It's been a week since the bushfires (all 400 of them) swept through the state of Victoria, Australia, leaving tragedy in their wake. Over 200 people died and 7000 homeless, and many more were injured. The weekend newspapers here released special editions today, much of which have been published online, and provide a comprehensive overview of the catastrophe with excellent coverage of the many heartbreaking stories of the last week. If you're just catching up on the news now, check them out: The Australian newspaper's Special: Victoria's Bushfires includes pieces such as How the Battle for Victoria was Fought and Lost, which conveys the dread felt by firefighters who predicted the catastrophe based on the weather and circumstances that day; Life or lifestyle warns fire chief explains the 'tree-change trend', where people have been choosing to escape urban life for a bush lifestyle, settling amid dense vegetation, and ingoring demands to reduce bushfire hazards; while The day a spot of bushfire fun turned to terror well explains the terror at Kinglake, where the ferocity of the fires took everyone by surprise, decimating the hilltop community. The writer describes how people covered in burns came down the mountain on Sunday and said: "It was a firestorm." "It was an inferno." "It was like a bomb went off, like Hiroshima." "It was a massacre up there." and "I spent the night hosing down bodies." Also read this story on how Residents brace for visit to burnt-out ground zero.
The Age's coverage entitled Our Darkest Day begins with a story on the class action suit the people of Kinglake, who believe a fallen powerline started the fire, are planning against the government-owned power company and includes scores more stories, a compilation of articles from the last week, and dozens of photo galleries, and video and audio reports, but if you only read one story, read On the Edge, which argues that public policy is to blame because "One of the many paradoxes of Black Saturday is that the authorities were able to predict the conditions, including the lethal wind shift later in the day, but not the consequences of what their computer modelling was telling them. Brumby, the Victorian Premier, advised the public that the impending danger would be greater than Ash Wednesday in 1983 or Black Friday in 1939." Yet, as the writer claims, none of the general alerts were backed up with timely and specific information on the day.