Word: goings
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...somber anniversary. On Sunday, Victoria will observe a minute of silence for last year's victims. Pictures of Marysville in the Melbourne Age show charred trees peppered with green shoots, and community websites show temporary housing constructed amidst the rubble. But the area has a long way to go before a tourism industry can begin to flourish there again. Marysville, once a favorite weekend getaway for people living in Melbourne, will probably not recover to be the scenic town it was. Only 60% of those who lost their homes in the region plan to return...
...Victorian Bushfires Royal Commission was quickly established to investigate what went wrong. Though their report is not due until later this year, one of the failings could have been a decades-old evacuation policy advocated by the Australasian Fire and Emergency Service Authorities Council (AFAC) known as 'stay or go.' The policy encourages individuals confronted with bushfires to leave early, or stay behind and defend their property, with the reasoning that last-minute evacuations result in deaths...
...last year, 113 out of the 173 deceased died in their homes. The "stay or go" approach has a long history in rural Australia, and gradually became official policy after the 1983 Ash Wednesday fires in southeastern Australia. "If someone was present in a house, it had a 90% chance of surviving the fire - protecting the occupants in the process - while many perished leaving at the last minute," says John Handmer, director of the Centre for Risk and Community Safety at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology who conducted a review of the 'stay or go' policy for the Bushfire...
...their homes last year following this logic, Handmer's study, in which he and his colleague Josh Whittaker interviewed 1,300 survivors from last year's fires, found that 80% of those who stayed would do it again. "It's really difficult to make a conclusion on 'stay or go,'" said Handmer. "It's supported by history but new building styles, building locations [close to the bush], reliance on fire agencies and perhaps increased fire weather risk, make effective implementation very difficult. There's no point staying and defending a house that has little chance of surviving ... [Communities] need...
...Israel's conflicts with its neighbors. But critics charge that Syria wants the economic benefits of normal relations with America and the West without having to giving up on the military alliances that give it strategic influence in the region. (Read "Can Former Iraqi Baathists in Syria Ever Go Home...