Australian fires - arson?

I just want to add my hopes that all of our Aussi PC'rs and families & friends are all OK and have not been adversely affected.

 

Where is Pat? We need his opinion on this topic.

Tom

 

Since I'm presently trapped by the ice storm, I was watching BBC News. Yes, they are speculating arson. PM Rudd had an interesting quote, referring to the fires as "mass murder"

I hope Pat and the other Australian members are safe

 

I didn't even know about this until a couple of PCers sent me messages. I then searched on line and put my TV on, I could not believe what I was seeing. It is unbelievable to see whole towns gone, reduced to small piles of rubble and ash. The death toll last I heard was 130 people and many many more injured.
This is a map showing the area affected: - http://mapvisage.appspot.com/fires/FireMap.html
You can see there are fires across Victoria.
I don't know if any PCers are affected by this directly without looking through each member individually I wont find out, I can tell you Adelaide and Sydney are a good 7+ hours drive from Melbourne so people there are not affected.
I watched our Prime Minister talking about the fires and the scum that light them and while he was choking back tears, as he has been affected before by bush-fires so he knows what these people are going through, I was not choking back mine. There were scenes on TV of big burley men in tears at having all they worked for and members of their family taken from them in seconds as the fire front moved at up to 120km/h (~80mph), Kevin Rudd was comforting this man, who was twice his size, it was impossible not to be moved.
I saw myself some of the devastation of the Ash Wednesday fires of February 1983 when fires burned across Victoria and South Australia destroying all in their path. I was working at a mechanical workshop in Crafers in the Adelaide hills, where after securing the building early due to the thick smoke making work impossible, I set off to see how I could help the hills residents. As one of may doing the same thing, with no power to run pumps we chained buckets of water and used wet wheat bags to stamp out fires or at least slow their progress, but the fires I saw were small compared to how big they can get. The plants here are extremely dry, there has been so little rain of late and the eucalypts burn with incredible ferocity because of the high oil content of the leaves. At the same time as fires are burning homes in Victoria, parts of Queensland are under water after having up to a metre (39 inches) of rain in a week! Three missing in Qld floodwaters

One of the problems caused by the fires is that people in their haste to help the victims have inundated aid agencies with donations of food and clothing etc to assist the people of the devastated areas, the agencies were unable to handle the inflow of donations. Already TV stations are organising fund raising telethons and there is a call for blood donations over coming weeks to ensure supplies for burns victims. The Commonwealth government has committed funds to assist people with emergency aid and set up collection systems for public donations of cash. This is one thing Aussies do really well, we rally behind a man (or woman) when he is down on his luck. It's 5:00AM, I need to sleep now, more soon.

 

From the Australian Newspaper

VICTORIA has suffered the most tragic bushfire disaster to have occurred on this continent throughout its period of human habitation.
The deaths, loss of homes and businesses and the blow to our feeling of security will take decades to fade into history. The trauma will live with the victims, who, to a greater or lesser extent, are all of us.
How could this happen when we have been told in a withering, continuous barrage of public relations that with technology and well-polished uniforms, we can cope with the unleashing of huge forces of nature.
I have been a bushfire scientist for more than 50 years, dealing with all aspects of bushfires, from prescribed burning to flame chemistry, and serving as supervisor of fire weather services for Australia. We need to understand what has happened so that we can accept or prevent future fire disasters.
That this disaster was about to happen became clear when the weather bureau issued an accurate fire weather forecast last Wednesday, which prompted me, as a private citizen, to raise the alarm through a memo distributed to concerned residents.
The science is simple. A fire disaster of this nature requires a combination of hot, dry, windy weather in drought conditions. It also requires a source of ignition. In the past, this purpose has been served by lightning. In this disaster, lightning has not played a big part, and for this Victorians should be grateful. But other sources of ignition are ever-present. When the temperature and wind increase to extreme levels, small events -- perhaps the scrape of metal across a rock, a transformer overheating or sparks from a diesel engine -- are capable of starting a fire that can in minutes become unstoppable if the fuel is present.
The third and only controllable factor in this deadly triangle is fuel: the dead leaves, pieces of bark and grass that become the gas that feeds the 50m high flames that roar through the bush with the sound of jet engines.
Fuels build up year after year at an approximate rate of one tonne a hectare a year, up to a maximum of about 30 tonnes a hectare. If the fuels exceed about eight tonnes a hectare, disastrous fires can and will occur. Every objective analysis of the dynamics of fuel and fire concludes that unless the fuels are maintained at near the levels that our indigenous stewards of the land achieved, then we will have unhealthy and unsafe forests that from time to time will generate disasters such as the one that erupted on saturday.
It has been a difficult lesson for me to accept that despite the severe damage to our forests and even a fatal fire in our nation's capital, the political decision has been to do nothing that will change the extreme threat to which our forests and rural lands are exposed.
The decision to ignore the threat has been encouraged by some shocking pseudo-science from a few academics who use arguments that may have a place in political discourse but should have no place in managing our environment and protecting it and us from the bushfire threat.
The conclusion of these academics is that high intensity fires are good for the environment and that the resulting mudslides after rains are merely localised and serve to redistribute nutrients. The purpose of this failed policy is to secure uninformed city votes.
Only a few expert retired fire managers, experienced bushies and some courageous politicians are prepared to buck the decision to lock up our bush and leave it to burn.
The politicians who willingly accept this rubbish use it to justify the perpetuation of the greatest threat to our forests, water supplies, homes and lives in order to secure a minority green vote. They continue to throw millions (and no doubt soon billions) at ineffective suppression toys, while the few foresters and bush people who know how to manage our public lands are starved of the resources they need to reduce fuel loads.
It is hard for me to see this perversion of public policy and to accept that the folk of the bush have lost their battle to live a safe life in a cared-for rural and forest environment, all because of the environmental fantasies of outraged extremists and latte conservationists.
In a letter to my local paper, the Weekly Times, on January 25, I predicted we were facing a very critical situation in which 1000 to 2000 homes could be lost in the Yarra catchment, the Otways and/or the Strezleckies; that 100 souls could be lost in a most horrible and violent way; and that there was even a threat to Melbourne's water supply, which could be rendered unusable by the ash and debris. Horrifically, much of this has come to pass, and it is not yet the end of the bushfire season.
In the face of this inferno, the perpetrators of this obscenity should have the decency to stand up and say they were wrong. Southeast Australia is the worst place in the world for bushfires, and we must not waste any time in getting down to the task of making our bush healthy and safe.
But don't hold your breath. Do you hear that lovely sound the warbling pigs make as they fly by?
David Packham OAM is an honorary senior research fellow at Monash University's school of geography and environmental science.

