“I knew people were dying around us, I knew,” said Annette Smit, describing the firestorm in Australia that destroyed her home and almost cost her life.
“It rained [fire], it was like lava,” she told the Herald Sun online in one of the compelling stories of survival that have transfixed Australians. “You couldn’t see where you were going, the only thing you could see was the road.”
A resident in one of the worst-hit towns, Victoria state’s Kinglake West, Smit and her partner were preparing to flee in their car when the vehicle exploded in the inferno’s intense heat. She said they had no option but to shelter with terrified neighbors as the flames bore down on them.
“We broke a window and got in under the house,” she said. “About 10 of us proceeded to save the house so that we could survive ... survival just kicks in.”
Peter Trapp from nearby Lower Plenty, who had sent his wife and child to safety, ran to his neighbor’s house after failing to save his own home from the flames.
“When I was running it radiated heat, I could feel my skin burning,” the 41-year-old told the Daily Telegraph. “But you know how you don’t think clearly about things? “I’m on fire and I’m going ‘oh no, I’m going to have all these scars.’ I wasn’t thinking about survival.”
Trapp and his family made it through their ordeal, although their home was razed.
Ian Creek told Melbourne’s Age newspaper how his parents-in-law, Faye and Bill Walker, perished along with their wheelchair-bound son Geoffrey as they prepared to flee their Narbethong home.
“The last contact we had with them was 6:30 on Saturday afternoon,” Creek said. “They said ‘we’ve got to go, there’s black smoke over the back of the shed.’ The neighbors had rung them at 5:30 saying to get out and they didn’t go.”
They nearly made it. Creek said the key was in the car’s ignition and the family dog was in the backseat when the flames engulfed them.
There were rare stories of joy too. Bill and Sherrill Carta were reunited in the emergency ward of Melbourne’s Alfred Hospital after becoming separated fleeing the Kinglake blaze and fearing each other had died.
“It was a fantastic moment, it was the best moment,” Sherrill Carta told Australian Associated Press. “I grabbed him by his big toe because it looked like the only place he wasn’t burned at the time.”
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un sent Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) greetings with what appeared to be restrained rhetoric that comes as Pyongyang moves closer to Russia and depends less on its long-time Asian ally. Kim wished “the Chinese people greater success in building a modern socialist country,” in a reply message to Xi for his congratulations on North Korea’s birthday, the state-run Korean Central News Agency reported yesterday. The 190-word dispatch had little of the florid language that had been a staple of their correspondence, which has declined significantly this year, an analysis by Seoul-based specialist service NK Pro showed. It said
On an island of windswept tundra in the Bering Sea, hundreds of miles from mainland Alaska, a resident sitting outside their home saw — well, did they see it? They were pretty sure they saw it — a rat. The purported sighting would not have gotten attention in many places around the world, but it caused a stir on Saint Paul Island, which is part of the Pribilof Islands, a birding haven sometimes called the “Galapagos of the north” for its diversity of life. That is because rats that stow away on vessels can quickly populate and overrun remote islands, devastating bird
‘CLOSER TO THE END’: The Ukrainian leader said in an interview that only from a ‘strong position’ can Ukraine push Russian President Vladimir Putin ‘to stop the war’ Decisive actions by the US now could hasten the end of the Russian war against Ukraine next year, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Monday after telling ABC News that his nation was “closer to the end of the war.” “Now, at the end of the year, we have a real opportunity to strengthen cooperation between Ukraine and the United States,” Zelenskiy said in a post on Telegram after meeting with a bipartisan delegation from the US Congress. “Decisive action now could hasten the just end of Russian aggression against Ukraine next year,” he wrote. Zelenskiy is in the US for the UN
A 64-year-old US woman took her own life inside a controversial suicide capsule at a Swiss woodland retreat, with Swiss police on Tuesday saying several people had been arrested. The space-age looking Sarco capsule, which fills with nitrogen and causes death by hypoxia, was used on Monday outside a village near the German border. The portable human-sized pod, self-operated by a button inside, has raised a host of legal and ethical questions in Switzerland. Active euthanasia is banned in the country, but assisted dying has been legal for decades. On the same day it was used, Swiss Department of Home