Four years on

Nice to read in the times today that the mayor is comfortable with how he and his council handled things in January 2003.

Those that have read the coroner’s report will have a different opinion..

Well I for one rest easier knowing the guys like Thumper and the rest of the SES and volunteer firies are around.

Amen to that. Those guys in Victoria must be taking months off work. Here’s hoping the new IR laws can cope with that situation.

Out of interest, LG, I don’t know anybody who lost someone or something in the fires, and I’ve been living in Canberra for ten years. Or, at the very least, I don’t know anybody who’s talked about losing people or posessions.

That’s not saying that I don’t respect the fact that, for many people, it’s still fresh in the memory and quite disturbing. But you can’t generalise and say that your experience is everyone’s experinece.

Well I for one rest easier knowing the guys like Thumper and the rest of the SES and volunteer firies are around. But still, one wiff of smoke and you can see everyone in sight (myself included) look around, sniff and say to whoever is next to them “can you smell that?”. I think it takes a long time to “move on”. Everyone in Canberra knows someone who lost someone or something in those fires.

Oh here’s a deal,

when i no longer have to edit your comments to put in hyperlinks I’ll think you’re less of an idiot.

You make my point for me.

Suddenly we have 27 comments, does this suddenly mean the story is any more agreed with or important?

No, not at all.

Make usefull contributions for a few years and you’ll probably have a better feel for it.

But, for my sins, I’ve been living and breathing this site since November 2000.

Now you may be hundreds of times smarter than me (not that we’ve seen much evidence of it) but experience counts too.

Maybe assuming you have a better grasp of the meaning of the stats here than the founding editor was a teensy bit of a mistake?

Your opinions about other subjects are the equal of anyones.

You’re assuming that every comment relates directly to the content of the original missive, which i’m sure you know is patently false.

This interchange is a perfect example of my hypothesis. And I use ‘hypothesis’ deliberately, and shall leave it at that, to allow this thread to resume normal service.

If you’d been here a bit longer Sammy

Ahh, the old “I haven’t been here long enough, so I don’t get it” argument. Gotta love that old chestnut.

Will I receive some sort of notification when my probationary period has ended, and my comments can be considered on par with the rest of the RA literati?

And knowing the site a teensy bit better than you I’m saying, as I said above, that the number of comments is no indicator of that.

If I wanted a thousand comments I’d say something that everyone disagreed with.

worst when people trivialise it.

I wasn’t attempting to trivialise it, so it’s unfortunate you got that from my comment.

If you’d been here a bit longer Sammy you’d know that the number of comments in no way indicates support for a view or otherwise.

I’m not talking about support, either for or against. I’m talking about the idea that people aren’t bothering to comment, because they’re ready to move on.

wiki:
link

[*sigh*]

we got no rain my way *frowns*

heres hoping we can get some decent rain soon!

“I don’t recall” and similar seem to be the political catchcry of the last decade (worldwide). But a fashion our locals are happy to subscribe to, eh!?!

hindsight = 20/20 vision Unless you provided testimony to the 2003 bushfires. Their vision was more like 3/20 after all the ‘I can’t remembers’.

hindsight = 20/20 vision

(unless U R in Education/”Barr-World”)

ready to move on from what sammy – many canberrans have to endure dealing with what occurred 4 years ago on a daily basis complete with nightmares. January 18 is a hard day for this city no matter how much time passes – worst when people trivialise it.

A look to the West and the 11,000 hectares of burnt and dying pines at Tumut is a good place to start. One lightning strike and they will be off.
Add in a strong Westerly wind and what do you get?

My place was burnt 10 years ago. To assume it could not happen again would be stupid.
No different to Canberra’s problem.

If you’d been here a bit longer Sammy you’d know that the number of comments in no way indicates support for a view or otherwise.

You never know what you can acomplish in 3 minutes 🙂

The story posted at 8:50am today on the photo of the Civic Skate Park has (at time of writing) 16 comments. This story — posted 3 minutes later — has 7. I think people are ready to just move on.

I appreciate that I have heard about the Fires being 12ks away from Thredbo ad nauseum! Allegedly there have been 2.2 million man hours spent fighting the fires

I heard from people in the know in Victoria back in mid December that these fires would reach NSW. The country they’re burning in is almost impossible to fight fires in.

This is an interesting read:

link

[Ed – for gods sake either use 50 characters of preceding text or use a hyperlink]

Never say never…

Something to think about…
The current vic fires, reports as of this morning are the fires had jumped the border into NSW and are 12’s from Thredbo.
Can it be stopped, could they be doing more and should have it made it as far as Thredbo?

Fire is something thats so unpredictable, anything is possible!

Mount Roger almost went up four years ago as well. Lucky the choppers were filling up at Yerrabi pond at the time and could divert for it.

The thick pine forests right on the doorstep of Weston Creek — which provided much of the fuel — are no longer there, so I doubt it’ll happen again.

I’m sure we’ll have bad bush/grass fires, but nothing with that intensity.