Bushfires in Australia

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[/url]BW538_020 by Another Chris, on Flickr[/IMG]
 
The picture gallery in the Sydney Morning Herald has been updated as the fires progress. These fires are unlike anything seen before in their scope and ferocity.

This picture has become one of the most viewed images of the fire disaster.
 
Our house didn't burn, but the fire got close to about 100 metres thanks to the Country Fire Service at Charleston. My two other close friends lost their house in Lobethal, South Australia. I've taken more photos of the devastation, but I may share these later when the situation is more calm.

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lynnb said:
The picture gallery in the Sydney Morning Herald has been updated as the fires progress. These fires are unlike anything seen before in their scope and ferocity.

This picture has become one of the most viewed images of the fire disaster.
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Lynnb hi. Just my "two bob's" worth. There has been some commentary from officials (including the Prime Minister) and experts in the field that the intensity of the fires have been due in large part to the huge fuel load that has built up due to poor management over perhaps 20-30 years or more. Made worse no doubt by town and suburban encroachment around the fringes of forests national parks etc.

In many states, regulations have been introduced by states and shires preventing farmers and government authorities from burning off forest ground litter during cooler wetter months specifically to prevent this kind of thing on the grounds that it is bad for the environment. One expert fire investigator who often gives expert evidence in such cases was interviewed on TV last night and though he was careful in his wording not to point the finger at specific groups he was very explicit in saying this is the key problem. When dried out leaf litter, tree branches, twigs, uncut grasses etc are allowed to build up in deep drifts across forest floors and grasslands then this is all there to fuel fires when they come and we in Australia as I am sure you understand know they will always come sooner or later. Turning huge swathes of Australia into national parks may be nice and green and environmentally friendly, but it seems to me that authorities who fail to then manage those areas properly for the inevitable fires that must follow are without a doubt culpable. And they are culpable too when these regulations prohibit farmers from even managing the problem on their own land.

Once more, there will be post catastrophe investigations and I am sure that just as in the past, acolytes of the green faith will point their fingers at "global warming" and even, as they also have in the past, victim-blame the very people who were burned out for having the temerity to want to live in and around beautiful "environmentally sensitive" areas. Governments will tut-tut and hand out money to help people rebuild and huge reports will be written. Then based on past experience nothing will be done. And it will all happen again when fuel load builds up and fires come again. Just like it has in the past.

I hope that at least one thing comes out of the lessons and that proper management practices are put into place. But I will not hold my breath. Governments love to talk, talk, talk and also love to divert attention away from their own failings inaction and incompetence. (Just look already at state Premiers who are responsible for this area of legislation who are already saying it's the Federal government's fault - for exactly what I do not know given they have the necessary powers, not federal authorities.)

This article says it all. It was written in 2009 after the last Victorian state fire disaster in 2008. The Royal Commission it refers to has achieved nothing.

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/20...fuHRS0dtYt5dyAIUo03werHATUT16pjH2QBAmMLLo5Ro4
 
I almost lost my home in July of 2018 to a wildfire and nothing like we are seeing now. A few weeks later a friend of mine ( a photographer ) lost his home in Malibu to that fire. Then he lost a family friend in the Paradise fire. Even the owner of this site had a fire come very close to his area of a business that likely helps to sustain this site.

We are about 20-30 years too late in correcting our bad behavior in terms of this planet's ability to support current forms of life. This will get worse, much much worse. This is not political, that is a poor excuse to suppress the discussion of the obvious and I won't tolerate it.

When ever someone now asks me where I am from or where I was born, I tell them Earth. And when someone asks me what nationality I am, I say I am a human being. Get the picture folks? Get the real and big picture that in this decade we will see that we have been wrong about what our grandchildren will inherit in terms of our inaction. It's not then, it is now and it has barely just begun.
 
Hi Peter, I have read accounts from the earliest days of the colony which describe the Sydney surrounds as "like parkland", with little fuel at ground level compared to today - achieved by the traditional Aboriginal land management practice of systematic patchwork burning. A pity these lessons have not been heeded over the past 250 years, although I seem to remember reading recently that these practices are being re-evaluated.

