In a year where things haven’t really been fine where much of the world’s ecology and the general weather in places like Australia are concerned, the year is ending pretty much the way it has been for the better part of 2019- hot and unexciting. The rise of episodes like bushfires being something of a regularity instead of being a sporadic change in the weather, the common perception of the locals has been that the weather gods must be crazy. But nothing could sound crazier than the latest episode that comes from a country that, for the better part for 2019, bore the brunt of the phenomenon known as climate change.
It appears that in Australia, a 12-year-old boy by the name of Lucas Sturrock, in Western Australia was left with no option but to escape his domestic setting when the threat of the bushfire approached his house with a threatening fury.
What was interesting and perhaps also thrilling about this episode was that the 12-year-old boy, having no help at his disposal whatsoever, had to drive a truck and leave his house in just enough time to save himself and also his dog.
While on the one hand, one has got to laud the boy’s steadfastness and brave, on the other hand, the sheer danger of finding one’s house confronted by the threat of the fast catching bushfire may easily have left the best in business worried and on the backfoot.
Then on top of this, the Australian boy, aged just 12 and hence, clearly under-aged for driving, actually put all the skills to good measure in escaping in just enough time from what could’ve been a dangerous situation, makes the episode every bit thrilling as it was worthy of being recounted again and again.
NDTV, among the first to break the news in India had the following observations to make:
Lucas Sturrock was home alone on Sunday after his father and brother had gone out to fight a fire in Mogumber, 128 km northwest of Perth, Western Australia when the blaze approached his house.
Realising the fire was approaching too fast to escape to the rendezvous point designated by his father, Sturrock grabbed the family dog and headed off in his older brother’s pick-up truck, police said.
Emergency workers found Sturrock and the dog in the truck at the side of a road, unharmed.
“It was great he had the driving skills to get out of there,” Police Sergeant Michael Daley told the Australian Broadcasting Corp (ABC).
The episode took place in one of the most prominent and popular places in all of Western Australia: Perth. And unfortunately, the young Australian boy was all by himself at that point as both his father and brother had gone out to battle another bushfire well outside the city limits.
It was told that the boy’s father and brother were around 128 kilometers away from the city of Perth, which meant that anything unfortunate or untoward- something which luckily didn’t happen- would’ve left the young Aussie reeling in utter discomfort, having no one else by himself other than the family dog.
But the thrilling episode doesn’t just paint the fortunes of one Aussie family. Young Lucas was just one of the thousands of Australians who have had to flee their homes in front of the damaging threat posed by the relentless Australian bushfires this year.