To ask you to pray for the thousands of people trapped on a beach by fires in Victoria?

[TheClaws]

There are 4000 people from the town of Mallacoota, Victoria, Australia, that is currently being destroyed by fire. They most likely won’t have homes to return to. They all have life jackets on ready to take shelter in the water as embers rain down upon them. Fire personnel have just - as I post - told them to get in the water. Can you imagine how they must feel?

Australia at the moment is burning across 4 states. Where I am it is 45c and the smell of smoke is heavy. It is a terrible summer for us.

This thread began about Mallacoota which is finally being evacuated, it will take 2-3 ship loads of 1000 passengers and the journey will take 17-20 hours. Babies and toddlers will need to be flown out with their parents but the conditions aren't hospitable, firies have had to change shift by airlift, and its the countdown to catastrophic weather conditions on Saturday
The town is running short on food and water as well as fuel.
Mallacoota is one town but it brought the attention of many of us on here to how horrific these fires are and how very real and personal the destruction is.
There is a massive evacuation going on along the coastline.
The wildlife as well the loss is catastrophic.

Thank you all.

Today’s rolling news (collated)

www.abc.net.au/news/2020-01-03/nsw-vic-australia-bushfire-crisis-live-blog-january-3/11838342

Some explanation on why these fires are so dangerous and damaging:

Scientific modelling 'not coping' with the load of the fires

Bairnsdale Incident Controller Andy Gillham told ABC Gippsland some communities will have fires coming from almost all directions.

He says, “the scientific modelling that we use to try and predict where fire might run is not coping with what’s happing in the landscape just purely because of the fire load.”

“When the fires build they can create their own weather, and the fires are doing what they want in the landscape.”

The Bairnsdale incident control team are expecting significant movement from all fires starting from this afternoon through till Sunday morning when conditions will ease off.

He's not actually at the cricket is he?

He's not actually at the cricket is he?

Nah.

Exhorting us to enjoy the cricket (and not panic about the fires) wasn't going too well, PR wise.

Scientific modelling not coping with the fire load :(

28 people unaccounted for in Victoria, and 449 homes destroyed in NSW

I don’t have the words...😢

My thoughts are with all of you who have family & friends there

& big hugs to the poster who thought her firey DH had died, but he turned up at home 💕

No prayers, but strength & best wishes to everyone over there x and obviously all of the animals 😢

It's desperately sad, not just these people but tens of thousands of others. In the weeks to come we can help via the Red Cross and other orgs who are helping people but also by every one of us taking responsibility for our environments, water consumption (including buying crops from water scarce areas) and carbon emissions - this won't help them but climate change is a real problem and we need to each do our part.

Kangaroo Island; video of a "fire twister”
If you watch til the end you’ll see how a fire twister starts, and how it sucks other smaller fires towards it causing more burn off and more danger.

Latest news for Kangaroo Island, South Australia
(Kangaroo Island (KI) is probably the last most preserved area of natural flora and fauna left in Australia because of its location. We are losing so much)
Over a third of the island is protected in nature reserves, home to native wildlife like sea lions, koalas and diverse bird species. In the west, Flinders Chase National Park is known for penguin colonies and striking coastal rock formations, like the sculpted Remarkable Rocks and the stalactite-covered Admirals Arch.

Stan Gorton is the editor of the local newspaper and he said there is now "no way of stopping" the fires on the Island”
“The real concern is when the southerly — the change hits, around 5:00pm, there will be strong westerlies, which will blow further east into farmland and also the scrubland along the South Coast, where there's lodgers and camp grounds, et cetera. They are advising everyone on that whole south coast to get out now.
Stan says there aren't too many people in the region, but there are farms "scattered" in the path of the blaze.
"But like the incident controllers said there's nothing they can do, nothing will stop it. It's just marching south. It's very bushy — yeah. There is nothing they can stop it. It is just burning through bushland. Thick scrub."

