This is a long story, but I’ll cut it short. I was in Victoria last week. Playing some shows. I had a gig in Bendigo on Saturday night. We turned up, no-one was there. We didn’t know why. Between the four of us we had two laptops, an iPhone, an Optus 3G wireless modem, three Internet-connected 3G phones and no clue. On Saturday afternoon online news media were in a flurry about the hottest Victorian day on record, but none of them were reporting the fire danger to any extent that we got an impression that it would be unsafe to head bush. The Melbourne forecast on the BOM website was down all day and I couldn’t get a forecast or a synoptic chart. We went to bed that night, 2km from a bushfire that killed people and destroyed 50 homes. The friend we were staying with in Bendigo lost her family home and the family shop in Marysville. None of us knew anything until we woke up on Sunday morning and saw the TV news. It was an epic fail of new media.

All the stories I hear are of people who had no idea the fire was coming. If we had decent broadband coverage in this country, an early warning system and mobile devices that worked in the bush, lives would have been saved. Hundreds of them.

Fail.