Public life ground to a halt, many lost power, and scores of people died behind closed doors. What sounds like the start of a post-apocalyptic movie is in fact Melbourne in January 2009.
I remember that. Black Saturday was fucked. I had a 4 month old kid, and I climbed into the roof of my house to run the wiring for a ceiling fan for his bedroom. I was pretty cooked in the 3 minutes it took to pull the cable.
As soon as it was wired, my Mum had to run home to defend it from bushfire. The firefront stopped at the road at end of her driveway.
Meanwhile, one of my Dad’s friends - a sergeant at Marysville - vanished into the smoke and emerged a few days later. The whole time, nobody knew where he was.
It was almost a solid week of days over 40°C. On the last day, there was a constant 50km/h wind coming directly from the desert inland. Going outside felt like standing behind a jet engine.
From memory where I was in Brunswick East each weekday leading up to the weekend topped out at 46.5C at 6:30pm. I kept wondering when the evacuations would be ordered but they never came. Mum worked for a funeral home in Sydney. She turned up a week or two later with a truck full of coffins. I guess Victoria didn’t have enough on hand.
All these new concrete jungle suburbs are especially bad for this, genuinely unsafe to go outside on some summer days. Would be nice to see some laws or planning guidelines about shade.
I was weeding corn in a paddock with no shade that week and it really incentivised me to think about going to uni.
I was in Oz during this heatwave. It was no joke.
I remember going to work in the city and thinking something was off but it took a moment to figure out what was different. The streets were filled with leaves because the trees were all dying.
