Marysville and the Bushfires.

A couple of weeks ago when Mary took Kate and I to the Healsville Sanctuary she also took for a drive through the main area that was devastated by the bush fires back in February. I have never in my life seen an area that was completely devastated. There is a very curvy road that takes you to Marysville. There are huge trees that stand taller than the mind can imagine and small short ferns scatter the grounds. The most amazing thing about the forest here is how resilient it is to natural disasters... here you would look out to a whole charcoal black forest and all you see are little specks of green covering the black scorched trees. All of the ferns have bright green growth a top the blackened bases. It was hard to imagine that growth had started and life had sustained through this awful devastation that was only a few months back.

I couldn't really grasp the damage at first as we entered Marysville, as the government has done a great job of initiating a severe clean up effort. I was not very struck at first until Mary had to explain to me that all of the sticks from the ground were where homes used to be....There would be one house standing, then ten vacant lots where the houses had burned. There was still a bakery standing on main street, but it stood alone as all the other shops had been burned down.

I guess it is really interesting to be here and think about how close it would have been to Melbourne. Here are a few pictures of the devastation, I got most of them off the Internet as I was not able to take many quality pictures. There is one picture that really hits home... its the first of the bunch. Christabelle forwarded me this the other day and it was taken from the roof of the shopping mall near my house. Its a beautiful picture but can you even imagine looking out and knowing that the fires were that close to your home, that massive and coming your way... How scary. That picture was taken on what they call Black Saturday, because it was the worst day of the fires and I believe the deadliest.

God Bless firefighters...Thanks Grandpa Marlon! xo