A killing. Facta non verba

I haven't had time to do more than glance at the news today.  Perhaps that's just as well, because I know it'll annoy me.

Yesterday a young women was found fatally injured and sexually assaulted in Bundoora.  As crimes go, it resembles the murders of Jill Meagher and Eurydice Dixon and more than a few others.  The Homicide Squad has been doing its usual highly capable work, and the Facebook pages of news outlets have their usual combination of condolences and calls for the death penalty.

By tomorrow the editorial and op-ed pages of the Age and the Herald-Sun and any number of segments on radio and TV will fill up with the usual headlines about a war on women and toxic masculinity and the roots of male rage.  No doubt the Gillette ad will get a guernsey.  I expect the incels will also rate a mention. And as always, it will all be talk, and intellectualism, and abstractions, and big ideas.  By way of example -

Some undeniable truths from @clementine_ford from her articles clearly about the rape and murder of Aiia Maasarwe. Yet there will be denials and defensiveness in abundance. #masculinity pic.twitter.com/1ZKZitxpVN

— Dr Steven Roberts (@SteveRoberts_) January 17, 2019

Last night, I took part in the evidence search conducted by Victoria Police.  This crime occurred in my SES Unit's area and so we were called upon to provide scene protection as well as extra bodies and eyes.  Clearly I shouldn't talk about what we did, and so I won't.  What resonated for me was that that literally nobody at the scene was talking in abstractions, or showing their own cleverness, or signalling their wokeness.  Each person was following instructions and doing their own greater or lesser part in helping the authorities investigate the crime and uphold the law.

Image Credit: Herald-Sun newspaper

The key word here is doing.  Doing seems remarkably unattractive to people who most love talking.  It's hard, for instance, to imagine many members of the commentariat slogging through brushwood in overalls and heavy boots looking for anything out of place.  It's not in the least sexy or heroic.  You can't take a break to go and get a good coffee and browse Twitter and attempt to "subvert the dominant paradigm" (as a student slogan in my University days wordily put it).  And a suspicious attitude to following the directions of the person in charge may seriously affect the entire project.

Why is it special? Because you say it is? Because some other symbolism says it is?

It’s actually a surrender of autonomy and a pledge to thoughtlessly obey instruction. It’s only special because some people believe it is.

— Duade Borg - Independent for QLD Senate (@DuadeBorg) December 22, 2018

I think one can concede good will to the commentariat and the other virtue-signallers.  No doubt they believe that their hearts are in the right place and that their words are a valuable and worthwhile service.  But I don't think one should concede that what they do makes a difference.

Image Credit: The Age newspaper

Do you want to make the world a better place?  Find some overalls and a good pair of boots.  Come and get your hands dirty.  Facta non Verba

Orange Intensity Redux

Hi everyone,

It's been another intensely orange week for me, with a tincture of red and a purple flourish.

Monday

I had a call on Monday from the SES Peer Support manager for my region asking if I could go and provide post-incident support to an SES unit that had gone out to a really bad job.  For confidentiality reasons I won't give details.  It's enough to say that the job was one that's on my personal list of 'nightmare scenarios', and some members of the crew that turned out looked a bit rattled.  I'm glad we could go out there and make sure they were doing OK and provide support to them.  They're a strong and experienced unit, but I hope it was still helpful for them to know the organization was there to support them.

Tuesday

Tuesday turned red with a trip to the Blood Bank in the late afternoon.  It's a stupid thing, but I still flinch every time the needle goes into my elbow.  But what makes it worthwhile?

Bugger saving lives: this is all about the cookies afterwards!

Wednesday & Thursday

On Wednesday afternoon a pager message came out advising that the Murchison SES Unit would be offline for a fortnight.  They're a smaller unit, and I think a couple of their more experienced operators are away.  My Unit as well as units from Euroa, Seymour, Shepparton and Rushworth will be covering part of their area.  No worries, I thought to myself, most likely things will stay quiet out there anyway.  What happened at 0210 Thuesday morning?  My pager went off to say we'd been requested by police to assist with a search for a missing person.  I was unit duty officer that night, so I called the regional duty officer and the police officer in charge, got a quick briefing and then activated the Tatura Unit, including our boat.

To cut to the chase, the news release prepared by Victoria Police News after the search advised that -

Police divers have recovered a body during their search for a missing Murchison North woman.

The deceased woman was found during a search of an area in and around the Goulburn River this afternoon.

The death is not being treated as suspicious.

Police will prepare a report for the coroner.

Because the search ended in tragedy, I'll follow my usual approach and not discuss details of the search.  I just don't feel it's appropriate to do so.  It's enough to say that I'm very proud of how my Unit performed.  Because only two of us who turned out are boat-qualified (me being one of them), one of our younger members had to step into the role of SES Commander at the incident control centre, and be in charge of the entire SES part of the response.  After daylight, that response included not just our unit, but also Seymour, Benalla, Rushworth, a Regional Support Unit and a parallel service from Shepparton.  The member in question had to step up bigtime and he absolutely distinguished himself.

I couldn't have been more impressed with his performance.  When the bad news about the lady came through, he came into the lunch room where the search teams were eating and announced it, and his bearing was different to how it usually is.  He was speaking to about thirty-five SES personnel, most of them older and more experienced than him, but he was as confident and matter of fact as the oldest veteran.  I was proud he was part of our unit.

