Lambley and a Fire

Last Thursday my GPS kicked the bucket. I got a new one yesterday, and today wanted to go for a drive somewhere to check it out. I decided Lambley nursery would be a nice spot to visit. The gardens there are always a treat, and we wanted to buy some of their vegetable seeds after attending a talk on vegetable-growing by David Glenn (the owner of Lambley) a couple of weeks ago.

It was a very bright sunny day, (and much hotter than you might expect at this time of year) which is not ideal for photography, but here are a few views around the gardens:

And in the nursery:

Sun-loving plants in the foreground, and shade lovers behind.

On the way home we could see a lot of smoke from a fire which turned out to be quite close to my parents' retirement village. I was almost home when I received a call from Mum's home care co-ordinator telling me that the village had been evacuated to Buninyong. I rang the village's main number to confirm exactly where people had been taken, and was given the address of the recreation centre which was being used as the fire relief centre.

I was relieved to think that the village had an emergency evacuation plan, and that my parents were somewhere well away from the fire.

Back in the car and off to Buninyong, where I found that there was no sign of my parents, or of the village bus. There were a number of elderly people there, and various cats and dogs in boxes and on leads. There were people handing out cups of tea and coffee. There were fire officials and police, but no-one knew where my parents might be. Eventually I was directed to someone who was the representative of the company which runs the retirement village, but she also had no idea where my parents might be. She made a phone call, and eventually I discovered that my parents were out on the street in front of the village.

Here is a news article about the fire in The Age. They don't mention in that story that a big part of the "massive amount of evacuations" was a retirement village. Or that the evacuation involved moving immobile people out to the street and leaving them there for over three hours.

Basically anyone who could drive was told where the relief centre was, but those without cars were just told to get out of the village, then left to their own devices. The village bus, which I had imagined had taken such people to safety, was parked blocking the driveway to stop anyone entering the village. My parents don't use mobile phones, so couldn't ring anyone (me) to come and get them, or even tell me where they were.

I asked the village manager why people were just sitting out in the street, and he said that it was safer for them to be there than in their units, in case the fire turned towards the village. I can understand that, but I think it would have been even better for them to have been loaded into the bus and taken to the air-conditioned relief centre, with access to toilets and refreshments, and well out of danger.