 

Well, speaking as a big, burly man, I do get a bit peeved off that folks think we don't have any emotions at all. You wouldn't be human if you didn't break down upon losing everything

It's one thing if a lightning strike sets off a fire. When a fire is deliberate, the people who set them must be hunted down. I'd be happy to do the hunting

 

Yes Jay, I know where your coming from there, physical size doesn't harden your heart. However I tell you that in the Aussie culture it is very hard for a man to cry in public and I suspect in the US or in parts of it the situation is similar. It is moving to see a big bloke break down and to see the Prime Minister hugging this bloke (another thing Aussie men don't do) to comfort him. I'll add that it isn't easy to admit how moved I was by seeing it, it just isn't done for a man to admit to crying.

If they find the person/people who set any of these fires I hope for their sake the police get them before the people affected by the fires. I feel pretty sure a life in gaol would be better than what most people would want to do to these f***ing morons! Personally I'd burn the bastards at the stake after a very long delay so they feel the fear.
173 people now confirmed dead.

 

I hate logging on and seeing that number rise. On another forum I am on specifically for Firefighters and EMS personnel, that is the talk currently.

Hope everyone stays safe and out of harms way.

 

Pat

Yes, in that regard Aussies and Americans are very similar. I don't see the big deal in a display of emotion, you'd have to be a cold-hearted sob not to.

jay

 

Unfortunately the toll is increasing. It is really a downer to hear that number increase almost every news bulletin.

I have just finished a two day work exercise on the other side of Australia (Perth) with some collegues from Melbourne. Whilst they were both city people, they knew of people who have been affected by the fires. It is almost the exclusive topic for discussion everywhere.

We have also had some fires here in New South Wales - no where near as bad as Victoria and no homes damaged, let alone destroyed, and most importantly, no deaths, but at least two of them were deliberately lit. I heard as I left for Perth that police had arrested two people for starting fires. While I was checking on the status of those arrests, I ran across the following article:
Victorian bushfires | arson | arrests | Taggerty | Marysville

I have heard our Federal Attorney General state that any person found guilty of starting one of the Vicorian fires can expect no sympathy from the courts, and encouraging the judges to apply the maximum sentences possible.

Talking about tearing up - the following article really got me going:
What do we tell the children? | smh.com.au

As Pat said, most of us are well away from the current crop of fires, although now that arson is being touted, suddenly there seems to be a flurry of people running out to start more fires, so there is no guarantee that we will not be affected by some other fire. It is the fire season here in Australia, and with the recent weather patterns, it has meant that we have had more dry, hot weather in the southern half of the country, and thus more fire threats, and the predictions are that it could get worse over the next couple of weeks. Here in Sydney, we have been very lucky - we got two days of light rain that reduces the fire risk for the next week or so, but if we do not get any more rain, it will only be a temporary reprieve.

 

For anyone interested in where the fires are and their current status:

Victorian Bushfires Map

 

When it was mentioned that the South Australian Police have been watching known fire bugs and this action may have resulted in a better than 50% reduction in deliberately lit fires some stupid morons went into the Adelaide Hills and started 2 fires. They were thankfully quickly bought under control.

Fire fighters are going from South Australia to help, there are now medical people on their way over to help with burns victims.
SA to send more firefighters to Victoria - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

SA to send more firefighters to Victoria

Posted Tue Feb 10, 2009 7:18am AEDT
Updated Tue Feb 10, 2009 9:54am AEDT
More SA firefighters are heading to Victoria help fight bushfires. (User Generated: Russell Glenn)

• Related Story: SA fire crews head into Gippsland

Forty extra firefighters from South Australia have been requested to help fight the bushfires in Victoria.
Euan Ferguson from the Country Fire Service (CFS) says the firefighters are preparing to go.
Seventy firefighters from the CFS, Metropolitan Fire Service and National Parks are already helping fight the bushfires.
South Australian health workers are on stand-by to go to Victoria to help in burns units.
The State Government says eight surgeons, eight nurses and four ancillary staff are ready to go if they are called.

 

Thanks Bob, it's awesome that you are thinking of these people so far away.
If anyone would like to help the people in the fire affected areas then send any donations via Red Cross. I believe they are the most efficient at getting aid to victims of this sort of thing and I believe the government is using the Red Cross to distribute and administer its aid contribution.
Check here Australian Red Cross

A paragraph from their web site,
Red Cross will not deduct any funds whatsoever from the Appeal for administration costs with all funds going to people and communities affected by the fires. Every cent received by Red Cross is being transferred on a daily basis to a Trust Account set up by the Victorian Government for distribution.

 

I just read this thread. I've been watching this on the news and am heartbroken to hear that human(s) are responsible. Horrible.

I'm glad to hear that you, Pat, are ok, and thank you for your detailed comments above. I learned something today. My thoughts are with you.

 

Thanks guys.