Listen to this

TV Channel 9 here in Oz has broadcast an amazing interview over her mobile phone with an Aussie woman trapped in her Christchurch office building after today's earthquake.

I've said many times before during major disasters that they're actually not one event but a jigsaw of individual, very personal stories.

This is another example of that.

She sounds calm but she must be terrified.

Listen here: "I'm trapped under a desk, I can't get out, it's dark, I'm bleeding, and I just don't what's going on out there".

Ánd by the way, it's a side of mobile phones, often so annoying and cause for complaint, that we don't think about.  Try to imagine the comfort of it to someone like this, trapped in the dark, not knowing what's out there, what's going on, what her situation really is. She at least has contact with a friendly voice, feels that she's not alone.



Another example of a very personal story that was part of a much larger jigsaw - and another showing the value and comfort of a mobile phone in these disastrous situations - that still raises the hair on the back of my neck whenever I listen to it was during the Black Saturday bushfires in Victoria. It was a real time audio of one person trapped right in the middle of it, facing a terrifying death.


Rhiannon, only twenty years old, called radio station 3AW as the fires raced towards the house where she and a group had taken shelter.