eleventyone

Two earthquakes recently hit Melbourne – events so rare in this place that it sent social networking sites buzzing. The first at 9pm, Friday 6th March of maginitude 4.7 on the Richter scale and the second at 4:30pm, Wednesday 18th March measursing 4.5, both with their epicentre 5kms north-west of Korumburra, in South Gippsland.

The quakes shook the online world too. Social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter were immediately flooded with posts about each quake. Confused people questioned if they were feeling an earthquake, others asked if other people felt it, some people reported houses shaking.  Melbourne Earthquake became a trending topic on Twitter with a thousand posts within the hour each time. Reports didn’t appear in the news media online, until several hours later. The seismology research centre reported the events online (www.seis.com.au) and asks users to report an earthquake they have felt on their website.

Victoria is burning. With the hottest days on record, comes some of the worst bushfires on record. For me this hits close to home, because I have family in Gippsland surrounded by thick smoke from the bushfires. Although I’m watching the fires from safety in Melbourne, the images still get to me. For many years the Gippsland campus of Monash University in the town of Churchill, has been my place of study and work – it has been a home to me. The shock of the fires has spread all over my social websites. People are posting images and videos of fires on many sites.

Fires behind Monash Gippsland

I’ve seen the hills above the Churchill alight with bushfires before, but from my safe distance it seems more shocking to me. Last week Monash setup a makeshift headquaters for firefighters and fire refugees. There’s a collection Youtube videos of the Churchill fires, such as this one shows the town surrounded by the fires, there’s this one which is cute, but still shocking and this one with a dodgey soundtrack. I’ve also been listening to the CFA radio stream online, where you hear things like, “we’ve had reports of an eighty year old grandmother, a father and some kids trapped in a house.” Here’s the CFA incident summary. There’s a good online map here showing all the fires in Victoria.

Fires behind Monash Gippsland

Monash Gippsland (from the Herald Sun website)