Photo: CSIRO By Ed Thexton
A FEW weeks ago, at the Inverloch library I picked up Black Saturday – Not the End of the Story by Peg Fraser, a cultural history of a small place, Strathewen, with an extraordinary story.
In this Museum Victoria publication about the afternoon of Saturday February 9, 2009, I could hear the voices of Barry, Barbara and Bronwyn as they spoke of a day, or more precisely a few hours of a day, that changed them. Like the expanding ripples from a pebble thrown into water, it also changed me.
A FEW weeks ago, at the Inverloch library I picked up Black Saturday – Not the End of the Story by Peg Fraser, a cultural history of a small place, Strathewen, with an extraordinary story.
In this Museum Victoria publication about the afternoon of Saturday February 9, 2009, I could hear the voices of Barry, Barbara and Bronwyn as they spoke of a day, or more precisely a few hours of a day, that changed them. Like the expanding ripples from a pebble thrown into water, it also changed me.
I’d come to know these people, their properties and the place, through working with them in the decade preceding 2009. Such was its out-of-the way beauty, on the forest edge, I’d even contemplated buying there, as a place to start a family.
A decade after the trauma of Black Saturday, I’m in Inverloch. Why Inverloch? For one, it’s not the Yarra Valley, where I was born and raised and where we had a few acres and intended to build. There are not the tight, winding, timber-bound, inescapable roads; not the poor sight lines, not the completely avoidable stress of the bad fire days. Inverloch is home now, 400 metres from Bass Strait. Our safe haven by the sea.
I reflect on home, security and safety. I turn my mind back, to the still fresh recollections of that day a decade ago. In the months and particularly the week preceding that Saturday afternoon the State was baked to a crisp. I remember, the Premier warning on the Friday that Saturday would be the worst day in Victoria’s history.
On Black Saturday, an energy intensity scaled at an estimated 1500 Hiroshima a-bombs was unleashed on Victoria with Strathewen receiving just a bit of it. Lives and decades of endeavour were blown into irrelevancy in moments.
How much forewarning – a morning of horrible dry, brutal winds and searing temperatures – is enough? Why didn’t sensible, competent people just get out of there? Why did one in ten people in that place not live out the afternoon?
In this context what does forewarning mean? Strathewen received a short, intense onslaught coming together as a consequence of locality, topography, and climate – general and localised – coupled with imprecise communications on the day.
So here we sit on a creek in a low-lying part of Inverloch on the edge of Bass Strait. Topography makes us vulnerable. We have the warnings in science. Why do we act as if nothing is happening or ever likely to happen? Why don’t we factor in the most basic of precautionary principles when we go to buy or build in this locality?
My own research, nearly 10 years ago, told me that sea level rise was of sufficient concern for the Government to have developed an accessible interactive map of sea flooding around the margins of Anderson Inlet. One of only a few places in Victoria. I bought in the knowledge that with a water rise of five metres we would be in trouble.
Human catastrophes are not the product of isolated factors; they are, as on Black Saturday, the product of factors acting in concert, if only for a moment. A gathering storm rather than a bolt out of a blue sky. In catastrophic circumstances, scale compounds. Survival often depends on the grace of good fortune.
A sea level rise of centimetres may seem trivial but factor in a rain-soaked catchment with flooding rains, a king tide, a ferocious wind driving a large swell from the wrong direction. Add in blocked drains or erosion, and suddenly five metres is surpassed, probably as much from land as from sea flooding. With the living room flooding, who’s going to stop and taste for salt?
I fled from the risk of fire into the waiting arms of a flood risk. With little coastal experience I viewed the model as a conceptual event. With accumulated observations and experience, I populate the concept with data. Credibility is given to concept. Hence the worry.
Before Black Saturday, the mantra was “Prepare, stay and defend your property or leave early”. The emphasis was reminiscent of war. In Strathewen it was so many of the most vulnerable, women and their kids included, who suffered when the prevailing catch phrases were played out to their final, tragic conclusion. The mantra changed in the light of Black Saturday. Catastrophes are not the domain of business as usual.
Stepping back from bushfire to the coastal risk. A crowded coast, Bass Strait, 1800 kilometres of exposure. We have the people, we have the risk, and we have the scale.
We need to transfer something from the revisionism of bushfire risk management to coastal risk management. Perhaps look at strategic withdrawal rather than confrontation or mitigation. I’ve never really understood some past real estate approvals. How were the negative consequences ignored? Was a collective blind eye turned? Perhaps the embodiment of the term “privatising the profits and socialising the losses. It’s worth noting that in NSW political donations from developers are banned.
At the heart of coastal risk exposure are regulations that govern where people live. In an advanced western democracy, this is almost the exclusive preserve of those with money. Yet when disaster strikes, it’s more likely to be the less well off, the young, the old and less able who suffer disproportionately.
As a step forward perhaps we should invert the process and learn to speak and formulate laws from their perspective. Locally, for example, look at it from the perspective of how the least able will cope if houses are built in a particular location with exposure to potential risks, particularly extreme events.
