How are you guys in Australia holding up?

[agus]

News on SKY and all USA media paint a very grim scene. Thinking about all my guitar building buddies I've met on this forum that live there...

[Marcel]

Australia is a huge place, and thankfully for me most of the current horrible activity is over 1000km South of my location.

That's not to say nothing is likely to happen here. In November 2018 the entire town of Gracemere population of 10k just near me was evacuated on a 43C day due to a fast advancing fire front. I had to travel to a remote transmission site and took these photos from 40km away. This is small scale to what is happening down in South Eastern Australia in recent times

[Fretworn]

Yesterday was insanely hot here in Sydney, the hottest day on record. Fortunately I’m not near any of the fires, but I know people who were trapped by the South Coast fires (no out fortunately) and one of the Victorian fires was near my sisters place.

[Sonic Mountain]

We had bad fires near us a month ago, but have been fortunate with some milder weather so they were brought under control. We are still severely drought affected and on water restrictions. All the bush around here is very dry as well so everyone is on high alert. Tomorrow is forecast to be very hot and windy.

[kuanjb]

I'm in Canberra. We aren't directly in danger from the fires but we've had a lot of smoke come over the city. So bad that Canberra has had the worst air quality of any city in the world for that last couple of weeks with levels way above "hazardous" levels. (Latest AQI reading was 3551; above 200 is hazardous). I've been in a daze for the last few weeks, not sleeping well, headaches on and off and stinging eyes and nose.

This weekend has been particularly bad. We just had our hottest day on record, 43.1C. Today is a bit cooler but the sky is dark amber from the smoke.

Still obviously better than areas directly affected by the fires. I just can't imagine what they're going through.

https://www.facebook.com/59711532124...8306603997125/

[DrNomis_44]

Since I'm living in Darwin in the Northern Territory, I've been pretty fortunate in that we haven't had any major bushfires so far....touchwood..., but my heart goes out to all those affected by the recent bushfire crisis, I have experienced some problems with my NBN internet though as apparently some of Australia's NBN infrastructure has suffered fire-damage, according to what my ISP has posted on their website.

I just checked and it is still saying that my NBN service is being impacted by an outage even though I am still able to get online.


I'm just hoping that no more people get injured, or worse, killed, and everything returns to normal soon.

[Marcel]

While there have been some notable donations to our Aussie volunteer fire fighters, Namely the awesome singer Pink and the dynamic duo of Nicole K. & Keith U. both giving a cool half million bucks each, plus there is a lot of FB donations from all over the globe, our Federal government has today (6 jan 2020) put up and even cooler AU$2b ($2,000,000,000) for recovery, rebuilding and replenishing from the bush fires over the next 2 years...

Also like to acknowledge all the mentions and donations at the Golden Globe awards held last night... and the arrival of many relief fire fighters from the USA and Kiwi land...

And in some parts of the fire grounds it has started to rain.... thanks for everyone's prayers ...

It's not news to our Aussie forum members who watch the TV, Just letting our international forum members know...

[Simon Barden]

$1bn spent in preventative measures would have seemed a far better investment IMO. But it is the way of governments everywhere to cut spending and just hope things like this don't happen.

Let's hope that things get better quickly, rather than worse.

[Alm_63]

We need rain, moderate and repeated showers of rain. That would start to put things back on track.
But until we get good rain , it will only get worse.

[king casey]

But it is the way of governments everywhere to cut spending and just hope things like this don't happen.

You've hit the nail on the head.
This is the conservative mantra. Big spending is portrayed as 'economic mis-management' and used ad nauseum in their re-election campaigns.

cheers, Mark.