Tue, Jan. 28th, 2020 09:16 pm
annarti: (Default)
Happy Australia Day two days later! This summer has been absolute balls and I feel like Australia Day this year was really all about the CFS volunteers et al. One of my Dad's mates is a CFS volunteer and has been doing stints in NSW, obviously Cudlee Creek and over to Kangaroo Island. The amount of time these people are sarificing to go into the teeth of these bastard fires time and time again is just insane.

Alex was over for a bit of a whirlwind weekend from Sydney, landing on Saturday for a 30th birthday on Sunday then off again that night. I picked her up from the airport Saturday morning and we headed up to LOT.100, which I've been meaning to do... well, since it opened, really but especially this summer. It's a sort of Hills booze collective place, joint cellar door between these five beverage companies: Hills Cider Co for the cider (my favourite cider), Mismatch Brewing for the beer (they have fruit flavoured beers!), Adelaide Hills Distillery (who make 78 Degrees gin, among other things), Ashton Valley Fresh for the non-alcoholic juices and, most importantly, Vinteloper for the wine. Vinteloper was one of the wineries that lost every single vine to the Cudlee Creek fires and, like every other business affected, they haven't been asking for donations but instead just saying BUY OUR STUFF. GIVE US BUSINESS. So we went there to do just that :D LOT.100 itself is perfectly fine, though from the pizza oven you could see one of the hills behind them was distinctly more brown than others, so that's terrifying.

So yus. Got a pizza and a cheese platter for lunch, a glass of rosé and a glass of red, then two bottles of shiraz, two of rosé and one of pinot gris to take home, along with some cider and beer (both flavoured with Davidson plum, aww yeah).

We then Googled antique shops in the general area and cruised up to Birdwood via Woodside and Lobethal, straight through the middle of the fireground. This was the first time I'd been through the fireground since the bushfires and my god it's terrifying. Entire hills behind Woodside burnt. Trees literally right on the edge of Birdwood turned to charcoal. One house that was just a few bits of corrugated iron sitting in ash. Acres and acres and acres of brown vineyards and burnt orchards. Entire chunks of forest where the road went through it with the trees completely black right up to the very top, their leaves bleached white to ash, and just imagining these towering walls of fire reaching that high; and then, right in the middle of it, a house still with its rose bushes out the front. This is the stuff that always amazes me in bushfires, the stuff that doesn't burn. Just imagining the inferno the fieries had to deal with, and they saved not just the house but the roses. I dunno that just... feels more real. They're volunteers. This isn't their job, they're not just getting it done and moving on, they know the roses are just as important to save, cos that's life. To whoever lived there, they love their roses. It just touches me to see that.

Every time we saw livestock we cheered them. Well done, cows and sheep, you survived a bushfire! Cos there were plenty of photos during the fires of livestock wandering the streets after the owners just opened the gates to give them the best chance at survival.

The gum trees, of course, will be fine. Give 'em six months and they'll all be covered in fluffy green pompoms cos that's what they do, but the rest is going to take years to rebuild. I still need to sit down and figure out exactly who I want to donate to. Red Cross just kinda puts it all into general revenue so your dollars aren't necessarily going to end up with the people you're donating to, so that bugs me. I want to go directly for KI, since it'll be a while before I can take leave to get over there and spend money on the island. I've been up to the Cudlee Creek fireground and spent money there, going to the T20 Showdown this Sunday (it's Crows vs Power but they're playing cricket I can't wait) but still need to work out an actual solid donation.

Anyway. Sidetracked. We visited three different antique shops, specifically looking for jewellery because Alex loves her some antique sparkles, and finally found some proper vintage stuff in Birdwood where I enabled her into buying a ring. Cos it was pretty! And the fire was RIGHT THERE at the end of the street! And it's not like it was hellishly expensive, and it was pretty! So she bought it. I'd seen a necklace of freshwater pearls out the front, all in different colours, and then inside found some earrings of the same multicoloured freshwater pearl variety. So I got them both.

We've also decided our next girls' trip will have to be KI. SA Tourism Commission has ditched the current campaign in favour of #BookThemOut and, ngl, made me tear up first time I saw that. I've always been a parochial South Australian, always try as much as possible to buy SA stuff, and this just makes me want all the more to go do SA things.

Vinteloper's first vintage back had better be called 'Phoenix' or something I swear to G.

Tue, Dec. 31st, 2019 07:40 pm
annarti: (Default)
"A Reduced Threat has been issued for the Cudlee Creek fire which is now Contained."

FUCKING CONTAINED. I'm so happy. That last incident update made me teary to read. Incident/advice/warning updates are more like this sort of thing. Y'know, fire is here, travelling that way, crews in attendance, locals advised to be vigilant/activate their bushfire action plan/it's too late to leave. That sort of very official, warning kind of thing. That last one is just throwing so much praise and thanks at the fieries and locals.