The trauma of risk exposure goes far beyond the relative few personally affected. We are part of a society. We have the capability to intervene, in language and action. There is no better example than the approach we have taken to dealing with road safety. Back in 1969, and for most of my life, the language of road death was “road toll”. Carnage was masked. This year it’s 165, so far, out of 6.4 million.
Reading Black Saturday has made the intervening decade disappear for me, such is the power of a catastrophe close to home. The subtitle Not the End of the Story is a call to the future.
I take it as a call for our society, Bass Coast Shire included, to build on the changes forced by Black Saturday and those learned from averting road trauma; to change the language; to stop pretending; to squarely face up to scientific probability; and to avoid the impending calamity coming to a coast near you.
A decade after the trauma of Black Saturday, I’m in Inverloch. Why Inverloch? For one, it’s not the Yarra Valley, where I was born and raised and where we had a few acres and intended to build. There are not the tight, winding, timber-bound, inescapable roads; not the poor sight lines, not the completely avoidable stress of the bad fire days. Inverloch is home now, 400 metres from Bass Strait. Our safe haven by the sea.
I reflect on home, security and safety. I turn my mind back, to the still fresh recollections of that day a decade ago. In the months and particularly the week preceding that Saturday afternoon the State was baked to a crisp. I remember, the Premier warning on the Friday that Saturday would be the worst day in Victoria’s history.
On Black Saturday, an energy intensity scaled at an estimated 1500 Hiroshima a-bombs was unleashed on Victoria with Strathewen receiving just a bit of it. Lives and decades of endeavour were blown into irrelevancy in moments.
How much forewarning – a morning of horrible dry, brutal winds and searing temperatures – is enough? Why didn’t sensible, competent people just get out of there? Why did one in ten people in that place not live out the afternoon?
In this context what does forewarning mean? Strathewen received a short, intense onslaught coming together as a consequence of locality, topography, and climate – general and localised – coupled with imprecise communications on the day.
So here we sit on a creek in a low-lying part of Inverloch on the edge of Bass Strait. Topography makes us vulnerable. We have the warnings in science. Why do we act as if nothing is happening or ever likely to happen? Why don’t we factor in the most basic of precautionary principles when we go to buy or build in this locality?
My own research, nearly 10 years ago, told me that sea level rise was of sufficient concern for the Government to have developed an accessible interactive map of sea flooding around the margins of Anderson Inlet. One of only a few places in Victoria. I bought in the knowledge that with a water rise of five metres we would be in trouble.
Human catastrophes are not the product of isolated factors; they are, as on Black Saturday, the product of factors acting in concert, if only for a moment. A gathering storm rather than a bolt out of a blue sky. In catastrophic circumstances, scale compounds. Survival often depends on the grace of good fortune.
A sea level rise of centimetres may seem trivial but factor in a rain-soaked catchment with flooding rains, a king tide, a ferocious wind driving a large swell from the wrong direction. Add in blocked drains or erosion, and suddenly five metres is surpassed, probably as much from land as from sea flooding. With the living room flooding, who’s going to stop and taste for salt?
I fled from the risk of fire into the waiting arms of a flood risk. With little coastal experience I viewed the model as a conceptual event. With accumulated observations and experience, I populate the concept with data. Credibility is given to concept. Hence the worry.
Before Black Saturday, the mantra was “Prepare, stay and defend your property or leave early”. The emphasis was reminiscent of war. In Strathewen it was so many of the most vulnerable, women and their kids included, who suffered when the prevailing catch phrases were played out to their final, tragic conclusion. The mantra changed in the light of Black Saturday. Catastrophes are not the domain of business as usual.
Stepping back from bushfire to the coastal risk. A crowded coast, Bass Strait, 1800 kilometres of exposure. We have the people, we have the risk, and we have the scale.
We need to transfer something from the revisionism of bushfire risk management to coastal risk management. Perhaps look at strategic withdrawal rather than confrontation or mitigation. I’ve never really understood some past real estate approvals. How were the negative consequences ignored? Was a collective blind eye turned? Perhaps the embodiment of the term “privatising the profits and socialising the losses. It’s worth noting that in NSW political donations from developers are banned.
At the heart of coastal risk exposure are regulations that govern where people live. In an advanced western democracy, this is almost the exclusive preserve of those with money. Yet when disaster strikes, it’s more likely to be the less well off, the young, the old and less able who suffer disproportionately.
As a step forward perhaps we should invert the process and learn to speak and formulate laws from their perspective. Locally, for example, look at it from the perspective of how the least able will cope if houses are built in a particular location with exposure to potential risks, particularly extreme events.
The trauma of risk exposure goes far beyond the relative few personally affected. We are part of a society. We have the capability to intervene, in language and action. There is no better example than the approach we have taken to dealing with road safety. Back in 1969, and for most of my life, the language of road death was “road toll”. Carnage was masked. This year it’s 165, so far, out of 6.4 million.
Reading Black Saturday has made the intervening decade disappear for me, such is the power of a catastrophe close to home. The subtitle Not the End of the Story is a call to the future.
I take it as a call for our society, Bass Coast Shire included, to build on the changes forced by Black Saturday and those learned from averting road trauma; to change the language; to stop pretending; to squarely face up to scientific probability; and to avoid the impending calamity coming to a coast near you.