Fire

Well anyone following this blog might think that we have fallen off the face of the earth since Black Saturday. Little did I know a few weeks ago that the day I posted the hot blog would be the start of the largest bush fire disaster in Australian history: 210 fatalities, 2498 farm buildings, 31 state infrastructure, 2029 houses, 10,287 livestock, 21,320 hectares of timber plantations and thousands of km of fencing with four of the largest fires still burning today. Two of the big fires are within national parks including the flagship Wilson's Prom Catherdral fire which has taken out over half the park so far. Both of the Canadian exchangees posted there have been busy working on backburns to protect Tidal River the main visitor site. Fortunately we haven't been directly impacted yet in the Grampians, touch wood, as most of the fires were in the south and eastern parts of Victoria so far this season. There was a lightning strike in the park that was quickly controlled and a predominately grassland fire near the town of Horsham around 70 km away which burned some houses and a golf course. Average rainfall for this area by this date is 85 mm and this year we have had a whooping 1.6 mm. The good news is that there is a 90% chance of several mm of rain forecast for this week. Hopefully it comes without much wind and lightning.

Yesterday we popped into Melbourne to send Dad off on the plane and take in the zoo. He certainly picked an interesting time to visit and we all have had a very authentic Australian summer experience this time around. At any rate we did manage to tour around a bit and now that work and life seem to be settling down a bit we can get around to a few more blog updates, no no, stop laughing, we really mean it this time :-).