No Happy Endings

Posted at 8:30 PM, Sunday, February 8, 2009

Our heatwave has finally come to an end. We lived through one last brutally hot day on Friday. At 8:00 p.m. it was still 103 degrees! I heard Hobbes meowing like crazy, and found him perched as high on a chair in the living room as he could get: he had spotted a small brown lizard on the ceiling and was hoping that gravity would intervene on his behalf. Bobby cheerfully spotted another refugee from the heat clinging to the curtains: a Huntsman spider. At least it was on the small side: ONLY three inches long or so! Bobby managed to imprison it in a jar and placed it gingerly on the kitchen counter so the boys could admire it in the morning. Yonatan declined to look, and Nadav asked that night if we suspected there were any more Huntsman spiders lurking in the house.

I worried about the wind change predicted to sweep through Adelaide on Saturday, but it arrived quite gently. Over the course of the afternoon and evening, the temperature dropped from 105 degrees down to the low 70s. I awoke today to a blissfully cool morning and even a few miraculous drops of rain on the road.

But this was not a truly happy ending. While South Australia enjoyed a slow and gentle weather change, our next-door state of Victoria was enduring record-breaking heat and ferocious winds, along with dreaded lightning strikes. Dozens of fires broke out across the state during Saturday afternoon, and the winds whipped them into horrifying walls of flame. We awoke today to the news that at least 40 people had died. Over the course of the day the toll has risen to 84 and is predicted to rise further. We are witnessing the deadliest bushfires in Australia's history.

Many in my community can tell tales of the last day of horror: the Ash Wednesday fires of 1983. Those fires ravaged the Adelaide Hills and killed 75 people in Victoria and South Australia, including 14 firefighters. A lot has been learned from that experience, and all firefighters so far are safe and accounted for. But the ferocity of yesterday's fires made it difficult for locals to get out of their homes in time or to stay safe once their homes caught fire. Entire towns of have been wiped off the map, and the photos look to me reminiscent of some of the worst tornado strikes in the United States. The Australian has provided dozens of photos, as well as audio slideshows narrated by journalists who are clearly struggling to keep their composure.

At the same time, the northern part of Queensland has been decimated by line after line of monsoonal storms that have dropped a meter of rain in the last week. A journalist visiting the region reported that more of Queensland was underwater than above it. Residents of the hard-hit town of Ingham are reeling now that they have been hit by flooding for the second time in a week; another seven inches of rain fell overnight, and the local river crested once again. However, local residents interviewed on national radio played down the misery they were experiencing when compared with what is unfolding in Victoria. Roads and homes can always be replaced, they said. Lives can't.