All posts tagged: damage

“We need kilometres of fencing”- repairs after an Australian bushfire Part 2

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The texts had reassured us all, anxiously listening for news of our friends’ latest bushfire threat. They dealt with one in February (the height of Summer fire season here in Australia), but this danger so early in Spring was scary… As I began to tell in Part One, I’m just back from helping with a tiny part of the massive clean-up: they battled all night to save their home, while thousands of acres burnt around them. Like, literally up to the verandah. I took this photo standing on their front deck: As you saw in Part One, destroyed sheds and landscape made for eerie surroundings. Plus the silence. Until the loud revving of a loaded truck, as an unknown farmer, his wife, and three kids from half an hour away arrived with a load of donated hay. His wife had even baked a chocolate cake. Just writing that down makes me cry; we were all fighting back tears as the team gathered to unload the hay and roll it into the [miraculously-saved] shed. This tough …

The flood anniversary, one year on

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  This exact time last year, here was my morning view from the front verandah at 7am. My son’s room below the house was underwater up to my thighs. His friend’s motorbike was almost floating, and my neighbour’s cars had water up to their steering wheels. It was a challenging, stressful time, as you can imagine, including several deaths, and I wrote about it here with many more photos in Soggy not Bloggy. It took 3 days for the waters to subside, and miraculously, we only lost electricity for a few hours. Which was great, because I had two teenage boys marooned in the living room with me; we would have likely killed each other without the internet for distraction. Or the toaster of course, for ongoing food requirements (I had waded to the supermarket with water over the top of my gumboots to bring back milk and bread). Today, the nearby town of Lismore- which was devastated by over 11 metres of water literally rushing thorough the CBD– is having a community gathering and …