Australia Bushfires - man made disaster?

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japie said..
That's the Truth

F'ckn oath it's the TRUTH. Humans are awesome.

We are the smartest creatures that ever roamed this great earth.

The species that we have decimated will be missed, they will be remembered, and possibly even recreated if we want.

In centuries to come we will tame this planet and our solar system will be a paradise.

In 1000 years from now - humans will be far better off than they are now.

^ The truth is people are generally optimistic not necessarily right.

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Macroscien said..
A little bit late for that in this fire season, but we could be assured the next will be exactly the same if not worse.
Why not to sit now and make plans and order to prepare in advance?
I would recommend make such research :
1) Fire spotting electric drones . Finding fire at early stages not when is 300 km in diameter
2) Electric Drones squads able to water-bomb / water spray instantly.

spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/aerospace/aviation/new-electric-drone-has-groundbreaking-flight-time

Future may show that Helicopters and Planes may not be enough to wind battle against firestorm here in Australia.Helicopters are notoriously expensive to maintain, unlike electric drones that have almost no serviceable parts. Lets imagine 100 strong squadron of electric drones.

Each able to take 500 kg of water from pond, swimming pool, fly few km and drop to return instantly for refill.

Almost completely autonomous , with people on the ground only helping to refill, water , swap electric batteries. US did spend 35 bln dollars on new King helicopter that doesn't work , but for the same money could design electric drones fleet that could win war of fires anywhere in the world.

What a croc of S#%T

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Mr Milk said..

FormulaNova said..

Macroscien said..

monaro said..
The Bradfield scheme was proposed in 1938.

You are absolutely right, Luckily people didn't found Sydney bridge and Brisbane one, impractical, then send to scrap metal.A project like that once finished could serve as another example of Aussie ingenuity, maybe more even practical then Sydney Opera? Sometimes good ideas need to wait 100 years to come back all guns firing ( ie electric cars) , so let's say at 2038 our grandkids will rediscover Bradfield project and implement with some improvements.

A simple search on the Bradfield Scheme tells you that the water quantities were optimistic and the engineering required was evaluated pretty simply, i.e. its probably not a practical solution.

I wish it was as this sort of infrastructure is a good idea, but it has to at least be feasible.

I went to the Ord river area, and apparently what it was marketed as was 'the food bowl of the north'. What it seems to be used for at the moment is growing sandalwood for export. It seems a bit weird. Is this the best use it can be put to? Is there something else behind it?

For what its worth its a huge amount of water, but it also drops significantly telling you how much water gets lost and how sporadic the rains can be.

I think it failed because insects couldn't resist the huge amount of food being grown for them

and magpie geese, ship loads of magpie geese

This guy thinks so too.

www.abc.net.au/news/2019-02-20/david-icke-banned-from-entering-australia/10830064

^^ Some good points, some total myths.

Where's your acknowledgement of the drier and warmer climate?

Where's your evidence of "poor fire management" and "back burning"? Are you perhaps confusing back burning with controlled burns?

People complain about insufficient preparation for fire hazard reduction but in reality, if these wingers simply spoke to someone who actually works in these fields you'd find that we're doing everything we can already. You'd also learn that in recent years, the traditional hazard reduction seasons are too warm and dry to safely conduct the planned hazard reduction works, again due to a much drier climate.

Some hazards cannot be reduced as much as people would like. Australia is vast. It is extremely dry, partly due to climate change.

We can't safely hazard reduction burn the whole farking countryside because it's just too risky.

Holy guacamole is bang on. another myth doing the rounds, even in comics in The Australian. "The Greens prevented back burning"

"The Greens prevented..." Think for a second. The Greens are not in power. I think they hold a council in inner city Melbourne. They do not have any power.

"...back burning". back burning is done after a fire has started, as a last resort to reduce the fire around homes and such. It is super dangerous as it can make the fire worse. You'd never, ever, ever do it if there wasn't already a fire.

"The Greens prevented back burning" is complete nonsense. Neither half of the statement makes sense.

The fires are due to longer, drier summers, a huge amount of fuel, current heatwaves, humidity, and wind. A perfect storm.

The fires are not caused by politics, not any political party. No political party has caused them, nor could any of them prevented them.

Let's just get something straight. Back burning is done to slow or stop the progress of existing bushfires. There's no way in hell greenies could do anything about this because it's an operational matter.

Nothing to do with prescribed burning to reduce hazards, which is usually done out of fire season.

Get the terms correct. It matters.

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Razzonater said..


2) Backburning and poor fire management, no conspiracy here just far too much fuel left to build up over several years

3) Some lunatic was going on about the land required for this interstate main train line. Initially reading it sounds like a mad mans rant until you see the propose path for the new train line overlayed over the path of the current fires is a bang on match up.

2) is wrong, as others have pointed out. Apart from everything else, hazard reduction burns require volunteers. Did YOU volunteer to do it? How do you do them around Clyde Mountain, the headwaters of the Macleay River and other inaccessible areas where major fires exist?

Try doing the RFS leaf test one day when the wind is light. See how rarely the correct conditions for hazard reduction burns exist.


