I can still remember that fateful day two years ago.
The hottest day I think I'd seen in my life. I only ventured out into the heat twice that day, once to buy something from the local Officeworks store, then later to pick up my son's bike from a repair shop. It was still early afternoon and I was looking at a Twitter clone app on my iPhone, messaging about it. A follower wanted to see just what it looked like, so I took a shot of the sky, although I don't remember if that were a great indicator of things or not. However, at that part of the afternoon we still had no idea what was to come.
The news later brought it home all too vividly. Then there was the realization that my niece was in one of the endangered areas up in Gippsland. That led to a frantic couple of phone calls and to taking a better look at Twitter clients, as I remembered reading how effective Twitter could be in emergency situations. I also set up a Twitter application on the desktop computer. I had to learn and adapt quicker than I'd liked, but it was crucial to finding out quickly what was going on and wheter I could find anything that would help my niece's situation.
Over the next six weeks, every spare moment was spent on that computer and my iphone keeping track of what was happening, in addition to collating and relaying important information out through Twitter.
That first night, however, was the hardest and perhaps the worst. It caught so many by surprise. Even with the earlier heat that day, nobody had really expected the horrendous fires that occurred. About the only thing we could do that night was figure out how to recover from the shock and try to handle it as best we could.
I think I can safely say it's something most Victorians hope we never see again.
Then again, we didn't think we'd see two lots of Victorian floods in the space of just under a month.
That's the thing about Australia and its weather conditions...it's either fire or its floods.
