The Daily Boomerang

Here is a perfect example of why politicians love global warming:

Households and businesses had to wait six days for power to be restored after last week’s wild weather, which killed four, blacked out 420,000 homes and caused $80 million damage.  (…)

Premier John Brumby blamed global warming for the damage and warned severe winds would become more frequent.

But industry experts, technicians and the Electrical Trades Union blamed staff shortages, frail powerlines and a failure to prune overhanging trees.

"There are not enough blokes in the industry and not enough are being trained," one experienced line worker said. [Herald-Sun]

Some how I seriously doubt this was the first time in history a wind storm that dropped heavy rain hit Victoria. How can someone claim increasing wind storms are hitting Victoria when in the two years I have lived here that is the first severe wind storm I have seen hit the state.  To claim more severe wind storms are coming is just more fear mongering to obscure the issue that the government failed to prune trees and hire enough utility personnel to fix downed powerlines. 

First you had violent rapist wombats in New Zealand and now you have dangerous hedgehogs:

A man in New Zealand has been charged with using a hedgehog as a weapon, the New Zealand Herald has reported.

Police said William Singalargh, 27, had hurled the hedgehog about 5m (16ft) at a 15-year-old boy.

“It hit the victim in the leg, causing a large, red welt and several puncture marks,” said Senior Sgt Bruce Jenkins, in the North Island town of Whakatane.

It was unclear whether the hedgehog was still alive when it was thrown, though it was dead when collected as evidence.

The police spokesman said the suspect was arrested “for assault with a weapon, namely the hedgehog.” [BBC - via Tim Blair]

And here I was thinking Australia had dangerous animals.

Fortunately it looks like the Social Primate didn’t run into any rapist wombats or deadly flying hedgehogs during his recent trip to New Zealand.

The drive between Melbourne and Sydney on the Hume Highway is a long one that takes an entire day to drive.  The drive is really not all that scenic and actually quite boring.  However, the drive between the two major cities in Australia has one unusual site that you will not see anywhere else in Australia, a public park with a submarine:

This submarine is located in the small city of Holbrook, New South Wales which is about the half way point between Melbourne and Sydney on the Hume Highway

The city only has about 1,400 people in it and was originally called Germanton in 1876.  However, during World War I the people of the city decided to change the name due to the anti-German sentiment of that time due to the war.  The decision was made to name the town Holbrook after Submarine Commander Norman Douglas Holbrook who earned the first naval Victoria Cross for his actions sinking the Turkish battleship Messoudieh during the war.  Douglas Holbrook would actually go on and visit the town three times to thank the people for naming the city after him. 

So historically the city has ties with submarines and those ties only became stronger when the decision was made in 1994 to purchase the shell of the decommissioned Royal Australian Navy submarine HMAS Otway.  The submarine shell was purchased using funds raised through a city wide fundraiser to include a $100,000 given to the city from Douglas Holbrook’s widow.  The shell of the submarine was shipped to the city by truck and then reassembled in the public park by local volunteers.  The city is easily the most recognizable aspect of the city and can even be easily spotted on Google Earth:

Holbrook, NSW is definitely a "submarine town", but it is sure strange to see one 400 kilometers inland.  So if you are making the drive across the Hume Highway it is worth a stop to stretch your legs and check out this surprising "submarine town".

The search for missing Canadian hiker Warren Meyer has continued in a new location near the Dom Dom Saddle:

Search and rescue police will be back in the Yarra Ranges National Park today looking for bushwalker Warren Meyer, who went missing in the area on Easter Sunday.

 Victoria Police said today the search will entail a new area adjacent to the Dom Dom Saddle car park where the 57-year-old was last seen.   [AAP]

The search for a hiker that was suspected in possible foul play against Mr. Meyer has also ended with him being cleared of any wrong doing:

Police also said a man seen hitch-hiking in the area, and who detectives wanted to speak to, had come forward and been eliminated from inquiries.