3) is wrong. The inland rail line is far, far, far inland of the fire grounds. It runs through Wagga, Parkes, Narromine and Moree. The biggest fire is north of Penrith with other major ones near Kempsey and Batemans Bay - they are hundreds of ks away from the rail line, and they are burning partly because they are in extremely hilly country that is unsuitable for railway lines.

Here's a map of the new line - far away from the main fires.

www.abc.net.au/news/2015-09-10/brisbane-to-melbourne-rail-line/6766832

And how the hell would burning trees help anyone get a rail line through some of Australia's steeper mountains anyway?

Of course, because we don't need trees to breathe; because chopping them down doesn't destroy topsoil etc; and because the Greens have been in power across the country for decades.

If only your hero had been running the country for a while we'd be safe - he'd have covered the countryside with concrete, apart from gaps where the mines could go. Imagine how many jobs that would create!

My hero is bon Scott and Jim Morrison.

And yes I am not talking about prescribed burns or thinning trees or using D9 dozers to turn over soil although all of these would help.

I am not talking about letting people collect firewood from national parks either from fallen trees although this too would help.

I am talking about balls to the wall ,,, cock on the block,, backburning...

100% backburning make no mistake about my lingo, my terms or the interpretation of them.

You have a large fire front moving east and uncontrolled the wind during much of this period was an easterly ( blowing from the west)

spark it up and let them collide

it removes fuel immediately and also limits the ability for fires to jump and spread.

Is it risky, yes of course it is

Is it as risky as letting a 200,000 acre fire just burn away ,,,,, I don't think it is..

Jeez there are a whole lot of smart people on here with the solution to everything to do with the fires (sarcasm)
How many of you are volunteers in the Rural Fire Service (NSW) or Country Fire Authority (Vic) or the other equivalents in other states??
It's easy to be a keyboard warrior know it all, in the cities where you don't have to deal with the reality on the ground.

We have a property on the NSW South Coast which was potentially in the line of fire on Saturday. We are surrounded by bush but have a cleared zone where house, sheds, veg gardens and orchards are, which is either green grass or compacted soil/road. We have carefully maintained this over the spring summer and paid attention to removing flammable material away from buildings and other assets. Then we have mains water, full rainwater tanks, mobile pump/and tank on a tractor as well as petrol & electric water pumps and 240v diesel generator if the power goes out. These are basic requirements if you want to live near nature and survive a fire.

In addition to this we had the local ABC radio on giving updates and as a good seabreezer, checked the wind direction nearby on the coast and inland to check fire progression. I also had access to a website to check where lightning strikes occurred locally as the oncoming fire created its own weather in the form of thunderstorms, with no rain but plenty of lightning, which could create new fires ahead of the main front.

We have tenants renting the house on the property who said they were going to help protect the property and their stuff, but lost their nerve as the fire loomed closer, and went to an evacuation centre. That's OK, you don't want someone freaking out when the fire hits. We had sprinklers on the house roof with blocked gutters and damped down the ground around the house and sheds and my partner and I waited as the fire traveled closer. Fortunately due to the wind direction on the day the fire went past a few km to the west of us and there was minimal ash and no ember attack to deal with. After the southerly buster came through and died down we packed our equipment back into the shed and went back to our normal lives. Not so lucky were some of our friends in the active fire zone.

As well as living in the country I do a lot of outdoor work with heavy equipment on farms and other rural property ranging from road construction, clearing for asset protection zones, excavation and demolition. Many people and their properties are completely unprepared for fire and they will catch fire and burn easily.
For all the clever dicks saying there should be more hazard reduction burning you need to think a bit smarter than such a blanket statement. The fire season has now become so long, the days when the a decent hazard reduction can take place are very limited. Even during a bushfire at night, back burning to deny a fire fuel, can become impossible with a heavy dew or a small shower. A change in wind direction and strength can turn a gently creeping hazard reduction burn into a raging uncontrollable inferno. Houses and lives have been lost due to a hazard reduction reduction burn going rogue.

And then there's the ecological science of hazard reduction. Every bit of bush is unique. Some areas require burns of a certain magnitude and frequency for the ecosystems to survive. Some areas will lose species with inappropriate hazard reduction burns, to be replaced by fire loving species which make the forest more flammable than before. There are always consequences for actions taken and if you don't know what you're doing you can easily make a bad situation worse. The last thing we need is politicians making knee jerk decisions on these matters. People who have a good understanding of forest and fire ecology need to make these decisions based on good, well funded research so that hazard reduction works as it's meant to.

But even if the hazard reduction means the fire doesn't even come into sight, embers travelling 5km or more ahead of the fire can drop in and around your house, falling on or under wooden decks, into gutters full of dry leaves, into garden mulch around your house, blown under your house if it's above ground, into oily rags in your carport etc. setting it alight in minutes. Most houses are lost due to such ember attacks either before the fire arrives or after it passes. That's why if you're prepared it's good to be around your property during a fire.

