Although Beaconsfield seems to be over run with media, the enormous quantity of journalists does not appear to be producing much in the way of quality reporting. I guess it is tough trying to come up with a new angle on a story when the action is 1km underground and there is no way to grab any action with even the longest telephoto lens. I guess Richard Carlton was told, "Come back with a story or don't come back at all".
Channel 9 has been having the best go at playing vulture, probably reasoning that if the Thredbo landslide could generate lots of ratings over an extended period, then maybe Beaconsfield could provide a lift to a sagging station. It will be interesting to see how the ratings work out. I'm a bit put out at why it has been termed a "disaster". One dead and two trapped is not a disaster. It's a mining accident with a bad outcome for one guy. More people died in the recent bus crash in Egypt and I don't remember it being lauded as a great disaster. I guess "accident" does not flog as many fish wrappers as "disaster".
Is this a sign of the new look Channel 9 under Captain Eddie? I'm trying to remember the name of the movie with Christopher Reeve about a TV station and the owner wanted to see a fire story on every news bulletin. Was it "Network"? People love fires. Beaconsfield would be so much better if it was a coal mine and it was on fire.
I've had a very jaded view of how the media reports these things ever since I was caught up in a hotel fire at Thredbo. It was the start of the ski season, I drove down to Thredbo with a bunch of friends, we bashed the snow all day, drank all night and then passed out in our rooms at the Thredbo Alpine Hotel.
Sometime after midnight, someone pounded on our doors yelling, "Fire!". I thought it was a drunk running up and down the corridor being an idiot, until I heard the fire alarm. I then thought it was a drunk who had set off the fire alarm and then run down the corridor banging on doors being an idiot.
I figured out that was not the case upon opening the door and finding the corridor to be full of smoke. We didn't know it, but the fire was in the rooms next door to ours, and they would end up being completely burnt out. Our room was not burnt, but we would have carked it in our beds from smoke if we had not split the scene.
Getting out was pretty tricky as we were pretty pissed and totally exhausted from lack of sleep. In that condition, we meandered up and down the corridors and stair cases trying to find a way out. I inhaled a lot of smoke in the process, and spent the next few months coughing up crap. As it was, we were the last to stumble out of the hotel into the snow.
The evacuation of the hotel, the putting out of the fire and the aftermath was a debacle of the first order. One thing that sticks in my mind is the arrival of the Thredbo fire brigade - it consisted of a cook and someone else in a ute with an Onga pump on the back - something that would be useful for putting out a BBQ, but not a three storey wooden hotel that was well alight. To cap it off, the cook appeared to be as drunk as I was. The Cooma fire brigade struggled up the hill at least an hour later, and they couldn't get their truck near the hotel to fight the fire as all the guests cars were triple parked out the front, and everyone had run outside in their pyjamas and left their keys behind.
Most people didn't want to stand in the snow all night in their PJ's, so they left the evacuation point and went and crashed elsewhere with friends. When the cops turned up and took control and did a headcount and compared it to the hotel manifest, they found themselves about 80 bodies short. The assumption was that those 80 people were dead in their beds, so the fire brigade wasted half an hour breaking down doors looking for people.
We ended up being led off to the Convention Centre, where we were given blankets and pillows and left to crash out on the carpet. After 6 years in the infantry, I can sleep just about anywhere, anytime, and I promptly passed out on the floor. No one else go a wink of sleep as thanks to all the smoke I had inhaled, I snored like a bear. Shaking me awake had no effect, as I would fall back asleep in 5 seconds or so. At breakfast a few hours later, I heard people complaining about, "that snoring bastard that would not stop".
There was a lot of speculation about how the fire started, and someone mentioned that it started after a fight in the bar on the ground floor. The bar had this big fire on a raised platform in the middle of the room, and somehow something must have been knocked over. Either that, or some lazy sod had not cleaned the chimney properly and sparks going up the chute set the chimney on fire.
I always like the fight scenario. When we got to the Convention Centre, I went to the toilet. Whilst I was there, a bloke came in with a split lip and black eye and he had skinned and bleeding knuckles. He was washing blood off his face. I had seen him in the bar trying to chat up this blonde who was wearing something like some tight leather jeans and a leather bra and not much else. Yes, it was a good look, but chatting her up was probably not a good option if she had a boyfriend (which she did).
Anyway, the way the media reported it, it sounded like very little happened and nothing went wrong and everything was peachy. Having been in the hotel, it was more like the Titanic. It was a complete and utter fucking mess. It was a really good first hand look at the disparity between what ends up being printed in the fish wrappers and what really happens.
I pity the poor buggers down the mine. They are going to come up blinking into the sunlight, get carted off to hospital and their families will present them with a wheelbarrow load of press clippings from every paper around the country. The two of them are going to be reading them saying, "Was there another mine collapse while we were down there?", because what they will read will probably have little in common with what happened down the mine.
The media - monkeys with cameras.
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