American Bungalow Magazine - The Magazine published in the interest of preserving and restoring the modest American 20th Century Home, the Bungalow, and the rich lifestyle that it affords.

Reader Steve Ansell, proprietor of interior design firm Oakfield & DePree in Kilmore, Victoria, Australia, described his and his community’s experience of last February’s catastrophic bushfire in his From Our Friends essay, “Kilmore, Victoria, Australia: February, 2009″ in the Summer issue (No. 62). His description, troubling as it was, and constrained by space limitations, could not convey the full extent of the hellish conflagration that enveloped his town and others on February 7, in a valley of the Great Dividing Range 60 miles northeast of Melbourne.

Now we have a fuller report-”The Inferno,” by Melbourne-born journalist and author Christine Kenneally, in the October 26 issue of The New Yorker and in an on-line Q&A on that magazine’s Web site.

As Kenneally’s reporting indicates, the devastation of this fire was so great that “even the science of wildfire is being reexamined.” For those of us who live and work in proximity to fire zones in a warming climate, this is troubling news well worth attending to.

Tags: American Bungalow, Australia, Black Saturday, Christine Kenneally, Steve Ansell, The New Yorker, wildfires

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 28th, 2009 at 5:03 pm and is filed under Bungalow Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.