it's a crazy dichotomy, two states of emergency, one on fire and one in flood. can't help but think that we have really pissed off Mother Earth, Nature, God or whoever your deity of choice is.
driving in the car this morning, it was terrible to hear of the ever-increasing death toll from the fires. discussion ensued as to what is the best thing to do?? been a while since I've lived anywhere which is vulnerable to bushfires. I guess we were discussing the number if people who died in their vehicles. I guess the issue of whether to stay in your house or try and flee was the main thing we were talking about. Many people choose to stay and "defend" their house, but realise too late that not only can they not save it, but may not be able to save themselves. then again, I think the cool change that came through last night and everyone was counting on for relief was actually the Devil in disguise... turning the fire front around and caught people unawares. maybe they didn't have time to evacuate. stories of houses, and trees, literally exploding into flames. sounds so scary.
watching the news and seeing the red cross coordinator, reminded me of the CIMS training we did. I wondered at what point they declared a state of emergency etc... having the assembly points etc, having counsellors on site, food for the volunteers, etc...
weirdly, this made me think of the way I reacted when the GWS swum past the boat a couple of weeks ago. I was unsettled by the way i reacted, the initial panic etc. In the past I have been pretty good at taking control of a situation, but I just felt so helpless. I don't like feeling helpless. I guess I didn't do too bad. I checked the position of the sharkshield, I got the diver recall running. I had a pretty good idea of the position of all the divers. I think when I realised M had untied the mermaid line from us and couldn't start his boat and was drifting off into the distance, and I realised I was left as the next qualified person to drive the boat we were on, it gave me a bit of fright. and I was just annoyed I hadn't familiarised myself with it... and the whole thought process, what if someone surfaced in distress? Could I get the boat to them without running them over (?!). then again I couldn't leave the divers ascending on the anchor, save the life of one only to put the others in danger... it seemed to take an age to think through this. what if what if what if... in the end it was all fine, and the shark didn't come back and noone was hurt, but obviously I was pretty shaken by it. I wasn't expecting to be the one who might have to take charge. I remember driving up the Mountain for a snowboarding trip early last Sept, and passing all these road accidents... two of them we were minutes from being first on the scene. Weirdly was mentally prepared to having to deal with an accident that day, of having to become the "incident controller" for a couple minutes. I guess when I debriefed myself with L, I realised, yeah course I could've driven the boat, used the marine radio, administered first aid and O2, hell I wasn't such a bad candidate to have on the boat afterall. but I guess it just caught me unawares.
phew. what a post. guess I've been stewing on this a while. looking forward to getting underwater again.
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