'Monday's excellent outcome' like... You guys, yesterday was as bad as the day it started. Hot and windy and scary, and shit was already on fire, but none of it got out. They did so much for like the full week prior, earth moving and backburning to get a damn perimeter around this thing, and they did it. It's fucking contained I'm so goddamn happy.

Fieries, man. Fieries.

Sat, Dec. 21st, 2019 09:46 pm
annarti: (Default)
Three weeks ago it was still winter. I was at the cricket and it was cold and wet and everyone was in winter gear, complete with Crows scarves and beanies cos Cricket Australia doesn't make scarves and beanies. Last week it was spring! We got, like, a solid six days of spring this year. That's a lot of spring because spring is a lie. It's winter up until mid-December, then you get a week of spring, tops, and then BAM you're on day four of 40+ and everything's on fire.

Hey look everything's on fire. Must be summer. IT WAS WINTER THREE WEEKS AGO.


The Advertiser is Helpful. (I mean, they're not wrong. Also lol 'cool in the night' that very night it was still 37 at midnight.)

Mostly, though, fire. I'll just preface all this by saying I'm safe, my family's safe and I promise if I'm ever in a danger zone I'll evacuate (as will be described below) but yes. For now, my bit of the Hills is fine and dandy.

So, fire. NSW has had it shit for ages now, and that's undoubtedly what's been making international news, but we sadly got our bit yesterday. Catastrophic fire conditions (which is the worst) which doesn't necessarily mean something will catch fire, it just means that if something does catch fire it's going to be a shitshow. We've been through plenty of catastrophic days where no catastrophe actually eventuated. Yesterday, manymany things caught fire. Big ones on Yorke Peninsula, in grasslands just off Main North Road, stuff on Kangaroo Island which seems to have been worse today than yesterday, started by dry lightning.

The big one, though, has been the Cudlee Creek fire, which I'd been monitoring all morning, then we went to end of work/pre Christmas lunch at a pub whose aircon was not coping with its fourth day over 40. Those poor waitresses and kitchen staff, omg.

For the record, I live in amongst all those little greyed out <!&rt; marks in the bottom left of those maps. The red indicates the warning area, where you should really be evacuating, and the hasshed-ut bits indicate the fireground. Individual icons indicate reported incidents--exclamation points being small, localised things (like a house alarm, tree down, car accident, that sort of thing), fire is when general nature is on fire and (not visible here, but they'll come in a sec) little houses with fire are buildings on fire.

So that was how it was developing yesterday. Started the top left of that red blob, north-westerly blew it south-east and devouered Lobethal and Woodside, then a cool change hit and brought with it cool winds (it only got to 23 today), fuck-all rain, dry lighting that started the fires on KI and a change in wind direction, so now the goddamn thing looks like this )

Or even more specifically, this. The fireground is the size of Adelaide. Those little pockets there, if you zoom in on Woodside, for example, are where the fieries have managed to keep it back from the actual townships. Yellow means it's downgraded from 'Emergency' status to 'Watch and Act' status, which I'm unclear on because the latest report from the CFS says it's still uncontrolled so idk. Maybe it's just because the conditions aren't nearly so bad as yesterday. Also this from my favourite insta, which is terrifying.

I wish I'd taken a screenie of this before the cloud came over. You could see the plume of smoke on the satelite image from the fire, but I mean... you have to zoom in to see it. Pan west and the shit that's going on in NSW right now is horrifying. If you look at that in daylight (ie not the infra red overnight) then all the dirty-looking cloud cover you can see over half the country is smoke. Cricket match I was watching tonight from Canberra was abandoned because smoke blew over the ground and it looked like this. Victoria is not on fire and yet Melbourne looks like this.

I think WA is okay. They seem to be not on fire. Well done WA!

Oh also, Cudlee Creek was started by a tree falling on power lines. Not fire bugs, thank god.

But yes. In closing, I'm safe. The cool change is now blowing the fire in the complete opposite direction from me (on that map above, I'm around about where the lone greyed out <!&rt; is in the bottom right-ish). It'd have to get through the whole Crafers/Stirling/Bridgewater area, which is much more heavily populated than where it is now and hence much easier for the fieries to navigate by road. It'd also have to jump the freeway, the big red wiggle going through said Crafers/Stirling/Bridgewater area. So yeah, I'm safe and I promise I'll tell you if ever I'm not ♥

Sat, Dec. 5th, 2015 05:16 pm
annarti: (see it's like this...)
That Smoke I Smell Isn't Someone's Barbecue: A Tale of Living In The Hills by Annarti

Thursday night I smelt smoke when I got home. Check the CFS and sure enough, there's a 'Completed' grass and stubble fire on the road across the valley from me. Then, 10-ish that night, MORE DRAMA. I heard sirens, refreshed the CFS and see an 'Assist SAPOL' (South Australia Police) item ON EVE ROAD. THAT'S MY STREET. The sirens kept getting louder until they stopped RIGHT AT THE END OF MY DRIVEWAY. Carefully crept outside with my phone locked onto the CFS, making sure there wasn't a dangerous situation (I mean, the CFS are involved so it's unlikely to be a gunman or something, but still) and saw the firetruck at the end of the driveway was still full of fieries looking down at whatever SAPOL were doing. The website incident had by this stage upgraded to 'Building Fire' so I, and a bunch of other locals, stood at the end of the driveway in my dressing gown watching all the flashing lights. There was an ambo with its light turned off, and the driver just sitting there reading the paper. Also I couldn't smell smoke.

