legless123 (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} legless123) wrote,@ 2009-02-13 22:45:00 |
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More On The Bushfires
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Well, it's been an interesting week. Unless you're here in Oz, I don't think that you can really get an idea of the scale of the bushfires here.
The day of disaster was last Saturday. 45c heat ( about 114f ) and winds of around 60mph an hour. Because the bush was tinder-dry, the wind made the fires into immense blow-torches. Added to that a sudden change in wind direction and the towns were fucked. Proper fucked.
The wind and flame just roared down the mountainside and house after house just exploded.
6 miles in ten minutes.
I then found that there were loads of message boards where people were looking for survivors. All comms, landline and mobile, were out in the affected areas, and people just couldn't get any information about friends and loved ones. A lot of the survivors were registering with the Red Cross, but, to be perfectly honest, the Red Cross's systems were a pile of wank. I've talked to people who spent over 48 hours solid ringing the Red Cross missing person line and getting the engaged tone. Hang up, hit redial and repeat.
But you could always get through to the Donate number. Go figure.
So I setup my own website that listed known survivors. 30 minutes to write and setup the database.
In three days I've had over 500 000 hits, served 200 000 pages and transferred over 9 gig of data.
Now my site is run by volunteers who are constantly updating it. I've had dozens of emails from all over the world thanking me for putting up the resource - people who've found their friends or relatives.
Now why the fuck couldn't the Red Cross, with their survivor lists, do something similar?
And yes, I emailed them and offered my server and services. No fucking answer.
http://www.daftdoggy.com/bushfire/Summa
Cheers
.
Well, it's been an interesting week. Unless you're here in Oz, I don't think that you can really get an idea of the scale of the bushfires here.
The day of disaster was last Saturday. 45c heat ( about 114f ) and winds of around 60mph an hour. Because the bush was tinder-dry, the wind made the fires into immense blow-torches. Added to that a sudden change in wind direction and the towns were fucked. Proper fucked.
The wind and flame just roared down the mountainside and house after house just exploded.
6 miles in ten minutes.
I then found that there were loads of message boards where people were looking for survivors. All comms, landline and mobile, were out in the affected areas, and people just couldn't get any information about friends and loved ones. A lot of the survivors were registering with the Red Cross, but, to be perfectly honest, the Red Cross's systems were a pile of wank. I've talked to people who spent over 48 hours solid ringing the Red Cross missing person line and getting the engaged tone. Hang up, hit redial and repeat.
But you could always get through to the Donate number. Go figure.
So I setup my own website that listed known survivors. 30 minutes to write and setup the database.
In three days I've had over 500 000 hits, served 200 000 pages and transferred over 9 gig of data.
Now my site is run by volunteers who are constantly updating it. I've had dozens of emails from all over the world thanking me for putting up the resource - people who've found their friends or relatives.
Now why the fuck couldn't the Red Cross, with their survivor lists, do something similar?
And yes, I emailed them and offered my server and services. No fucking answer.
http://www.daftdoggy.com/bushfire/Summa
Cheers