As to our rural roads being death-traps, I fully agree with the article. Friends of mine living in rural NSW have long said how stupid it is to prohibit clearing fuel loads along country roads.
 
lynnb said:
Hi Peter, I have read accounts from the earliest days of the colony which describe the Sydney surrounds as "like parkland", with little fuel at ground level compared to today - achieved by the traditional Aboriginal land management practice of systematic patchwork burning. A pity these lessons have not been heeded over the past 250 years, although I seem to remember reading recently that these practices are being re-evaluated.

As to our rural roads being death-traps, I fully agree with the article. Friends of mine living in rural NSW have long said how stupid it is to prohibit clearing fuel loads along country roads.
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I meant to mention Aborigine land management practices. I agree we should have learned from them.

As to clearing fuel roads along roads I agree too. As a kid growing up in rural SA I recall that it was normal for residents of that part of the world to spend some weekends especially in the lead up to winter when fuel would be needed for burning in open fires for home heating, to take a car and a trailer to collect wood from roadsides and from the farms of compliant farmers happy to have the nuisance and danger removed at no cost to them. It was part of family ritual which often included taking a .22 rifle to shoot rabbits for the pot (shock-horror, killing a furry creature) and foraging for autumn forest food like mushrooms (eating locally and seasonally was normal). In short it was an inherently pretty balanced and renewable life style. One that trendy inner city dwellers no doubt think only fit for the illiterates who do not live near a city CBD, never eat kale and seldom drink chardonnay. (For full and frank disclosure I am one of those inner city dwellers now, but I at least still have a healthy respect for my rural forebears and the way I was brought up).

As to the danger of having to use such a road as an escape route, well that danger should be obvious. I have had personal experience of being in the middle of a huge bushfire and having to drive down a road with trees literally exploding in flame on either side of the car from the intense heat as the flame front approached - actual flames had not even reached the exploding trees when they "detonated". Obviously we escaped but only because the road was quite a wide one and in that case the road verges were relatively clean of fuel. Even so it was a close run thing and not a little bit intense. On a narrow country road surrounded by trees and fallen debris it would be impossible and deadly.

In many places now, that lifestyle and especially road-side wood collecting like this has been prohibited by short sighted and dopey policies presumably on the idiotic idea that it adds to the carbon "footprint". (By this I mean that I should have thought that releasing and recycling carbon that had been sequestered by trees and plants just a few short years ago is preferable to burning fossil fuels for energy that sequestered its carbon millions of years ago. This goes doubly, when one stops for a moment to consider that if left laying there, that fuel will almost certainly sooner or later add to the carbon footprint by being burned in wildfires or alternatively it will decay naturally over a few years and do so). And it's vastly preferable to relying on inherently unreliable wind energy that in any event is so ludicrously expensive that many cannot now afford to use it and must freeze instead.)
 
Best of luck to all people in Australia. I hope that it suddenly will rain a lot.
 
I'm sorry for your troubles KM-25 and Australia's as well

I'm sorry for your troubles KM-25 and Australia's as well

KM-25 said:
I almost lost my home in July of 2018 to a wildfire and nothing like we are seeing now. A few weeks later a friend of mine ( a photographer ) lost his home in Malibu to that fire. Then he lost a family friend in the Paradise fire. Even the owner of this site had a fire come very close to his area of a business that likely helps to sustain this site.

We are about 20-30 years too late in correcting our bad behavior in terms of this planet's ability to support current forms of life. This will get worse, much much worse. This is not political, that is a poor excuse to suppress the discussion of the obvious and I won't tolerate it.

When ever someone now asks me where I am from or where I was born, I tell them Earth. And when someone asks me what nationality I am, I say I am a human being. Get the picture folks? Get the real and big picture that in this decade we will see that we have been wrong about what our grandchildren will inherit in terms of our inaction. It's not then, it is now and it has barely just begun.
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Dear KM,

It's hard to come to grips with that we have always assumed would be sustainable may not be. I live in Pennsylvania, a place where more people seem to leave than come to?

We need to find a better way to balance our actions with those of our host planet, but for today I will be content to extend sympathy to your and your family and friends, along with those people 1000's miles from me.

Regards,

Tim Murphy

Harrisburg, PA :)
 
Our prayers go out to our Aussie friends and family (we have family in Riverstone, a suburb of Sydney and in Townsville). According to the news, as of yesterday, the Australian bushfires have burned a total of 12 million acres, approximately the size of the states of Vemont and New Hampshire combined. In comparison, the most destructive fire season in California history (2018) burned less than 2M acres.
 
I'm troubled by this unending story of fire, destruction, and hardship in Australia. I wish all of you there the best.


