after the storm
Mar. 23rd, 2009 05:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hnpccWe went back up to have tea with Dean's parents again on Friday night in Whittlesea. On the way up I realised you can actually see where the fires went across the hills. I keep forgetting how much closer Whittlesea is to Mt Disappointment and Kinglake.
There was one really large, almost clear looking patch on the hills. Dean's best guess is that that's where Coombs Rd was, where Brian Naylor and his wife lived. It looked to be roughly right anyway.
The roadblocks have gone, and the roads to Kinglake and Marysville re-opened on the weekend. We didn't go up there, for obvious reasons. The refugee and emergency services camps in Whittlesea have pretty much gone, although there's still an Australia Post mailpoint caravan (quite a lot of people don't have mailboxes any more, funnily enough, but they still need a Post Office Box address.) The centre of action has now apparently moved back up to the communities, which is a good thing.
While we were waiting for Dean's parents I flicked through the most recent edition of Mountain Monthly. This edition is about survival - it's full of survival stories, photos, etc. The obituaries can wait for later editions, and, in some cases, for the dead to be identified.
Only 66 out of 210 so far. D., who works for Dean's parents, is waiting for her son and his family to be identified still. The four of them (her son, her daughter-in-law and two grandchildren) died together with 5 others and they're still identifying the bodies. D. and her family know that they're dead - there are phone calls, a neighbour who saw them, that kind of thing - but until the coroner releases all 9 of them there will be no funeral or memorial service.
(The neighbour offered them all a lift down to a cleared patch of ground he hoped would be safer. They hesitated, and decided to stay in the house. It could have been the other way around. A roll of the dice, the luck of the moment. The firestorm obliterated their entire street. No one who stayed survived. In this case the advice not to leave in the face of the fire was wrong. But it could have so easily been the other way around.)
Meanwhile there's a memorial service or funeral almost every second day. A lot of the time the memorial services are public, the funerals are immediate family only and little publicised.
After tea Dean's Mum asked if we'd mind giving her a lift up to the church so she could set up the coffee mugs for the following day's service. The op shop behind the church has signs asking people not to leave any more donations, they've no room. All the other op shops have similar signs up. There are three shipping containers sitting out the front of the church, and they're full too. The goods will get used of course, but first people have to clear, to sift and to decide whether to rebuild or not.
Whittlesea is nearly back to normal. It was pretty dead on Saturday night, with only the local restaurants, pubs and takeaways having signs of life. I think everyone's happier that way.
There was one really large, almost clear looking patch on the hills. Dean's best guess is that that's where Coombs Rd was, where Brian Naylor and his wife lived. It looked to be roughly right anyway.
The roadblocks have gone, and the roads to Kinglake and Marysville re-opened on the weekend. We didn't go up there, for obvious reasons. The refugee and emergency services camps in Whittlesea have pretty much gone, although there's still an Australia Post mailpoint caravan (quite a lot of people don't have mailboxes any more, funnily enough, but they still need a Post Office Box address.) The centre of action has now apparently moved back up to the communities, which is a good thing.
While we were waiting for Dean's parents I flicked through the most recent edition of Mountain Monthly. This edition is about survival - it's full of survival stories, photos, etc. The obituaries can wait for later editions, and, in some cases, for the dead to be identified.
Only 66 out of 210 so far. D., who works for Dean's parents, is waiting for her son and his family to be identified still. The four of them (her son, her daughter-in-law and two grandchildren) died together with 5 others and they're still identifying the bodies. D. and her family know that they're dead - there are phone calls, a neighbour who saw them, that kind of thing - but until the coroner releases all 9 of them there will be no funeral or memorial service.
(The neighbour offered them all a lift down to a cleared patch of ground he hoped would be safer. They hesitated, and decided to stay in the house. It could have been the other way around. A roll of the dice, the luck of the moment. The firestorm obliterated their entire street. No one who stayed survived. In this case the advice not to leave in the face of the fire was wrong. But it could have so easily been the other way around.)
Meanwhile there's a memorial service or funeral almost every second day. A lot of the time the memorial services are public, the funerals are immediate family only and little publicised.
After tea Dean's Mum asked if we'd mind giving her a lift up to the church so she could set up the coffee mugs for the following day's service. The op shop behind the church has signs asking people not to leave any more donations, they've no room. All the other op shops have similar signs up. There are three shipping containers sitting out the front of the church, and they're full too. The goods will get used of course, but first people have to clear, to sift and to decide whether to rebuild or not.
Whittlesea is nearly back to normal. It was pretty dead on Saturday night, with only the local restaurants, pubs and takeaways having signs of life. I think everyone's happier that way.
