Tomorrow (Friday) we’re off to Rock’n’Rebuild at Hurstbridge High Oval which is being held to raise money for the Bendigo Bank Bushfire Appeal to assist people in the Kinglake, Flowerdale, etc areas that were burnt out recently.
My wife’s band “Donna and the Aspinauts” are playing at 2:50pm and they have The Vagrants headlining! 🙂
Note: If you’re looking for the 18th March quake you want this blog post instead..
Wow – that was wild, I thought at first one of the big gums trees was coming down here at the base of Mount Dandenong but that doesn’t get felt by a friend up the mountain and especially not a friend in Glen Iris!
There was a fairly rapid rise to a large shake (about 2-5 seconds) and then it died down again over the space of about another 5-10 seconds.
Update: The USGS is reporting that it was a magnitude 4.7 located around Loch near Korumburra over in Gippsland.
GeoScience Australia now have their website back up with their information about the quake, they estimate it as magnitude 4.6, and I’ve grabbed a copy of the seismograph as it’ll disappear in 90 days.
We’ve been watching smoke up on Mt Dandenong for a few hours now, apparently the result of a grass fire over Tecoma/Belgrave way. We’re fine, but keeping a weather eye on things and gathering our important possessions and documents in case we need to evacuate.
Update: it’s now under control according to the CFA site.
Donna’s cousin was at work, but her husband, their kids and his mother were at home in Humeville when they smelled smoke. Going outside they were greeted by flames coming down the drive towards them, forcing them back inside the house and closing the only route out. Somehow the local CFA managed to get into the property and thankfully got them out safely with just minor injuries.
We have no idea who you were, but thank you so very much.
Most of us have no idea what the CFA go through but these photos on the OverClockers site, left by someone who is in the CFA, give a taste of the danger they face – the final one gives the most graphic idea, it’s the view from inside a CFA truck looking at flames outside.
Found this “thank you” video on the CFA website.
This Flash map is pulling RSS data from the Victorian Country Fire Authority (CFA) onto a Google Map of Victoria.
Note that it can only show fires that the CFA are reporting via their RSS feeds, long running fires may not appear until they are updated in their database and pushed out to the feed.
The Red Cross has set up an appeal for victims of the 2009 bushfires here in Victoria. You can donate online or you can call 1800 811 700. Please dig deep.
The Red Cross are also running a hotline for people who are trying to track down friends and relatives as they have the responsibility for keeping a register of people being evacuated, that number is 1800 727 077.
Pretty scary listening to ABC 774:
“ABC Aerial photo of what’s left of Marysville
Useful links:
View of bushfires from Doncaster in the north of Melbourne, submitted by Chris Mulherin
Wow, what a day, according to the Melbourne Uni graph of the temperatures reported by the Bureau of Met we broke the record of 45.6C set in 1939 on Black Friday by almost another degree, peaking at 46.4C (so far). At least there is a cool change on the way and thankfully no lives lost in the fires (so far).
Max to now: 46.4°C @ 15:04 | Min to now: 24.0°C @ 6:55
If you think that’s bad Avalon got to 47.9C before then!
Update: The cool change just arrived – the new graph above shows a drop of 15C in 10 minutes!
Update 2: There are now unconfirmed reports of casualties from the CFA, according to a CFA officer on ABC 774. They are trying to verify those reports. The cool change has caused them problems and loss of properties.
Hmm, this is going to be interesting, according to the BOM…
Well today it hit 43.4C at 6:15pm…
Temperature graph for 20090128 generated by Andrew Watkins at the University of Melbourne
Sunday it’ll (hopefully) just be 30C..
Today was Australia Day / Invasion Day (depending on your point of view) and it’s the first anniversary of my becoming an Australia citizen.
Didn’t get to do much to celebrate though as we’re in the middle of a massive backup recovery at work which has been keeping me very busy recently (24+ hours of extra work busy to date) and about which I’ll blog more when I get the chance. For now all I’ll say is don’t trust your hardware RAID controller and boy am I glad we’ve got good backups! 🙁