India safe

21.1.2013

India phoned tonight. She has been taken out of the camp and is away from where the fires are heading. The relief for everyone here is enormous.

My biggest worry is that I myself may have been part of the problem. We have all tried to keep going after the fires here and stay optimistic. What we have not done is clearly communicate exactly what it is really like to be in a fire storm. Perhaps we should have stressed how bad it was instead of focussing on how we coped. I say this because even now we hear people on the radio stating the sort of mythology that we trusted before we had the experience. I am pretty sure that they have never faced a tsunami of fire approaching with the noise and apparent speed of a jet plane.

Have they struggled to find their way in air that is so thick it blankets out all light and totally disorients you whilst you struggle to breathe? Have they discovered that in a valley a fire front may pass over, but that you will still be bombarded with fire bombs for hours after all your water pumps have run out of fuel or died for lack of oxygen. Have they known what it feels like when is neighbour is burning to death just down the road because they made a wrong choice at a critical moment?

It does not end there either. Problems with health, mental and physical continue in our valley even after four years. The climate has changed. The problems have increased and I applaud our PM for acknowledging this.

Now that this drama seems resolved we have to try and remember where we were at before we dropped everything except our concern for India.

The ground water table seems to have dropped suddenly in a way it did not even do at the end of the drought and we are having a battle to keep even the established fruit trees alive. The feed is also burnt off in the paddocks and because the fences are not yet all replaced after the 2009 fire we have limits on usable space. We have all the materials now to build new stockyards but the ground is rock hard and friends report that if they try to knock in posts they just shatter. This job might have to wait.

I will deal with it all tomorrow.