Trapped by bushfires on the NSW south coast, my young family saw the very best of humanity

After waking up with the sky ‘weird and wrong’ in a Narooma caravan park, Timothy Lee describes an at-times terrifying three-day journey home to Sydney

On New Year’s Eve morning at 5.30am I was woken by a single thunderclap – the loudest I’ve ever heard – that echoed and rumbled on for minutes. Half asleep, I wondered if there had been a volcanic eruption. At 9am our son came running in to wake us, saying there was something weird and wrong outside. Outside, in our caravan park near Narooma, it was still dark. The sky was low and a strange orange colour. All around us people were leaving, or hosing down their caravans. The power was gone. Ash was falling and the air was thick with smoke. At the campsite reception, where we tried to find out what was going on, we were told fires were closing in; if we left we couldn’t return. If we stayed and were trapped we would need to go to the beach to escape the blaze.

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from The Guardian https://ift.tt/2QnLJhX
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