The fire has come, the fire has gone. You have somehow managed to save your house. You still don’t know how.
You are tired. You look around, everything you once knew has now all gone, You don’t remember the Jones house burning, but it must have, you can’t see it anymore.
You are half deaf, the noise of the fire, the noise of the gas bottles venting. The large explosions, you don’t know what they were. But you have survived.
You don’t know about friends, you can’t contact them. The phones no longer work, either landlines or mobiles.
You look around the place, everything outside is burnt or melted, God knows how you managed to save the house. The down pipes are all bent and melted. The retaining wall will need to be replaced. The clothes line? – Looks like a sad scarecrow.
At some point in time, you ripped the smoke detectors off the ceiling and threw them out – the noise. OMG – which was worse? The screeching or the sound of everything burning?
You are afraid to leave the house in case there is a fire you haven’t put out. You are running out of water, for some reason the gravity fed water supply has stopped running. You don’t know why.
Exhaustion, you want to sleep but can’t. Everything keeps flashing through your mind. Suddenly there is a knock at the door. The DSE are there asking you to take in some people who couldn’t save their homes. You can’t turn them away. You make room.
It’s now morning – you feel like crap. There is still no water. There are still no phones, there is no power.
Do you stay or go?
There is a knock at the door. It’s some officials. They advise that the town is being evacuated because there is no water.
You don’t want to leave, can they make you leave? You don’t know.
What do you do? Where do you go? – What do you take? – You can’t empty the house. What happens if when the house is empty, some bastard decides to help themselves?
You make a decision to stay. You don’t know if it’s right or wrong, but it’s all you know. At least at ‘home’ you can sleep in your own bed, Things are familiar.
What would you do somewhere else? This is all you’ve known for the past 40 years.
You hear a car in the street, it’s xxxx, they tell you that the water should be okay now, make sure you boil it and they move on.
That means I have water, I don’t have to go. I don’t have power, but I have a generator. I should be okay.
Someone else has come into the street. They are taking photos?????????? Who would take photos at a time like this?
A helicopter overhead, Jeez, I hope they don’t see me. I look horrible.
Everyone else leaves, they lost everything, they are going to the evacuation centres, they have no-where else to go. I don’t have enough food and there is no way for them to contact family. So they have to leave.
There is no sound, no birds, no cars, no mowers. Absolute silence. Can I stay here and not go mad?
We hide in the house for 2 days, hiding because everyone lost so much, we lost nothing. We feel ashamed.
The police are everywhere, they tell us at the outskirts of town if we leave, we can’t come back. How can they say that? We have a house, what will happen to the animals?
We are running out of fuel, we have eaten everything out of the freezer, the canned food is running low. Can they starve us out?
I thought this was Australia? Why are we being treated like this?
We’ve spoken to the kids, they know we are okay. There are 6-7 houses where people have stayed. We are not meant to travel around the town, as it has been declared a crime scene. We can’t talk to each other. When night falls, we move between the houses, making sure everyone is okay.
Food and fuel that is meant to be at the police point is not there. And no-one knows anything. A guy from out of town gets into town with a car full of stuff – the kids dropped it at his place after the police wouldn’t bring the stuff in or let them through the roadblock.
Are You Prepared to Stay and Defend?
Why Must Government Save People from Themselves
Thank God for friends and family.
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