Artistic Tree

Okay. Back in harness. We went for a drive around Katoomba today, to see what is going on.

One of the things we have all been confronted with, this fire season, is the generally sketchy, vague and often misleading information available from official communication systems. It is all very well to expect people to have prepared emergency evacuation plans and to carry them out on cue ... but people must be given reliable and specific information with which to make their life changing and home abandoning decisions. Hysterical robot calls advising flight at 2 o'clock in the morning won't do. Sooner or later the "boy who cried wolf" effect takes hold.

It is clear that the information is THERE ... somewhere .... but one must go to extraordinary lengths to get it - usually via a network of personal contacts, commercial media hell bent on sensationalising everythng, direct observation, erratically updated "official" websites, printed bulletins, a host of disparate community organisations, hearsay, rumour and blatant guesswork. Most often the information is more than 12 hours old, inaccurate to begin with or couched in relatively meaningless stock phrases. Sorry. Not good enough. 

Authorities readily recognise the need to FIGHT fires but the need to authoritatively inform apprehensive local populations seems to have escaped their attention. Surely it is not too much to ask that for each local fireground there should be one or two well supported people (intimately aware of local geography) with no other task than to co-ordinate information sources and keep potential victims reliably informed - via a single organ of communication that all locals know about and can reach at will. I believe that doing so has the potential to save lives and the failure to do so will some day cost them.

None of this takes anything away from the brave, hard working folk still out there but the sort of bush fire season, we are currently enduring, looks likely to become the norm and we'd all better start learning its lessons.

What I have been able to gather from my own efforts is as follows:
a) The original Jamison Valley/ Ruined Castle fire is pretty much out
b) Valleyside roads and public vantage points in Katoomba have now re-opened
c) Grose Valley backburning operations are still flat out and smoke is still everywhere
d) The fire threatening the town of Blackheath is gradually moving further east, down the Grose Valley. Pockets of fire in the local bushland reserves are regularly flaring up afresh, requiring quick emergency action
e) Unpredictable conditions over the next few days may lead to sudden unexpected outbreaks and spot fires.

The picture above was shot atop the northern Jamison escarpment near Katoomba today. In the extra is a view of the Three Sisters, bathed in smoke, from Eagle Hawk Lookout