So I am thinking about evacuating over the weekend as I reflect on the abrupt end to it all and the non event that it was. About the warning system for natural emergencies. About doing what your told. About how many non events does it take to render the general population complacent. And it appears I wasn’t the only one. I saw on the news that a number of Australians actually flocked to the beaches to watch the show, others ignored the warning and continued on, more still got into altercations or arguments with authorities.
And maybe they had a point. Maybe they had every right to stay put because after all, in hindsight, there was nothing to be worried about. There was no tsunami. There was barely a king tide. My Dad’s reaction when we were heading home was ‘What, seriously, that warning is a joke. I’ve lived in this area my whole life, it’ll amount to nothing’. We nodded and responded with our usual yes Dad’s and said a lot of ‘Better safe than sorries’. And now, he has more evidence that it’s a load, next time he definitely won’t vacate. In fact I may not go next time.
That leads me to the whole crying wolf thing. How many false alarms before people simply ignore the warning? Is it like the boy that cried wolf? Two strikes and your out? If so, the warning system has one swing and a miss to go before we ignore it from now on. For some people it’s a case of fool me once shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me. They, like my Dad, will never evacuate again… Unless there is water gathering around their ankles.
It’s serious right. The whole warning system thing. In the event of an emergency there needs to be a system in place to warn and inform as many people as possible. This was demonstrated during the devastating loss of the black Saturday fires and other similar (but less impactful in terms of sheer scale) disasters. Now we have emergency texts and phone calls. But does it work.
Ummmmm, yes and no.
You see we saw people evacuating. They were going. Did they take it seriously. Not really. Some people were questioning if the text was a prank. More still were of the opinion, oh well we’ll wait and see. Some we spoke to were just leaving because they had planned to leave after lunch anyway and the weather was turning to crap. And yeah, you don’t want people running around screaming the sky is falling and panicking but you do want to see a little hustle.
Are we even able to hustle? Or are we as Australians too laid back to hustle. Does the whole she’ll be right mate attitude cause us to be too laid back about things we need to take seriously? The numbers of people that lined east coast beaches yesterday indicates that maybe we are (too laid back that is). There were people still surfing. Seriously. That could just about be in the dictionary as a definition of she’ll be right’ness.
So maybe there is something else that needs to be done but where do you go from here? Do you have any suggestions? On the Gold Coast they are already talking about installing sirens. Tsunami sirens. I can imagine they are going to be used often. And seriously, there already cyclone sirens, shark sirens and general emergency services vehicles sirens..? If a siren goes off we won’t know if we should run, swim for our life, duck, merge left or what. Confusing. Yes. Most certainly.
Anyway. That’s my thoughts on it all. I’d love to hear yours. Aussie or not. Give me your input. We might just change the way the world works here down under.
Suger 
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