Black Saturday is an Australian tragedy that redefined the way we live with fire.

I’d visited the Latrobe Valley a few times before I really took in Hazelwood power station. Of course, I’d seen it. How could anyone miss it? But now I beheld the concrete behemoth, its towering chimney stacks creating their own thin, brown cloud-stream.

 With a death toll of 131, Victoria’s Black Saturday bushfires
 are considered the worst in Australia’s history. 

I was writing about the adjacent town of Churchill, built in the late 1960s as a dormitory suburb for Victorian electricity workers. In 1971, a toddler named Brendan Sokaluk had moved to Churchill with his parents, who believed the coal fields would provide a better life for their children. Brendan was raised in the town, and never left. Aged 39, he woke on the morning now known as Black Saturday, and just after lunch, got in his car – a view of Hazelwood visible from his street – and took the short drive to a eucalypt plantation where he set a blaze that engulfed the surrounding world.

Driving to the town, and the area devastated by what is called the Churchill Fire, meant passing the power station, and for the first time I didn’t just half-look at the building.

Read the story from The Guardian by Chloe Hooper - “Black Saturday is an Australian tragedy that redefined the way we live with fire.”