And why are we facing such catastrophic fires? The climate is changing, and changing fast due to the changes humankind has made on the earth. Record temperatures lead to record evaporation rates drying out the country to give us unprecedented droughts. These tinder dry conditions make everything flammable and the fires are unstoppable. Wind patterns are also changing increasing fire intensity. Sea temperatures are rising wiping out kelp forests off the coast of Tasmania. Climate change is real people and on the TV every night. We need to wean ourselves off fossil fuels which are increasing CO2 levels in the atmosphere. Over 95% of credible scientists who have contributed to research on climate science warned us of what we are experiencing years ago. Some said they were exaggerating the risk, but it looks like they have been too conservative.

Be prepared for the next natural disaster when we have record rainfalls in the burnt water catchments filling the dams with ash and eroded soil, silting up rivers and ecosystems and turning river mouths, bays and estuaries to muddy swamps of toxic algae which will then wash up and down the coast making surfing, kiting, windsurfing impossible. If you don't like this version of the future get off your arses and do something to create a better one. Stopping coal mining and burning is a good place to start and look at treading more lightly on the planet in your own lives. Take some responsibility, don't look for someone else or some thing to blame.

Thank you, Dr Surf!

The other thing that people are ignoring is that fires of this intensity are NOT affected significantly by fuel loading. Fires like this are created by dry conditions and wind conditions, so fuel reduction does little; to quote a Victorian study " at higher levels of fire danger, weather influences become more important than fuel conditions, in terms of successful suppression operations." Or as the B&NHRCRC says "On extreme high- temperature and high-wind days like Black Saturday, the effectiveness of most prescribed burning on stopping runs of large fires will be minimal because medium and long range spotting will see these areas overrun."

A University of Tas shows that 1/3 of the state will have to be burned to work effectively. It's also agreed that the effectiveness of hazard reduction burning is also shown to drop significantly after about four years. As the Royal Commission into the Black Saturday fires found, hazard reduction burning is " a high-risk activity to conduct, is resource intensive, is available only in limited time frames, and can have some adverse consequences for local communities."

So year after year, volunteers will have to be sitting out there doing HR burns while posters here sit on their arses - and older people, asthmatics and others suffer and whiners complain about the smoke.

Oh, and it's easy to make mistakes while doing HR burns; ask the idiot who did his own little one the other month near me. I've never had to use a bloody gum tree branch to swat out a grass fire before.

Razzanotor, you are obviously a firefighting God since you can sit behind a keyboard safely in your home and tell the RFS what they should be doing. Can you tell us all how fantastic it must be to know everything just like you do? And then can you tell us what someone with your amazing knowledge and power is doing, sitting at home instead of getting out there and putting your faultless, all-knowing abilities towards stopping the fires?

Or, on the other hand, could you perhaps stop worshipping yourself and consider than perhaps there may be some people who have years of experience and training who are out there on the fireground and that maybe, just maybe, they may know a tiny bit more than your all-knowing self?

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drsurf said..

It's easy to be a keyboard warrior

As you said your property was spared because fire didn't approach any closer at the end.
How many people in NSW, VIC did exactly what you did, by the book and lost their property at the end?
Some their lives too? I think that attacking this bushfire problem from many angles is more just one single point of view , depending where do you sit:
-We need more firetrucks and people on the ground with shovels
NO
-We need airplanes with buckets
NO
-we need preventive burnings
-No
-we need all farmers on tractors with water buckets attached and hoses
I am afraid that all those aboud taken separately may mitigate to problem, make it less painful but not eliminate.My bet for future that for next 10 years we will have similar stories until development from overseas arrive ( most likely California) that allow detection and response to the fire within first minutes or hours.
I agree to one. You may have 10,000 traditional thinking, practical blokes, doing all they can and few eccentric thinking looking for newer solution to old problem.One of mine project is device to convert on mass scale all wood material into charcoal. In easy , effortless way conversion of all wooden waste, branches on farm into charcoal that you could then sell to industry. If instead of mindless cyclical burning of forests and bushes with all aminimal living there you could: Load all material into 20 ft container size device and remove next day few tonnes of precious charcoal .This type of solution is self sustained and self funding. All farmers I know or see have the same problem with excess of woody material.
Just burning this off is risky too.My proposed 20 ft container do it perfectly safe , while converting all material into pure charcoal without the risk for flame over. For extensive bushland you could deliver multiple container like converters and people with machinery could convert what is now a problematic bush into dark gold.
Chinese industry and whole world is so hungry for pure carbon to build vehicles from carbon fibre.If farmers could earn money when disposing organic material, why to burn it mindlessly?
This example just show one angle of alternative thinking.Obviously greenies may pop up claiming that charcoal converter also do release some amount of byproduct gases into atmosphere and demand for device to be completely emission less, but that will render the project uneconomical. Beside carbonisation in strictly controlled enviroment do release only percentage of what typical bush burning do.

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CJW said..
^^ You can have all the high level detection you like, and i'm sure they already have a lot, but given the current moisture condition of our forests and the conditions we've had already this spring/summer, y

Fine, But that exactly what it is. You have this condition and removing hay from you gutter aren't going to change this. All this talk about climate change is not going to effect this climate in nearest future. Temperature will not drop, humidity rise , winds fall because you just spotted how awful they are.
What in above spot on text is going to prevent next massive bushfire? I can see none.