Where I lived growing up in Australia, there was no snow. There was barely rain, and if it ever gold cold enough for water to freeze, the entire city lost its mind. The closest experience we ever had to snow was a massive hailstorm. Shops closed, preachers proclaimed the end times were upon us, there was mass panic, and people used surfboards (remember, this is Australia) to try and recreate sledding as seen on TV, with the layer of ice on the streets instead of snow.
It wasn’t that we lacked our own weird weather. It’s just that we didn’t get a whole lot of storms. We did get droughts. It got hot and dry enough that if one wasn’t careful, a backyard pool that existed at the beginning of the beginning of the week could easily be a dry hole in the ground by week’s end. Water rationing made this harder.
The storms we did have were more often firestorms. With the land as dry as it was, the threat of fire loomed over everyone. A single match, or cigarette dropped accidentally or negligently, could kindle a fire that would consume the country. A single bolt of lightning striking the wrong tree could ignite a blaze that would render the most flammable parts, which were mostly the areas surrounding population centers, uninhabitable.
Through the summer months, public information adverts warned citizens of hazards that could create the spark that would burn down our civilization. School projects demonstrated how a glass bottle discarded in the open could, if left at the wrong angle, magnify the sun’s raise and start a fire. Poster campaigns reminiscent of WWII and Cold War civil defence campaigns lined walls at public places, warning of the danger. Overhead, helicopters scouted and patrolled daily, checking for any signs of smoke, and marking off which pools, ponds, and lakes still had water that could be used if needed. Meanwhile, ground vehicles checked water meters and sprinkler setups, and issued stiff fines to those who used more than their fair share.
At school, we conducted fire drills, not only for evacuation, but for prevention, and active firefighting. We were quizzed on which tools and tactics worked best against which type of fire. We drilled on how to aim and hold a hose while battling flames, how to clear a fire break, how to fortify a residential structure against an oncoming firestorm, how to improvise masks to prevent smoke inhalation, and other first aid. We were told that if the fire reached our homes, the professionals would likely already be overwhelmed, and it might well be up to us to do what we could, either to shelter in place, or to eliminate any fuel from our homes before retreating.
When the fires did come, as they did almost every summer, we followed the progress along, marking down on maps the deployments of the fire brigades, the areas that were being cleared to create a break, the areas that were marked for evacuation, and so on. We noted the location of our local teams, and the presence of airborne units that we saw on television and publicity material. The campaigns often lasted for weeks, and could span the length of the continent as new theaters flared up and were pacified.
While there are some similarities, a blizzard is something quite different. Whereas the Australian bushfires are perhaps best understood as a kind of siege, blizzards of the sort that exist in the American northeast are closer to a single pitched battle. Blizzards are mostly contained within the space of a day or two, while bushfires can rage for an entire season.
A blizzard is almost quaint in this way. It forces people to break routines, and limits their actions in a way that creates the kind of contrived circumstances that make interesting stories. Yet the inconvenience is always temporary. Snow melts, or is removed, power lines get repaired, and schools go back into session.
Bushfires are only quaint if one is sufficiently far away from them, and only then in the way that people call the Blitz, with its Anderson Shelters, blackouts, evacuations, and “we’ll all go together when we go” spirit, quaint, in retrospect. A blizzard may impact a larger swath of land in a shorter period, dumping snow to knock out electricity to large numbers of people, and closing roads. But bushfires will scour towns off the map, suffocating or burning those who stand in their way. And while snowstorms are mostly bound by the laws of meteorology, a sufficiently large bushfire will spawn its own weather system.
It is an interesting contrast to consider while my house and the landscape around it is buried in snow.
