Warning by Sophie Cunningham Page B

shifts to Brisbane and preparing for and responding to
the floods as they were happening. It was no longer a news event that people were
passing on but they were providing practical information on how to flood-proof your
house or after the flood had happened how to clean up.’ 3
    It’s not all good news. If events are moving quickly, reading a tweet that is an
hour old can mean you’re getting out-of-date information, much like hearing an expired
radio warning. But there is no doubt that social media has been a game-changer and,
according to the 2013 World Disasters Report, the widespread use of technology, 4 particularly mobile phone texting, played a role in preventing a large loss of life
when Cyclone Phailin hit the state of Odisha in India. A cyclone in this region in
1999 killed ten thousand. In 2013, after Phailin, only fourteen are reported to have
died.
    But right up to the present day, laying blame when communications collapse has been
a recurring theme in most disasters. Quite apart from any physical damage to the
infrastructure, panicked friends and relatives trying to reach each other in the
build-up to, as well as during and after, an extreme event quickly jam the phone
lines. In the aftermath of Tracy a national registration and inquiry system was set
up by the Natural Disasters Organisation and operated by Red Cross, but systems always
find a way to crash. In 2009, for example, the Bushfires Royal Commission into Black
Saturday interrogated multiple breakdowns in the Country Fire Authority’s emergency
warning and telecommunications systems. 5
    But back to 1974. Hedley Beare describes how it felt to be disconnected so suddenly:
‘When you’re without telephone, post office and all of those things, you’re actually
standing alone in the universe.’ Or, as RAAF commander Air Commodore David Hitchins
mused thirteen years later, ‘Amazing how we are dependent on a telephone. You want
to do something, you put your hands out for the phone and all you get is a hissing
noise.’ Hitchins had been out of Darwin at Smith Point in Kakadu (not then a national
park) on Christmas Eve, and when he tried to tune in to the radio at first light
all he heard was static. ‘We didn’t really know what had gone on and then late in
the morning, out of the black clouds, appeared one of my old DC3s from Darwin…That
particular aeroplane and that crew had been evacuated from Darwin.’ He went to board
the plane with his family but was told that his wife and daughter should stay where
they were because there was nothing to go back to. So they stayed, and as he flew
back over his own collapsed house he saw there was another DC3 wrecked in his back
garden. The RAAF, with the airport next to it, is the largest single piece of real
estate in Darwin. It was home to fifty or so light planes, the civilian airport facilities
and hundreds of people. When Hitchins got there he found hangars built in World War
Two had simply crumpled, aeroplanes were lying on their backs, helicopters were crushed.
‘The whole place was just like one vast rubbish dump.’ The control tower and the
communications at the army base were wrecked. The emergency back-up in Berry Springs
(shared with the ABC) had also been flattened.
    Curly Nixon remembers that at around two on Christmas morning ‘the ABC fellow that
was on the air, he said: “Well the roof looks like it’s going and I’m going.” That
was the last time we heard from the ABC.’ The ABC fellow was Sally Roberts’ husband.
He’d driven in at midnight when it became clear how bad the cyclone was going to
be, because he didn’t want things left in the hands of an inexperienced announcer. 6 Sally was upset because she thought he should be with her, not worrying about the
news. It was seven in the morning before someone who’d been rostered on for 5 am
staggered into the studios and said that the northern