I take it by the stream of HAZMAT response units, police cars and several fire trucks that have just exited my street that the emergancy is over, the roadblocks are lifted, people within the '200m exclusion zone' can re-enter their homes and life on the avenue will return to normal.
The excitement of the past 24hrs was the threat of an explosion, apparently one large enough to reduce the entire suburb to rubble.

First i knew of the whole event was chatting to my mother on the telephone and a fire truck whizzed past sirens a blazing, followed by a police car and another fire truck - hmm.. wonder what that is all about? approx 5 fire trucks and several police cars later i was getting curious all i could see peering up the street was a road block and a hell of a lot of flashing lights.
I went down to the school (about 500m in the other direction) to pick up Liam and an announcement came over the loudspeaker asking all children living in the following streets to assemble in the hall, after quizzing some of the other parents we were informed about a chemical spill on my street and a fire in a trailer... righto...

Picked up Liam and attempted to get home through the roadblocks and traffic jams and was lucky enough to be just outside of the no go area so while other people turned around in our driveway or parked their cars accross the road and abused police officers for not letting them go home, i sat with a hot coffee observing the commotion outside the lounge room window. When the news came on in the evening we learned that it wasnt actually a chemical spill but rather the threat of an explosion that was costing the government unthinkable sums of money in emergancy services, luckily there were no loud bangs and we went to sleep feeling fairly safe. This morning the road was STILL blocked off and fire truckes were STILL going up the road, the place looked like an emergancy services convention or something.

All in all an Anti Climax really, no explosions, no fatalities and only a small segment on the 6 o'clock local news. Apart from the annoyance of roadblocks and evacuations one wonders silently - exactly how long does it take pretty much Canberra's entire fire brigade and police force to put out a fire in a trailer anyway?

I suppose as it turned out, the act of extinguishing the fire was complicated some what by the two small bottles of explosive liquid located on the same trailer which was unfortunatly located next to two ginormous bottles of the same explosive substance...