The unfriendly fires of home: events in Canberra

My regular blogging seems inconsequential in the face of what is happening in Canberra, where I have family and friends. Like much of the Canberra diaspora in Sydney/Melbourne I’ve spent a fair bit of time on the phone. With many land-lines down and mobile phone reception at times patchy, I was for a while the only person who could relay messages between family in Canberra and relatives in Victoria. (My parents live north of the city on forty acres, just off the highway to Sydney, before you pass Lake George. They are in no immediate danger, but in the event of a northern fire front opening, I imagine my Dad will be going out with his volunteer bush fire brigade.) But telephone contact, and watching the dramatic coverage on BBC world, was as close to the action as I got. Though I heard about the crisis on Saturday, it was Sunday before the scale of what was going on set in for me. I now know that while nobody I know is hurt or injured there have been a few close calls, and one friend is among those who have lost their family homes.

Canberra is a small town: there are at best two degrees of separation between people. With 368 houses gone, everyone will know someone who has lost their home. There are perhaps two thousand people now without a housing. Fortunately, there has been very little loss of life, but emergency rooms are stretched. Twenty-five percent of the city was without electricity for up to two days. (There are fears loss of refrigeration could lead to an outbreak of food poisoning.) The city’s sewage treatment plant has suffered three fires and the emergency holding dam will overflow after tonight. In the worst affected suburbs apparently it sounds like a war zone: there are explosions as natural gas mains, even petrol stations, went up.

In some ways it is astonishing nothing like this has happened before: Canberra sits in grasslands, and most suburbs are surrounded by (and contain corridors of) native scrub, pine plantations or parkland. This provides a lot of fire “interface”, in the emergency services jargon. The night-time television footage was astonishing: strips of fire marching across the valley beneath a sky of orange and black smoke. Simply apocalyptic.

I know people who have been fighting spot-fires in their garden; another who has seen the houses behind his go up in smoke, his own back fence consumed in the flames. My best friend volunteered at her local emergency centre for registration duty, and would up registering her own aunt for relief.

There have been moments of human incompetence and greed: Saturday there were reports that when water restrictions were lifted so people could hose down their homes, a number of idiots began washing their cars; and a young man has been arrested for burglary of an evacuated home.

However, far more inspiring have been the acts of heroism by everyday people, and news of a community pulling together. There has been a the story of a man going to help fight fire at a friend’s place, only to hear his own suburb was in flames: on his return he found his house standing, while neighbours had been burnt out. When his neighbours realised they couldn’t save their own homes, they fell back to defend others’, including his. A man in Duffy, where the worst fire was, drove back through flames several times to ferry out seven stranded residents. I’ve also heard a friend’s sister put herself in real danger to help horses from a fire-threatened paddock.

On a lighter note, Canberra’s citizens have been asked to minimise water going into the drains to prevent sewage overflow into the river system. One friend has taken to showering with a variable hose-head on the front lawn in his underpants. He claims if high temperatures persist, he may have to make it a habit.

The community has also rallied around the emergency centres with food, clothing and mattresses, and in making food for the fire fighters. Despite this, civic infrastructure in terms of medical centres, a school, pathology labs, RSPCA buildings, parts of the CSIRO and the entire Mount Stromlo observatory are gone.

Still, what do we say to those who have lost homes? Survivors may philosophically declare that they were only possessions, and that the main thing is they still have each other. This is certainly true, but how to measure the loss of what those possessions represented, a connection with one’s past? People are combing through the wreckage, not so much to retrieve lost things, but merely to find mementos. Memories. The test of the community, and these families, is going to be in the rebuilding.