Inspector Phil Shepherd told Fairfax newspapers police have found nothing to suggest foul play behind Mr Meyer’s disappearance. 

The new search I think makes sense because in the area that was searched that I personally walked through myself, I think it is unlikely if he is dead that his body is located there considering the size of the area and the number of searchers who were looking through it.  However, if Mr. Meyer decided at the last moment to hike through another area without telling his wife then that could explain why he hasn’t been found.

Hopefully the searchers that have been working really hard to locate Mr. Meyer can locate him and give some peace of mind to Mr. Meyer’s family.

Wild weather has been bashing the state of Victoria recently which has actually led to the deaths of two people here.  However, a nice thing about the wet and wild weather is that when the rain does stop the clouds help provide some spectacular sunsets over Victoria:

The picture is from my backyard and shows how intense the sunset was due to probably the increased amount of dust and water vapor in the air.  As the sun continued to set the sunset began to lose its intensity:

The weather the next few days is supposed to be pretty good the next few days but the heavy rain fall was quite nice despite all the damage the heavy winds caused.  I hope everyone gets out and enjoys the good weather this weekend.

The search for the 57 year old Canadian man Warren Meyer who went missing a week ago while bushwalking in the Yarra Ranges east of Melbourne has been called off:

Police have scaled down a search for a Canadian bushwalker missing since Sunday in the Yarra Ranges National Park, east of Melbourne.

Warren Meyer, 57, from Beaumaris, was last seen at the Dom Dom Saddle car park in the region last Sunday morning.

A police spokeswoman said the number of searchers had been scaled down as hopes of finding the man alive faded.

Earlier today, 53 Country Fire Authority volunteers, 40 State Emergency Service members and 15 search and rescue police searched over new ground in a last ditch attempt to locate the bushwalker. [The Age]

This weekend I went and hiked the same trail that Mr. Meyer disappeared on. I go hiking just about every weekend anyway and since I have never hiked this particular trail before I figure I would go and check it out. I began the hike over at Fernshaw which is opposite from where Mr. Meyer began his hike at Dom Dom Saddle.

In yellow below, I highlighted Morley’s Track that Mr. Meyer disappeared on:

I began at Fernshaw because I figured that the Dom Dom Saddle area would be packed with search and rescue personnel. At Fernshaw I was literally the only person there. The trail as can be seen in the map above runs nearly parallel to the road that runs through the mountains connecting Healsville to Marysville.

Here is the sign announcing the start of Morley’s Track and the route to Dom Dom Saddle:

Right from the start it becomes obvious how thickly vegetated this area is:

Most of the mountain ash trees are of medium size along the trail, but occasionally there are a few extremely large trees with some extending over 100 meters in height. The trail was overgrown in some areas due to the thick vegetation with plenty of fallen logs as well, but for the most part the trail was of decent quality like you see below:

Throughout the walk the trail remains heavily forested:

To further give readers a further idea of how forested and thick the underbrush along this trail really is, here is a quick video I shot of the terrain with my camera.

If Mr. Meyer did leave the trail it would be easy to get disoriented from where the trail is located. However, if he did leave the trail it would have to be towards the east because if he went off the trail and was disoriented to the west he could easily hear the cars on the highway to reorient himself. So if he was lost he would have to have been to the east. However, if he went east he would have to cross the stream pictured below:

This stream can be heard for quite some distance a way, so if Mr. Meyer was lost to the east it would have to be quite some distance from the stream. This stream runs right to Healsville so anyone lost can easily get back to town by following this stream. So he would have to be far enough from this stream not to hear it which would then put him on the slopes of Mt. Donna Buang.

I would think that since Mr. Meyer is an experienced bushwalker, he would know that there is a lookout tower on top of Mt. Donna Buang. If he was lost he could simply just head to the top of the mountain to find help. This why I don’t think he got lost during his hike.