After a while the fieries all started driving off, and one fiery came over to ask if I knew the people in the house two down from me (nope) and to tell me what was going on. Very small house fire, but the owners weren't home and the implication was that it was deliberately lit. Dick move. Especially so soon after the Pinery fires, seriously dick move. Doubt I'll find anything more about that, but that was a fun bit of drama for the evening!

Moving on, today has been cleaning day, though I've only done one item on the list. Started at about 11:30. Three and a half hours later and the Shagna is as shiny as it'll ever be. There was enough road grime around the bottom of the doors that you could've written 'clean me' in it with your finger, except that it was road grime not dust, and that would be icky. The hub caps--all three of them, goddamnit--were just about black. Now they're the same champagne colour as the car again. Oh, and I had that front left panel replaced on Thursday, so that's no longer dented. Less than $200, so worth it. Cleared out all the shopping bags and floating pens and transferred them to Yoshi the Mazda, got rid of all the parking tickets and shopping receipts, and found $10 under the driver's seat, score!

Yesterday I also got the rego for Yoshi the Mazda transferred and paid my stamp duty, so it's officially mine, now =D

Tomorrow I'll take photos of the Shagna when I take it over to Mum and Dad's, where it'll live until it sells.

Still want to vacuum the house, put my clothes away and sweep the kitchen floor, but after washing the car in 37-ish I need a break. Hey look, a wip! I've since done the trunk and most of the branches of the left-most tree you can see on the ref. Hoping to have it finished today or tomorrow. I had a lot of fun on the reflections. This billabong is so glassy flat and gives the most beautiful soft reflections.

Wed, Nov. 25th, 2015 07:54 pm
annarti: (see it's like this...)
Sooooo South Australia's on fire again. No comparisons yet to last summer's, probably because the CFS are too busy right now trying to make it not a fire anymore. They can hardly tell us anything about it because it's so big and scary. 41km fire front and 'pretty nasty'. Cos. They're fieries. Properties probably destroyed and people probably dead but they dunno.

Also it's travelled about 50km in 4 hours, so it's travelling at about 13kph, which is faster than I could reliably jog. I've been doing fitness recently, of 30-second sprints, during which I can go about 150m giving me an absolute top speed of 18kph, and that is seriously giving it everything. I'm dead afterwards. And that's in clear air. Which this isn't. The air is black.

Just been upgraded by the CFS chief to 'particularly nasty'. Shit.

(I have the entire city of Adelaide between me and the fires, btw, so I'm safe, as is everyone I know. I do fear for the vineyards, though. Obvious selfish reasons aside, wine is a major industry for my state. Lose too much of that and we're stuffed.)

Tue, Feb. 10th, 2009 11:49 pm
annarti: (this r srs bzns)
Currently at 181 deaths, the fires in Victoria are officially worse than our two formerly worse bushfires ever--Black Friday (1939, 71 deaths) and Ash Wednesday (1983, 75 deaths across SA and Victoria)--put together. Sick, sick bastards who started the things. What kind of person gets enjoyment out of something like that?

The one-day cricket match at the Adelaide Oval today had an appeal to raise money for the Victorian bushfire victims. They had people with buckets collecting money around the ground, all the profit from ticket sales, people ringing up and donating watching the broadcast around the country, $100,000 from Cricket Australia, $25,000 from the SACA (SA cricket), and the players donated their match fees, too.

From the Adelaide Oval alone, with an attendance of around 16,000 people, we raised about $145,000, just from rattling the buckets around the oval. Around the country, $6,023,643. Purely from the cricket match. God knows how much has been raised from other funds and appeals, too.

I love my sport. I love my city. I fucking love my country.


The match was pretty bloody brilliant in itself, too. Eeeee the CHEER when our South Aussie boi went out to bat *^^* Have I mentioned how much I love my city yet? laksjghals

Sun, Feb. 8th, 2009 06:02 pm
annarti: (why does it have to be like that?)
Holy fuck Victoria.

They showed one shot of about five burnt out cars that were in positions as though they'd had a crash, because the fire front changed direction while they were on the road and they'd crashed trying to get away. THAT is my worst nightmare right there. Just seeing the fire coming towards you, bush on either side of the road, and there's NOTHING you can do about it.

South Australia has been SO lucky this heatwave. We've had little patches but nothing serious. This? Is worse than Ash Wednesday.

News says the fires were lit by arsonists. If they're caught, they'll be charged with murder. I bloody hope they are.

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