For my part, in the morning (as in from about 0400 to 0830) I was out on the boat doing a river search with our most experienced coxswain.  I can tell you that the Goulburn is cold in the small hours of the morning.  He took us downriver and I brought us back up.  I'm pleased to say I remembered a good deal of what I learned on the coxswain's course.  In the later morning we joined the team doing line searches.

As I said before, the search didn't end how anyone wanted it to.  There's not much you can say about that: it's a terrible outcome and that's all there is to it.  I detest the word 'closure' for this sort of thing, but I don't have a better one.  It's better that she can be put to rest decently than not at all.

Because a lot of members of the unit had been at the search since the small hours, many of us were at the end of our duty time limits.  We cancelled training that night and gave everyone the night off.

Friday

Fairly predictably I slept late on Friday and spent a decent whack of the day going though a blizzard of unread emails and looking for jobs.  When I was going to bed, though, I checked out my Facebook feed and saw a bunch of purple flood warnings for Louisiana.

I texted the ex to confirm everyone is OK over there (they are, although Baton Rouge and points west are getting smashed) but I went to sleep feeling guilty.  My girls are there - and other people I care about are there - and I'm here.  Moreover, I'm here when I could do something to help there.  As improbable as it sounds (to me as much as anyone), when the clouds get black and the weather turns to crap, I know what to do.

I guess this isn't unusual - I expect firies, police and amboes have the same sensation - but it's different when your family are involved.  It's like having a shoe with a polished upper and a hole in the heel.

No more for now.  Hope you're all doing OK and that life is a bit quieter at your end than it is at this one!

Finding Fred.

Hi everyone,

Shorter post tonight, I suspect.  I had to scurry down to Melbourne and back this afternoon to meet with a recruiter (which will be the subject of tomorrow's post I expect and I'm a bit on the tired side.  I just spent an hour doing the Unit's weekly email - it must be said that it's a good way of organising my thoughts about that aspect of my life.

Last night at SES training covered land search for a missing child, near the Goulburn River in Shepparton.  The original plan was for it to be a mixed land and water search.  We took the boat, but none of us grabbed the bag with the lifejackets (which highlighted a gap in our processes which is now fixed).  So, the river search was converted into a straight land search.
 

We used the staggered-parallel-lines technique to conduct the initial brisk search along the path, and then a line search along the river bank.  I'm tending to think that a mobile phone is a great asset for pinpointing locations of finds - these were where the bike and a stuffed toy were located, if you're curious:

 

 

As you can see, the child's bike we were using for the purposes of this exercise had seen better days!

 

One the 'casualty' (a child-sized version of Fred, our rescue dummy) was located, we log rolled him onto a blanket stretcher improvised from a wet weather coat and took him back up to level ground.
 

I have to say, though, that it's been an A1 crappy week to be an emergency volunteer.  Some good units are being partly defunded as collateral damage in a dispute between State and Local government over revenue.  And the State government is siding with the firefighters' union in a deal that shows utter contempt for volunteer firefighters (which has an echo of the hostility that professional fire brigades apparently had for the Auxiliary Fire Service in London in World War Two).  Just at the moment, more than anything else, what's keeping my passion for volunteering alive is the great people I get to work with.

A land search.

Hi everyone,

I've had a big couple of days.  It's Friday evening; I spent Wednesday and Thursday on a land search in he hills up near Mansfield.

Maybe you saw it on the news?  I'm sad to say that it didn't have a good result.  As the ABC put it:

The body of missing man Taddeo Haigh has been found within 1 kilometre of where he went missing, police say.

His body was found in dense scrub in difficult terrain near a holiday house at Sawmill Settlement, near Merrijig, where he and his wife were staying over the Anzac day long weekend.

A large-scale search was launched after 31-year-old Mr Haigh, also known as Ted, failed to return from a walk in dense scrub on Sunday.

Victoria Police Acting Superintendent Libby Murray said there were no suspicious circumstances.

"We're working with Ted's family to provide some support. Obviously they're pretty shocked and upset at the moment," she said.

"He was found within a radius of a kilometre of that holiday house. So [it was] not particularly close, but within the search area we'd identified."

Acting Superintendent Murray was asked why the area where he was found had not been previously searched.

"It's pretty thick and rugged terrain through there, so it's one of those areas where we were doing some pretty systematic searching," Acting Superintendent Murray said.

"We did line searching where we had to keep line of sight and keep people pretty close because of how dense it was."

... About 200 people were involved in the search, including the State Emergency Service, Parks Victoria, Victoria Police, the dog squad and the police helicopter.

Acting Superintendent Murray said the searchers had been working very hard to find Mr Haig and were "heartbroken" at not finding him alive.

I don't think I should tell you about the land search itself.  For one thing, the SES isn't keen on members discussing operations on social media.  More seriously, though, it seems wrong to babble on about where we searched, what we ate and so on, when the story ends with the death of somebody's husband and son.  I think that everyone felt something like this when the news came through and all the search teams were called back to the staging area: in the morning, the 200 or so police, SES, CFA and other searchers had been chattering and laughing; in the afternoon as we waited for the debrief, there was a quiet in the air that was more than just sound of fatigue.

Despite the bad outcome, I was incredibly proud of the performance of the SES members.  Crews had come up to help from all over the State to help, some from as far afield as Maffra, Sorrento and Foster.  It was rough terrain to search, and I think we did it well.

Sitting here and writing now, one other thought crosses my mind.  I can't imagine it would be any comfort to his family, at least not now, but Mr Haigh died in a beautiful part of Victoria.  There's never a good time for a young man to die, but if it must happen, I can't think of a better place to go to your eternal rest.