This leaves the possibility he slipped and was hurt somewhere. It was reported that Mr. Meyer had a cellphone with him. I tested my cellphone out there and it did not get a signal so if he slipped and injured himself his cellphone may have been useless as well. I think this scenario will always remain a possibility, but I would think that with over 100 people looking for him in an area that isn’t that big somebody would have eventually found him. I say this will remain a possibility because the underbrush is so thick in the area that I think it is possible that the search party could have missed him, but probably unlikely.

After discounting the lost or injured scenarios as unlikely, I wasn’t surprised to learn that the police are opening a criminal investigation into his disappearance:

POLICE fear a missing Melbourne bushwalker may have been murdered and are investigating the movements of a man they suspect could be involved.

Detectives called in to probe the disappearance of experienced bushwalker Warren Meyer in the Yarra Ranges revealed yesterday that a man in his late 30s had been in the area at the time and was a “person of interest”.

Mr Meyer, 57, a Canadian national living in Beaumaris, was due to return from a 10-kilometre bushwalk in the Mount Dom Dom area at noon last Sunday but has not been seen since.

A massive search covering more than 100 kilometres of tracks and roads and more than five square kilometres of forest has failed to find any trace of the married father of two.

Mr Meyer, a consultant civil engineer, set out at 7.30am from the Dom Dom Saddle car park with food, water, a phone and GPS.

Police want to speak to a group of about eight people who were camping in the Black Spur, Narbethong or Acheron Way area over the Easter break and who might have given the suspect a lift to Warburton.

The man has been interviewed by police and admitted he had been in the area.

Police spokeswoman Creina O’Grady said the man claimed to have come across the group of campers on the day Mr Meyer disappeared and that they gave him a lift to Warburton. Detectives want to speak to the campers to check his story. [The Age]

On the map below you can see Warburton is on the opposite side of Mt. Donna Buang:

The Black Spur, Narbethong, Acheron Way area is just north of Dom Dom Saddle. So this mystery hiker may have hiked from Warburton over Mt. Donna Buang to Dom Dom Saddle and then walked further north up the Black Spur road before finding some campers to catch a ride with back to Warburton via the Acheron Way road. If anyone knows anybody who was camping in this area over Easter Weekend you might want to tell them to contact Victorian police.

If this mystery hiker did assault Mr. Meyer while their paths crossed on the trail, it would seem to me that Mr. Meyer’s body would at least have been fairly close to the trail for the searchers to find. Once again I can’t stress enough how thick the brush is and maybe the searchers just missed him.

I don’t know what happened to Mr. Meyer, but it is strange and tragic at the same time. When I reached Dom Dom Saddle there were a lot of people, police, and even ABC news there. I didn’t take any pictures because I don’t believe taken photos of people obviously very upset is the proper thing to do. I just took a quick look and left. I just hope authorities will be able to find out what happened to Mr. Meyer so his family can have peace of mind about what happened.

Last night was the highly publicized Earth Hour which today as expected the Australian media is touting as this great success:

EARTH Hour returned to Australia tonight, with Sydney’s postcard-perfect harbour again temporarily plunged into darkness.

At 8pm (AEDT), the Harbour Bridge and its neighbouring Opera House dimmed from flood-lit tourism icons to still recognisable silhouettes.

Only security lighting remained on the structures, while elsewhere in Sydney’s CBD, the office towers glowed rather than blazed against the night.

As lines of office lights inked out, a crowd of about 100 people at the harbourside park of Mrs Macquarie’s Chair cheered.

“Earth Hour is a call to action. People have now responded and it’s time to introduce some significant long-term changes,” Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore said at an official Earth Hour function at the park.