I can't imagine trying to evacuate an entire coastline of people! Do they ever 'reverse the flow' and stop the 'incoming' traffic and use both sides of the highway to get people out? I'm in the US and that's what they do to evacuate people from natural disasters here.

I was thinking that too, AcrossthePond. I find it hard to imagine why they couldn't do that.

The words 'thoughts and prayers' are like a red rag to a bull to a lot of us right now.

And if Fucking Smoko says 'comfort' one more fucking time it is entirely possibly I will personally hunt him down. Andrew Constance is right (for fucking once), we don't need this dickhead travelling around patronising people, if Smoko wants to keep his job, he needs to get the cheque book out and get shit rolling, stop blabbing about it being a state matter.

He could also learn to read a fucking crowd/situation (like not rolling into a devastated community in a fleet on clean white BMWs, touching people when they clearly don't want to be touched and then turning his back and running away when it gets a bit tricky).

Thoughts and fucking prayers DON'T. DO. ANYTHING. You know what does stuff? Regulation, Long term thinking and planning, ACTION.

I do hold him personally responsible for a lot of this. HE. KNEW this was coming, he was TOLD.

The only thing fucking Scott Morrison has going for him is that he is not Peter Dutton.

@IamNotaWitch

He turned up today at an evacuation centre with a bag of biscuits.

Such help. At this point I’d rather they bring back Abbott. At least he understands the fire situation.

Re Kangaroo Island, this graphic will help show how big, and all consuming this disaster is. This is the danger zone.

If you want to read some facts this is a good thread:
twitter.com/manwithoutatan/status/1212523804620152832

His first tweet on the 1st Jan (so numbers are worse now) is:
“I want to give some perspective for people not from Australia.
More Aussie land is currently burning than exists in the entire country of Belgium. The smoke is causing breathing problems in New Zealand, 2,000km away. Half a billion animals have been killed. Eight people are dead.”

And continues:
“One-seventh of the state of Victoria is on fire. The fire front in the state of New South Wales is so long that, if you made it a straight line, it would stretch from Sydney to Afghanistan. The fires are being fought by volunteers.”

He can't even politician right.

Seriously, FAKE it you idiot. Where are the PR people? he was in fucking MARKETING?! HOW? Glad we spent all that money on empathy training! He can't even see that a pregnant woman who has just lost her home, lost track of her partner in the chaos and has had to drive through FIRE with her baby might not want to be a part of his fucking photo op. And if he didn't know all of that, he fucking well should have.

While I can't quite agree with this: At this point I’d rather they bring back Abbott. I understand the sentiment.

IAmNotAWitch

Well said.

Do they ever 'reverse the flow' and stop the 'incoming' traffic and use both sides of the highway to get people out?
I think the problem is that it is only one lane each way a lot of the time with no hard shoulder and they need to be able to get food supplies and fuel tankers in, police down etc and allow space in case they have to turn around and go the other way or get around broken down cars etc

This is the biggest 'natural' disaster of our generation I'm scared for my family there in NSW and Victoria.

That Kangaroo Island video is terrifying.

I cannot believe the Australian bushfire haven't made it onto the BBC news homepage

Colouringinpro Obviously it's more important for us to know that a knitting group are inundated with requests for 'Archie's hat', we don't need to be bothered with depressing news from an insignificant country far, far away
I feel a complaint coming on.

So today Scummo met a firie today who was at breaking point, he told Scummo that he hadn't eaten all day to which our glorious PM replied 'oh well, I'll let you get back to it then and walked off.

What the actual duck is wrong with this man? Where IS his humanity? A convoy of 6 BMWs for a political photo op to a town that has been burned to the ground and not so much as a bottle of water to give to people? What the duck?

Fuck fuck bloody autocorrect

stuffedpeppers, people are dying, wild life is being wiped out, yet all you can think off is an opportunity to kick them when they’re down. Shame on you.