The Wire

When a fire approaches your community these days it’s your phone that gives you the warning – but is there still a place for the old warning siren, letting the whole town know of approaching danger? The small South Australian town of Gumeracha thinks so, but since theirs broke they haven’t been able to get funding to replace  it, and will now fundraise to get it working again. Their situation  plays into many recent warnings that fire readiness in Australia relies too much on volunteers and is done on a shoestring budget.