“One inspired idea that began in Sydney just 12 months ago has become a world movement,” she said. [AAP]

However in Melbourne, Earth Hour was a failure:

Melbourne Before

Melbourne After

The Arts Center and its spire was nearly the only building that turned off its lights. The Age got caught last year Photoshopping their Earth Hour pictures in order to make it appear more people turned off their lights then really did. Since they couldn’t get away with Photoshopping pictures this year The Age despite their attempts to gloss over this failure ultimately had to admit instead had to admit that Earth Hour was anti-climactic:

At the top of the Rialto, a small crowd had a sense of anticlimax when there was no widespread blackout at 8pm. In fact, across the CBD rows of illuminated office windows, with little sign of beavering workers behind them, showed not everyone had read the memo. [The Age]

Funnier yet was that Carlton and St. Kilda were playing their night time footy game in the Telstra Dome last night with full lighting. To further emphasize the failure check out the energy demand of Victoria last night from the National Electricity Market Management Company:

Total Energy Demand for Victoria:

If you look at 20:00 (8PM) when Earth Hour started, the demand for energy actually increased in Victoria. It wasn’t just Victoria either, look at the energy demand for the rest of Australia:

Total Energy Demand for New South Wales:

Total Energy Demand for South Australia:

Total Energy Demand for Queensland:

Total Energy Demand for Tasmania:

Looking at these graphs I have to wonder what was going on in South Australia last night at midnight? Energy demand went through the roof. You can also tell by this graph that not a whole lot is going on at night in Tasmania considering their energy demand dropped to next to nothing.

As for myself all the lights in my house were turned off last night, not because of Earth Hour, but because my wife and I had a dinner party put on by my employer to go to which yes all the lights were on. We turned the lights off at our house simply because that is what we always do when we leave the house. The functions we went to was scheduled for months and the organizers decided to hold the function even though the Earth Hour was going on.

The Earth Hour did provide some good discussion at the event last night though with many people I talked to believing that Earth Hour was ultimately pointless and symbolic at best. Many wondered why doesn’t the government do something to create more non-CO2 polluting electricity so people do not have to feel guilty about having their lights on? Another friend of mine may a great point that the Australia 2020 Summit is going to be as pointless as Earth Hour. Instead of the 2020 Summit the government should have an 2020 Energy Summit to come up with an ultimate solution to what the nation is going to do in regards to generating more non-CO2 polluting electricity by 2020.

However, such a summit would require tough political decisions to made; it is much more simple just to ask people to turn off their lights instead.

A Queensland farmer is wondering who the litter bug is that left this on his property:

A cattle farmer in Australia’s remote northern outback on Friday said he had found a giant ball of twisted metal, which he believes is space junk from a rocket used to launch communications satellites.

Farmer James Stirton found the odd-shaped ball last year on his 40,000 hectare property, about 800 kilometers (500 miles) west of the northern Queensland state capital of Brisbane.

But Stirton only started inquiring into what the ball of metal really was, and where it had come from, in the past week.

“I was riding out to check some cattle, and I came around the corner and there it was in a paddock,” Stirton told Reuters on Friday.

“I know a lot of about sheep and cattle but I don’t know much about satellites. But I would say it is a fuel cell off some stage of a rocket.”

He said the object was hollow, and covered in a carbon-fiber material. He has contacted some U.S.-based aerospace companies to try to find out what the object really is.  [Reuters]

I wonder what the fees for littering are in Queensland?

Australians often claim that their neighbors in New Zealand are a bit slow and this story will only reinforce this commonly held belief:

Arthur Cradock, 48, from the South Island town of Motueka, called police last month to tell them he was being raped by the marsupial at his home and needed urgent assistance.

Cradock, an orchard worker, later called back to reassure the police operator that he was all right.

"I’ll retract the rape complaint from the wombat, because he’s pulled out. Apart from speaking Australian now, I’m pretty all right you know. I didn’t hurt my bum at all."

He pleaded guilty in Nelson District Court to using a phone for a fictitious purpose and was sentenced to 75 hours’ community work.  [Daily Telegraph]

Unsurprisingly police claim alcohol was involved in then incident.  Here is a word of advice to anyone in the future that wants to claim they were raped by an animal, at least claim you were raped by an animal that is native to your country.  Wombats are a marsupial native to Australia and are not found in New Zealand, but then again I guess claiming to be raped by kiwi would be even less believable. 

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