- Murray
 
Returned this evening to our home after evacuating last week. Sent the wife and kids and family photos away first, stayed to pack the GAS kit. Our local bushfire in beautiful natural, but very dry parkland was small compared to the massive fire storm that is still raging, but I have no desire to get any closer than we did. Many friends are still in harms way.

I suspect the political debate will heat up as well. I have strong views but that is for a different soapbox. However, the schisms are already becoming obvious, with the trauma driving these splits from just beneath the surface. None of our lifestyles and choices here are exempt from contributing to where we are at on this planet. It just manifests differently across the globe.

What may not be obvious to non- Aussies is the circa 500 million animals that have been estimated to have been lost, and the potential for complete extinction of some species.

Summer 2020 will go down as the year our collective lack of vision came back to burn us. We’ll have to build a new vision that all sides of politics can countenance and commit to.
 
One hesitates to say anything on this topic.

A physicist PhD Robert Rohde @RARohde (not Australian so far as I know) presents some fascinating animations and graphs on this topic and others on Twitter. A recent one on Australian Climate shows that 2019 is notable for the combination of increased average temperature and the low rainfall - drought. He plots the figures for all of the 20th century through to now. The precise source of the figures is unclear. He is linked to Berkely Earth which I have not researched much, but they are willing to expose climate science deceptions at the same time as promoting ways to reduce emissions in China and India.

I understand that the dryness and increased winter temperatures were a barrier to forest fuel reduction burns this year. One of these got out of control in NSW in the last two years and shrouded Sydney in smoke.

Ten years ago in Victoria 173 people died in the Black Saturday fires of the 7th of February 2009. There was a Royal Commission and much was learnt. A state minister of the time is now the Premier and he has led admirably this week. The advice to populations to just get right out of the area has saved scores of lives. The coordination of emergencyvic and the Country Fire Authority and the early request for defence force support by the Premier, leading to the remarkable amphibious landing craft evacuations on Friday, and the army helicopter evacuations of small towns cut off by road this weekend have all been unprecedented and impressive. The death toll in Victoria is currently well under 10% of that ten years ago, with these fires far worse.
 
Apropos my earlier comment about traditional patchwork burning, see full story from today's Sydney Morning Herald:

"Phil Sheppard watched with trepidation as a giant blaze approached his beloved Hunter Valley property outside Laguna, near Cessnock.

The Aboriginal elder had poured his heart and soul into Ngurrumpaa - an isolated 160-acre bushland property with a main house and several huts, offering cultural camps for tourists and Indigenous youth.

Three weeks ago, he and other owners were forced to evacuate, helplessly watching online as the Gospers Mountain fire converged with the Little L Complex fire and appeared to engulf the property.

To his amazement, when he returned two days later, traversing the long gravel driveway on foot after fallen trees blocked vehicle access, most structures remained perfectly intact.

“I came around the bend and could see my hut still standing, I just couldn't believe it,” said the 66-year-old.

“It burnt right around the house ... it was as if somebody had been here watching it and putting it out, but there wasn't, there was nobody here at all.”

Owners say the property was saved by the traditional Indigenous technique of cultural burning conducted on their land three years ago.

The only hut not protected by cultural burning, 500 metres from the main house, was destroyed in the blaze.

“It's pretty miraculous,” said co-owner Leanne King, 60.

“This is proof that [cultural burning] works.” "
 
@nickthetasmaniac - hope you're safe and sound over there.

@teddy - you stay safe too, man.

@ChrisN - As I said, I was going to Canberra this week, but canceled due to the fires. The Hume freeway was closed near Euroa, where I would have had to drive, and Canberra itself has smoke pollution as bad as Lahore and Delhi! I hope you can stay inside as much as you can.
 
Apart from loss of life and property the saddest aspect of the fires for me is loss of wildlife and unique vegetation. Years ago I lived in Far East Gippsland which for me was the centre of the universe. I lugged my 8x10 and 6x6 along the endless coastline, the Errinundra plateau, and up into the Snowy Mountains and alpine areas. There are (I hope not 'were') areas of unique vegetation in East Gippsland remnant of the time when Tasmania and the mainland were joined before the last ice age, and if burnt their loss would be permanent, I fear. The world is on the brink of a climate crisis which if not addressed now could lead to global catastrophies of which our current experience is but a preview.
 
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