So I gather that the people who lost their lives in Black Saturday were unintelligent and had no self respect unlike your fantastic self and so their lives don't really mean that much.

Nice to know you think yourself more responsible and worthy than someone like Brian Naylor.

Seriously, the self righteous indignation being displayed on this thread and now degenerating into straight out narcissism is sickening.

One thing I'm sure of, John started this thread as a commemorative gesture with respect to the victims of Black Saturday, the terrible extent and intensity of the disaster and how it impacted on the psyche of an entire state.

It's a pity it has degenerated to such nonsense. It would almost be a good idea to close the thread before the personal insults towards Black Saturday victims and survivors become even more outrageous.

If you guys are so responsible and intelligent, why don't you run for your local council, or even state parliament if you're that brilliant. Better still provide me with evidence that you would act perfectly responsibly when it comes to the crunch, i.e. faced with a natural disaster yourselves.

Humans are fallible, but by the way some of you guys are carrying on it seems that some of us must be perfect.

Actually Coldsnapill. You have taken that in the wrong way. What I was aying is that by putting all the blame on somebody other than those that were affected you are taking away their self respect. By saying that those that were affected had absolutely no control over their own fate you are demeening them and their actions by suggesting they they did not have any ability whatsoever to affect the outcome of the situation whether they showed intelligence or not. Their is no self rightousness in my comments(I am as fallible as anyone else). What I am saying was as a direct response to someone else 'passing the buck', which seems to be a sign of the times. Untill this attitude departs our society forever then these sort of tragedies will keep repeating themmselves while peoople kkeep sitting back and waiting for a hand out as opposed to a hand up.

ROM, I would never recommend that the army head out into the rugged bush to try to stop the fire there, I agree the conditions would be just too severe there. Only to protect the boundaries of a few of the main towns, and the houses within, I do believe that would be successful to a large degree.
Brett I also fully agree with you that we all need to take the appropriate steps to protect ourselves and our property. If I lived in a flood zone then I should not blame anyone for getting flooded that is for sure. If my house cannot stand up to a wind then its only my fault for not taking steps to build it correctly.
Coldsnap11, all we want is to be better prepared the next time and make the right decisions.

CSIII, we cannot absolve the dead from blame and we cannot sweep what happened under the carpet, never to be critically examined again. We have unfortunately been witnesses to one of the most devastating, catastrophic fire events since European settlement (and in all likelihood since Aboriginal settlement) the least we can do is to sit back, analyse what happened and learn from it to try and prevent a repeat in the future.

If this process involves justified criticism of those who lost their lives then so be it. The worst thing that could happen out of all of this would be to continue to hold those who died on some sacrosanct pedestal and let their deaths be in total vain. To do so would be gross disrespect.

how can there be justification in criticizing those that died?
from having personal experience of living in the kinglake west area i know what it was like, the majority of the people who died simply would not have had a chance, the street where i lived was one way in and one way out.....and it only took about 10 mins from the fire being at Whittlesea and the bottom of the range to being at kinglake west.
Being a Saturday most people would have been inside doing the normal family things, so by the time you would have noticed there was a fire comming in most instance it was already to late.

So your only option was to either "stay and fight"/seek shelter inside your house from the approaching fire or flee.... and with the distances involved and the amount of smoke that would have been around for some it would have been impossible to escape ( on average it used to take us 4 mins to get from our house to the end of the road and that was travelling at 80 ks....)


Even those that were as well prepared as they could have been for a possible fire event still had problems while they were fighting the fire, their pumps either stopped running because of the thick smoke or the fuel in the lines of the pump just evaporated, hoses melted due to the radiant heat.
Our old neighbours house was well setup with sprinklers on the roof and a Davey firefighter pump hooked directly to their pool so they could drain the water from the pool to protect their house, yet their house was also destroyed.
I personally know a number of people who died on that day and 4 of them were from the one family, as well as many more families that lost everything.

Put yourself in someone else's shoes... if you and your family were faced with a raging fire and only minutes to either stay put and seek shelter or try and escape what would you do?

Remembering the heroes...

Because if we don't face up to reality and look at exactly what those victims did wrong then we will never learn. Sticking your head in the sand achieves nothing. It is no different to critisizing a drunk and speeding driver that has killed himself. We are not saying these were bad people and we are not denying the heroism and bravery that undoubtedly went on that day. Your dead right too YShack. It WAS a saturday which meansmost of those people were NOT at work. You say most were probably inside relaxing. That would have been the worst mistake anyone could have made. Everyone knew that Victoria was going to burn. They shoulld have been prepared for it but were not. If we do not face up to these sort of errors as a society then the next time these events take place(annd I guarantee there will be a next time), the same mistakes will be made annd the same tragedie will take place. People have to stand up annd take responsibility for themselves rather than just trying to blame someone else or nothing will ever change.