Australian Fires

The Sound Guy

Pursuit Driver
Funny how all of the "climate change" crowd who are quick to jump on any natural disaster are not mentioning this...

More than 180 alleged arsonists have been arrested since the start of the bushfire season, with 29 blazes deliberately lit in the Shoalhaven region of southeast NSW in just three months.
The Shoalhaven fires were lit between July and September last year, with Kempsey recording 27 deliberately lit fires, NSW Bureau of Crime and Statistics and Research data shows.

Police arrested 183 people for lighting bushfires across Queensland, NSW, Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania in the past few months. NSW police data shows 183 people have been charged or cautioned for bushfire-related offences since November 8, and 24 arrested for deliberately starting bushfires.

Queensland police say 101 people have been picked up for setting fires in the bush, 32 adults and 69 juveniles.

In Tasmania, where fires have sprung up in the north of the state and outside Hobart, five were caught setting fire to vegetation. Victoria reported 43 charged for 2019.

The Australian

The also fail to mention that the very Green crowd that is complaining about the size of the fires keeps pushing regulations that makes them larger that fighting proscribed burning and/or reversing the actions of firefighters trying to contain the blazes:

In July 2007 Scott Gentle, the Victorian manager of Timber Communities Australia, who lives in Healesville where two fires were still burning yesterday, gave testimony to a Victorian parliamentary bushfire inquiry so prescient it sends a chill down your spine.

"Living in an area like Healesville, whether because of dumb luck or whatever, we have not experienced a fire … since … about 1963. God help us if we ever do, because it will make Ash Wednesday look like a picnic." God help him, he was right.

Gentle complained of obstruction from green local government authorities of any type of fire mitigation strategies. He told of green interference at Kinglake - at the epicentre of Saturday's disaster, where at least 147 people died - during a smaller fire there in 2007.

"The contractors were out working on the fire lines. They put in containment lines and cleared off some of the fire trails. Two weeks later that fire broke out, but unfortunately those trails had been blocked up again [by greens] to turn it back to its natural state … Instances like that are just too numerous to mention. Governments … have been in too much of a rush to appease green idealism … This thing about locking up forests is just not working."

The Kinglake area was a nature-loving community of tree-changers, organic farmers and artists to the north of Melbourne. A council committed to reducing carbon emissions dominates the Nillumbik shire, a so-called "green wedge" area, where restrictions on removing vegetation around houses reportedly added to the dangers. In nearby St Andrews, where more than 20 people are believed to have died, surviving residents have spoken angrily of "greenies" who prevented them from cutting back trees near their property, including in one case, a tea tree that went "whoomp". Dr Phil Cheney, the former head of the CSIRO's bushfire research unit and one of the pioneers of prescribed burning, said yesterday if the fire-ravaged Victorian areas had been hazard-reduced, the flames would not have been as intense.

Kinglake and Maryville, now crime scenes, are built among tall forests of messmate stringy bark trees which pose a special fire hazard, with peeling bark creating firebrands that carry fire five kilometres out. "The only way to reduce the flammability of the bark is by prescribed burning" every five to seven years, Cheney said. He estimates between 35 and 50 tonnes a hectare of dry fuel were waiting to be gobbled up by Saturday's inferno.

Fuel loads above about eight tonnes a hectare are considered a fire hazard. A federal parliamentary inquiry into bushfires in 2003 heard that a fourfold increase in ground fuel leads to a 13-fold increase in the heat generated by a fire.

Things are no better in NSW, although we don't quite have Victoria's perfect storm of winds and forest types. Near Dubbo two years ago, as a bushfire raged through the Goonoo Community Conservation Area, volunteer firefighters bulldozing a control line were obstructed by National Parks and Wildlife Service employees who had driven from Sydney to stop vegetation being damaged.

The poor management of national parks and state forests in Victoria is highlighted by the interactive fire map on the website of the Department of Sustainability and Environment. Yesterday it showed that, of 148 fires started since mid-January, 120 started in state forests, national parks, or other public land, and just 21 on private property.

Only seven months ago, the Victorian Parliament's Environment and Natural Resources Committee tabled its report into the impact of public land management on bushfires, with five recommendations to enhance prescribed burning. This included tripling the amount of land to be hazard-reduced from 130,000 to 385,000 hectares a year. There has been little but lip service from the Government in response. Teary politicians might pepper their talking points with opportunistic intimations of "climate change" and "unprecedented" weather, but they are only diverting the blame. With yes-minister fudging and craven inclusion of green lobbyists in decision-making, they have greatly exacerbated this tragedy.

Sounds like the issues with California greens, but even worse. (If that's believable)

The SMH
 
Funny how all of the "climate change" crowd who are quick to jump on any natural disaster are not mentioning this...



The Australian

The also fail to mention that the very Green crowd that is complaining about the size of the fires keeps pushing regulations that makes them larger that fighting proscribed burning and/or reversing the actions of firefighters trying to contain the blazes:



Sounds like the issues with California greens, but even worse. (If that's believable)

The SMH
Many California fires are started by arsonist when we have Santa Anas which give us high winds and gusty conditions. All the crazies come out and light fires once the news starts to say we are under a severe threat of fire.

We have a Santa Ana today. The wind is very dry, predicted at 35 MPH. It blows from the eastern deserts to the coast due to a high pressure system. If a fire starts during a Santa Ana, the wind will spread the fire very quickly, and due to the gusty wind it is hard to contain.

The good thing is we had 3 inches of rain a week ago, and rain 3 other times prior to last week so the ground is not dry and there is a blanket of new green growth all over the ground currently, so we are not in danger the way it is in summer or fall. Once that green growth matures then dries out it becomes the fuel for the fires.

Way back the public was encouraged to go to the forest and gather the dead trees. My grandfather, for instance, and his neighbors would go into the Inyo National Forest in the Sierra Nevada Mountains and bring down wood to burn in their fire places in the winter. They lived in the valley where there are no trees, but would go up to bring down fallen dead trees and chop them up for winter heat

I remember when the tree huggers decided that the forest needed the dead trees for the diversity of to forest floor. Which is fine, but mother nature clears the floor with fires, so either man clears it or mother nature will... so now the forests are filled with dry dead debris that is great at fueling these fires. My Grandfather predicted this at the time... he, of course, did not live to see the outcome which has given the global warming mongers the mantra that these fires are worse than in the past.

Now people also live in the forested areas, and areas that are dry and burn quickly and hard to fight fires once they start. As the cities filled up people went out to rugged areas and built homes, they did not live in these areas back then. Now the forest floor is not cleared by the public for fire wood as it was... but instead it is blamed on global warming.
 
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