km away, but I hadn't really thought of it.
It feels at times like the whole of Australia is rather edgily looking towards where the nearest fires to them are. I'm not so much - for me to be burnt out by bushfire the fires would have to have taken out quite a large chunk of the northern suburbs or have come roaring up the creek, leapt a major road and still have taken out a fair chunk of suburbia - but I'm mildly concerned for my parents (near paddocks on the edge of a major town) and Dean's parents. Dean's parents are in an area that is extremely dry, although there isn't a lot of bush around.
The number of deliberately lit fires amazes me. It's as if people really can't make the correlation between the weather, the dryness and the fire potential. And then you have the dickheads who can't correlate between "cigarette butt out the window" and "dry grass" - there is the remains of a grass fire on the SE Arterial, which definitely wasn't there yesterday...
I suppose a lot of people in Victoria would be too young now to remember Ash Wednesday, and media coverage of fires elsewhere always seems a bit remote. Both newspapers had crap maps of Canberra to illustrate the fires, for example, which made it really difficult for me to work out how close my sister was to them and whether her house was likely to be threatened. The classic Melbourne news TV quote from the Sydney fires in 1995 was "And the fires are as close to the CBD as Prahran is." Um, yeah, guys but there's this harbour in between, which there isn't in between Prahran and the CBD... did you want to factor that in at all?
Still. Arson remains a strong possibility, and tomorrow is forecast to be 40oC with northerlies.
Look to the hills...
